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Donald Trump is now admitting Republicans could get clobbered in the midterms, while a Democratic strategist tells Raw America Democrats still need a real message to go along with its expected wins. Trump’s Justice Department filed complaints against almost every federal judge in Minnesota. A federal appeals court blocked Trump from carving his name into the U.S. Institute of Peace building. And the president reportedly blew up at Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin over a rumor that ICE would stop arresting people with no criminal records.
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It appears Donald Trump is now facing a reality that many presidents before him have had to face; losing control of the House and possibly the Senate in the midterm elections. Talking with reporters on Wednesday, he all but admitted that Republicans will likely suffer significant losses in November.
The president was trying to defend his recent spate of propaganda-style TV ads as “good for the country” when he discussed the November 3 election. Trump began by saying “I don’t know why,” but that “if you look at history,” the incumbent party in the White House “usually loses.” Trump then lamented that this shouldn’t be happening because in his view, the country is “the hottest it’s ever been.”
Since 1946, the president’s party has lost seats in the House of Representatives in 18 out of 20 midterm elections (90 percent). California-based Democratic strategist Eric Schmeltzer, thinks Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels despite estimating they’ll win a significant House majority (perhaps as many as 20 seats) and could have “decisive control of the Senate.”
Schmeltzer — who founded the firm Winning Progressive Message & Strategy, edits the “Build a Better Donkey” Substack newsletter and once served as press secretary to outgoing Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York — told Raw America that simply winning isn’t enough.
“We have to take full advantage of this. We have to swing for the fences and give voters a sound message and tell them what we stand for,” Schmeltzer said, adding that Democrats can’t be content telling voters they aren’t “the party of Trump.”
In the meantime, Republicans aren’t wasting any time defining Democrats. This week House Speaker Mike Johnson painted Democrats as anti-police communists and socialists who want to abolish the border, get rid of prisons and defund what the Trump administration now calls the “Department of War.”
He’s also alleging that Democrats aim to pack the Supreme Court, do away with the Senate entirely and investigate Trump, his family, his Cabinet and the MAGA billionaires who bankroll the GOP. Johnson says it’s the duty of Republicans to “defeat the far-left Communist Democrats.” He warned that should the Democrats win, they will likely investigate the president, most of the cabinet, as well as the president’s friends and family.
“It’s like he’s campaigning for the Democrats,” Schmeltzer said of Johnson.
The strategist also argued that while Democrats notched big midterm wins during Trump’s first term, they never made it clear to voters what they actually stood for, and so they lost the majority in succeeding elections.
“What’s our message? It isn’t enough to take control of the House and Senate,” Schmeltzer told Raw America. “We did that in 2018 and lost it because voters didn’t understand what we stood for and we allowed the Republicans to define us.”
The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to 1994, when Republicans swept into a majority in both chambers. Newly minted Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich rolled out the GOP’s “Contract with America,” which Schmeltzer noted wasn’t much of a plan, since it mostly promised to hold votes in Congress on bills many knew were doomed to fail, but at the same time tell voters blame to Bill Clinton if they failed. The plan, Schmeltzer noted, worked because it gave people something to vote for.
Schmeltzer said his goal is for Democrats to establish five or six main goals which include “votes on corruption” along with “a real ethics, stock trading and lobbyist bill.” He also urged his party to “concentrate on affordability, healthcare, data centers and AI.”
Schmeltzer said his biggest concern is that Trump could use the military to seize ballots or cause disruptions to the voting process this fall.
“[Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth has done nothing to convince me he won’t do that. He’s eliminated anyone who would stop him at the top,” he said. “Will it fall on a junior officer to tell the president ‘no’?”
Hegseth spent a significant portion of his Wednesday “State of the Force” speech to attack the media and indicated he’d deploy troops ahead of the midterms if Trump asked. Outgoing Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky called for Hegseth’s impeachment just before Speaker Johnson abruptly adjourned the House in September.
As for the president, he spent his Wednesday celebrating a pork barrel legislation in Alaska, renaming Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, and then boasted about renaming artificial intelligence, before saying he was going to rename the “fake news” the “artificial news.” He also declared that “people love and want Data Centers.”
“This is why we have to get as much as we can out of this election and build up a big majority,” Schmeltzer cautioned. “We have to change things to guarantee a continuing majority of people who respect facts and the Constitution. This isn’t a two-year project. This isn’t a four-year project. This is a generational project and unless we have a clear voice on that fact, we will have problems making the changes we need to make to guarantee the success of our country.”
In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party beat the midterm curse and flipped nine seats in each chamber, because working people supported the New Deal. Voters don’t turn out just to punish failure. They show up when a party gives them something worth believing in. That’s the difference between winning an election and winning back the country.
Attorney General Todd Blanche is conducting an all-out assault on the federal judiciary in Minnesota. Blanche — who was Trump’s personal attorney before joining the Justice Department — announced Wednesday that the DOJ has filed a misconduct complaint against all but one of the federal district judges in the Gopher State.
The rationale for the complaint was that the judges spoke to The New York Times for an article published earlier this month about the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown in the Minneapolis area. Blanche claimed seven judges discussed cases “in a manner that the Department of Justice views as a clear violation of their ethical duties.” He added that their statements “undermined public confidence in an impartial judiciary.”
According to the complaint, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz sat for a 90-minute interview with the Times. Six of his colleagues on the bench also spoke with the paper. Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee not exactly known as a liberal firebrand. He told the Times that the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for federal court orders during the immigration crackdown was a “grave threat to the rule of law.” He recalled saying aloud to himself at the time that “this just never happens.”
U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, a Bill Clinton appointee, told the Times that in his view, the people ICE was arresting weren’t dangerous criminals.
Blanche said the judges’ comments were “blatantly false” and asked the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to investigate further. He also wants every one of those judges to recuse themselves from cases involving the Department of Homeland Security, whether they be civil or criminal in nature. That would Minnesota’s bring federal courts to a standstill, which may be the whole idea.
While federal judges rarely talk to reporters, there’s nothing illegal about it. Additionally, none of these judges discussed ongoing cases with the Times. Schiltz even gave the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt, telling the paper that most of the noncompliance with his orders seemed to come from incompetence rather than direct defiance. That generosity didn’t buy him or his colleagues any mercy.
The founders built an independent judiciary into Article III to prevent judges from being bullied by a president who disagreed with their rulings. Alexander Hamilton called the courts the “least dangerous” branch because they control neither the sword nor the purse. All they have is their judgment. The Trump administration is now trying to punish these judges for having the temerity to exercise it in public.
When Arkansas officials decided in the 1950s that they didn’t have to obey federal court orders requiring them to integrate schools, a unanimous Supreme Court answered in the Cooper v. Aaron decision that no official gets to wage war on the same Constitution they swore an oath to uphold. A government that ignores judges and then punishes them for criticizing them is directly testing whether the law still applies to the people in power.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that despite his best efforts, Trump’s name can’t be carved into the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).
The USIP is an independent nonprofit created by Congress in 1984 to help the federal government stop violent conflicts around the world. In the divided 2-1 decision, Judges Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, and Harry Edwards, who was appointed by Jimmy Carter, granted the Institute’s request. Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, dissented.
Back in February of last year, Trump announced he wanted to eliminate the Institute as part of his effort to hollow out the civil service. The following month, members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team forced their way into the building and attempted to break into its computer systems. The administration went on to put Trump’s name on the building’s facade.
A lower court ruled last year that Trump lacked the authority to fire the Institute’s Senate-confirmed board members, but the appellate court put that ruling on hold while the government appealed that decision. The Institute’s lawyers argued the Trump administration shouldn’t get to use that temporary delay “to literally set things in stone” by chiseling Trump’s name into the building. Justice Department attorneys countered that while the State Department had researched “possible engraving,” there were “no current plans” to go through with it.
Trump has used the better part of his second term to plaster his name on everything he can. A federal judge stopped Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board from renaming the vaunted institution after him, and that case is now before the D.C. Court of Appeals. The White House has also been sued over a proposed arch near Arlington National Cemetery and the demolition of the East Wing of the White House for Trump’s $400 million ballroom. There is also litigation over the Trump administration’s plans to paint the granite exterior of the 19th-century office building adjacent to the White House.
Kings and emperors have been carving their names into stone for millennia, hoping to be remembered forever by future generations. Percy Shelley wrote a famous poem about how that usually turns out, with the great king’s proud inscription on a broken statue sitting in an empty desert. Courts are thankfully, for now, not letting Trump do the inscribing.
The men who authored the Constitution put a ban on titles of nobility in Article I, because they had just come from a system where the public’s property existed for the glory of one man. Congress built the Institute of Peace with our money. And in a republic, the people’s buildings belong only to the people.
There’s apparently a quiet rift building between Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. CNN is reporting that Trump erupted at Mullin after the leaking of an internal ICE leadership call. Agency leaders had suggested the agency was quietly cutting back arrests to focus on immigrants who actually had criminal records.
Trump quickly moved to stamp out any idea of a change in arrest policy, and apparently called a prominent Fox host to let them kow that agents would continue to detain anyone in the country without legal status, whether they had a criminal record or not. Privately, Trump allegedly directed the bulk of his anger at Mullin.
According to rhe report, ICE leaders gave agents verbal instructions urging them to de-prioritize “collateral arrests,” in which people were detained for simply being near the target of an investigation. Three people familiar with the call told CNN the phrasing was vague enough that agents weren’t sure how to actually apply it in the field.
Those same sources said Mullin publicly maintains that anyone in the United States illegally can be removed, but privately preferred to cut back on making collateral arrests. One source told the network that “Mullin is definitely out of step with President Trump and the base on immigration.”
An unnamed DHS spokesperson said everyone in the Trump administration is on the same page when it comes to ICE arrests and that “no one is off the table.” They also accused critics of trying “to create an illusion of chaos.” However, this isn’t the first time Trump and Mullin have butted heads over immigration. The president reportedly blew up at his DHS secretary this summer over a temporary pause on ICE vehicle stops after agents killed people during stops in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine. Trump reversed that pause after the MAGA base pushed back.
Mullin took over as head of DHS just six months ago after Trump fired Kristi Noem. But the secretary is already facing heat from Republicans uneasy about the ICE crackdowns. Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida released an ad citing immigration arrest figures that showed half of July’s ICE detainees had no criminal record. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas complained that ICE arrests are disrupting communities and businesses in the Sunflower State without any coordination with local police.
None of the internal drama has slowed down ICE’s arrests. Federal agents booked almost 51,000 people in August, which broke the record of more than 46,000 set in July.
During the Palmer Raids of 1920, federal agents swept up thousands of immigrants in dragnets until Labor Department official Louis Post read the files, found the evidence wasn’t there, and canceled more than 1,000 deportations. When the measure of success is defined by the size of the haul, innocent people inevitably end up in the net. A country that tolerates innocent imm…