https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/02/tennessee-aftyn-behn-matt-van-epps-democrats-00674118
Nevertheless, House Republicans privately bemoaned the results.
Speaker Mike Johnson leadership’s team was bracing for a tighter than comfortable race, and the single digit margin was a hard pill to swallow after national Republicans raced to rescue Van Epps in the final days.
“It was too close,” said one House GOP leadership aide.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/02/trump-hegseth-rubio-ukraine-venezuela-boats/
Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.
The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.
Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/02/trump-honduras-president-pardon-drug-boat-strikes/
For weeks, the Trump administration has demonstrated its zeal in taking on supposed “narcoterrorists” in the Western hemisphere. The United States bombed numerous boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that Trump officials claimed were transporting drugs to U.S. shores, while also rattling the saber at the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the White House has cast as both an illegitimate tyrant and a thuggish cartel boss. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting on potential U.S. plans for Venezuela, during which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hailed Trump for “taking the gloves off” and declared that “we’ve only just begun” sending drug traffickers to “the bottom of the ocean.”
According to Justice Department documents, Hernández once allegedly bragged to a drug kingpin that he was going to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” He caused “untold damage” and “unimaginable suffering” in the United States, U.S. prosecutors wrote in the government’s sentencing memo, recommending life in prison plus 30 years. “The defendant engaged in this egregious conduct while publicly posing as an ally of the United States in its efforts to combat the importation of narcotics that destroy countless lives in this country. But behind closed doors, the defendant protected the very traffickers he vowed to pursue.”
“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade — it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” Mike Vigil, the former Drug Enforcement Administration chief of international operations, told the Guardian. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going after Nicolás Maduro. … It’s all hypocritical.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/01/jewish-donors-gop-israel-and-antisemitism-00670406
Top Republican Jewish donors are beginning to confront a growing antisemitism problem in their party, but have yet to find consensus on how to respond.
The discomfort among top pro-Israel donors, who steer the Republican Party’s fundraising apparatus, signals the complexity of this political moment for conservative U.S. Jews. Many of them feel the Democratic Party allowed antisemitism to seep into its mainstream in recent years. Now, they fear the same could happen to the GOP.
“Anti-Israel, antisemitic — that gets conflated. A lot of them hide behind anti-Israel, and it’s very hard to prove because you truly should be allowed to be critical of Israel. I’m Justice Potter on this: I know it when I see it. They’re not just anti-Israel,” the donor added. “I think they hide behind free speech, they hide behind isolationism. I think there’s a fair amount of just classic antisemitism going on.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/25/europe-canada-nato-trump
Europeans and Canadians are now talking about making their own security arrangements. What would a post-American NATO — or NATO 3.0 (NATO 2.0 was the post-Cold War alliance) — mean? It could ultimately lead countries such as Germany and Poland to acquire their own nuclear arsenals. It is likely to lead to greater levels of defense integration among some NATO members — notably the Nordic-Baltic Eight — than in the alliance as a whole. It is also likely to lead U.S. allies to buy weapons from each other, rather than from Washington. And it is already resulting in greater cooperation between NATO members and the like-minded democracies of Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/01/pete-hegseth-military-orders-boat-mark-kelly
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who headed the Office of Legal Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, wrote online: “If the Post’s facts are correct, it appears that Special Operations Forces committed murder when the ‘two men were blown apart in the water,’ as the Post put it.” A working group of former judge-advocates general also weighed in: “Orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are ‘patently illegal,’ anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.”
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5628685-service-members-boat-strikes-orders-hegseth
Service members’ uncertainty over whether they will be asked to carry out an illegal order or pressured to go against their training is likely to be exacerbated after The Washington Post and CNN late last week reported that Hegseth authorized a highly unusual strike to kill all survivors aboard a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea this fall.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Monday that on Sept. 2, Hegseth authorized Adm. Frank Bradley to carry out a follow-up strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean; the strike reportedly killed two people who were hanging onto the burning vessel, having survived an initial strike.
https://www.newsweek.com/5-polls-trouble-donald-trump-republicans-11131436
A string of new polls paints a challenging picture for President Donald Trump and the GOP: His approval rating has plunged to a second-term low, cracks are widening in his MAGA coalition, Hispanic support is eroding, Democrats are competitive in deep-red districts, and national polling averages show Trump underwater across every major survey.
These polls paint a portrait of declining approval, rising disunity among Republican voters, and significant inroads for Democrats—even in historically conservative districts. The unfolding trends could reshape congressional control and influence the GOP’s prospects in 2028 and beyond.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/us/politics/trump-age-health.html
Mr. Trump has prompted additional questions about his health by sharing news about medical procedures he has had, but not details about them. While in Asia, Mr. Trump revealed that he had undergone magnetic resonance imaging at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early October.
“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump told reporters, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician, which did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and contained few other details.
“There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone,” Mr. Trump wrote, “but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (“That was aced”) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now!”
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-mri-physical-white-house-0c66f2f9fca865d842ee94329a210a42
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he would release the results of his MRI test that he received in October
Trump added Sunday that he has “no idea” on what part of his body he got the MRI.
“It was just an MRI,” he said. “What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed that she instructed the federal government to carry out the deportation and transferring of Venezuelan detainees to El Salvador despite a court order halting the flights.
The administration has argued it was not obligated to follow the March directive from District Judge James Boasberg.
The latest DOJ filing states that Noem “directed that the AEA detainees who had been removed from the United States before the Court’s order could be transferred to the custody of El Salvador,” adding that the “decision was lawful and was consistent with a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s order.”
FBI Director Kash Patel is facing withering criticism from an alliance of active-duty and retired agents and analysts, days after the White House denied media reports that the president is about to fire him.
A troubling new report card on the first six months of Patel’s leadership concludes he is “in over his head” and his deputy, Dan Bongino, is “something of a clown,” according to the alliance, which in two previous reports warned about crippling DEI and politicization of the FBI during the Biden administration.
Patel is described by multiple internal sources as inexperienced, with one source saying he “has neither the breadth of experience nor the bearing an FBI director needs to be successful.”
Another source, a self-professed Trump supporter, said Patel is “not very good,” “may be insecure,” and “lacks the requisite experience” or the “measured self-confidence” to be FBI director.
