CNN goes wild over the incredible power of Trump's endorsement.

🚨 JUST IN: CNN was just FORCED to report that Donald Trump has a 95% GOP primary WIN RECORD and he just forced Bill Cassidy into the worst performance for a sitting senator in *80 YEARS*!

"Cassidy did worse than EVERY SINGLE one, getting 25% of the vote for a senator, in a… pic.twitter.com/jrzh6GW3Q0

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 18, 2026

"And this is sort of just going back through the archives to see how bad Bill Cassidy did. He got 25 percent of the vote, okay? I went back and I looked at every single non-appointed senator. This in my mind was the worst primary showing ever, at least since the end of World War II. That is how badly Bill Cassidy did. He did worse than every single one. Getting 25 percent of the vote for a senator in a primary? It's literally unheard of! And that is because, of course, Donald Trump endorsed against this guy.... When in fact you go against President Trump, you go in the grinder.... If you look at Trump approval rating within the GOP—21st century own party approval at this point in term two—he's still at 83%. That's more popular than Obama was with Democrats. Way more popular than George W. Bush was with Republicans back in 2006. So the power of a Trump endorsement is still sky high. And we'll see tomorrow if that happens with Thomas Massie."

"His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER."

Said Trump, in social media, quoted in "Trump Gets Revenge Against Republican Who Voted to Convict Him" (Bloomburg).

In a 3-candidate primary, Cassidy came in third, the other 2 advance to a runoff. Trump's candidate, Julia Letlow, came in first.

Conceding, Cassidy said "I find that people of character and integrity don’t spend their time attacking people on the internet."

"Attempting a coherent portrait of Groypers can feel a bit like trying to describe the plot of a Surrealist film, or a fantasy board game that takes place in its own universe."

"They greet each other with the salutation 'Christ is King'; they banter about their aspiration to re-create Agartha, a mythological Aryan kingdom supposedly situated somewhere in the earth’s core. Theirs is a would-be party of trolling, of 'discourse porn and conspiracy theories on Adderall,' as one adherent told me. But they see their movement as a gathering storm about to break over American politics. Liberals may think of the Trump era as a tragedy of democratic backsliding and authoritarian malignancy; Groypers view it as a cynical pantomime of a nationalist takeover that never went far enough. Fuentes has become the gleeful narrator of this dashed dream, building a career in part by insisting that Trump’s pledge to put America first has curdled into a lie. 'Nick said that Trump’s going to simp for Israel,' G. told me. 'He’s totally going to cozy up to the donors. He’s not going to give us mass deportations. He’s not actually going to advance any of our interests except performatively, to appease us. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.'"

Writes Antonia Hitchens, in "How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics/Inside the battle for the post-maga G.O.P." (The New Yorker).

"President Trump let a key filing deadline pass on Tuesday without endorsing a candidate in Texas’ Senate race, locking in a high-stakes Republican runoff..."

"... between the incumbent, John Cornyn, and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. Mr. Trump could still offer an endorsement at any time, but his decision not to before the deadline for candidates to formally drop out of the race means both Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton will be on the next ballot even if one of them withdraws at a later date. It also means both will continue to duke it out in what has already been a highly personal, historically expensive Senate race...."

The NYT reports.

I'm not surprised. Paxton had said he wouldn't drop out if Trump endorsed Cornyn, so then how could Trump endorse Paxton? And what's the good of endorsing Cornyn? Maybe Cornyn also said he wouldn't drop out if Trump endorsed Paxton. Trump is keeping his distance.

"If ideological consistency can’t explain the enduring loyalty of Trump’s base, what does?"

I'm reading "The Four Types of Trump Supporter/The president’s political power depends on his ability to play different roles for different parts of his coalition," by Daniel Yudkin and Stephen Hawkins" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

1. "MAGA Hardliners" — 29% — "mostly composed of white Gen Xers and Baby Boomers," "animated by the belief... in America’s existential struggle between good and evil."

2. "Anti-Woke Conservatives" — 21% — "a more secular and affluent group of voters deeply frustrated by what they perceive as the takeover of schools, culture, and institutions by the progressive left."

3. "Mainline Republicans" — 30% —  "a more racially diverse group of middle-of-the-road conservatives who prioritize border security, a strong economy, and cultural stability."

4. "Reluctant Right" — 20% — "ambivalent" people who thought Trump "seemed 'less bad' than the alternative." (I'm laughing at "the alternative" — the name Kamala doesn't even appear in the article.)

Those are the 4 types of Trump supporters, we're told. Then there are 4 roles that Trump plays:

"Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Plans to Resign in January."

The NYT reports: "Her announcement came days after President Trump branded her a 'traitor' for breaking with him and helping compel the Justice Department to release its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. Ms. Greene, who was elected in 2020 and positioned herself as a die-hard Trump supporter until a series of recent ruptures with the president on a variety of issues, made the abrupt announcement in a video and statement she posted online, filmed from her home in Georgia, her Christmas tree on display behind her."

This is another one of the "certain topics" I was talking about yesterday in "I feel as though unseen readers are leaning on me to write about certain topics that I see out there." Today's news is easy to absorb, and now I don't have to react to what the NYT has been pushing at me for the last few days in things like "The Three G.O.P. Women Who Broke Trump’s Grip on Congress" and "Marjorie Taylor Greene Was Not on Our Bingo Card." 

In the "Bingo Card" conversation, Frank Bruni said to Bret Stephens:

Unless they nuke the filibuster, "it will be impossible for Republicans to get Common Sense Policies done." The "Crazed Democrat Lunatics" will "block everything."

"FOR THREE YEARS, NOTHING WILL BE PASSED, AND REPUBLICANS WILL BE BLAMED. Elections, including the Midterms, will be rightfully brutal. If we do terminate the Filibuster, we will get EVERYTHING approved, like no Congress in History. We will have FAIR, FREE, and SAFE Elections, No Men in Women’s Sports or Transgender for Everybody, Strong Borders, Major Tax and Energy Cuts, and will secure our Second Amendment, which the Democrats will also terminate, IMMEDIATELY."

Wrote Trump, on Truth Social this Morning.

He's all about winning: "[The Democrats] have much less chance of WINNING if we have Great Policy Wins after Wins after Wins. IN FACT, THEY WILL LOSE BIG, AND FOR A VERY LONG TIME. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER NOW, END THE RIDICULOUS SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATELY, AND THEN, MOST IMPORTANTLY, PASS EVERY WONDERFUL REPUBLICAN POLICY THAT WE HAVE DREAMT OF, FOR YEARS, BUT NEVER GOTTEN. WE WILL BE THE PARTY THAT CANNOT BE BEATEN - THE SMART PARTY!!!"

"It’s an emotional gas-main explosion, from people who felt unheard, patronized, left behind...."

Writes Michael Hirschorn, explaining why he's voting for Mamdani, in "With Mamdani, the Left Finally Has Its Trump" (NYT).

This is a febrile, statue-toppling time, one with some parallels to the politics of previous moments of authoritarian ascendancy, when hard-left movements sprung up in response to the right. But it’s not quite a “horseshoe” moment, either. That’s the theory that far-left and far-right ideologies often converge around similar ideas in times like these. As we watch Mr. Trump lay waste to multiple generations of conservative dogma, it starts to become clear that ideology of any kind is inadequate to capture what is happening in the electorate.... 

Well, then that's it: "Judge Denies Request to Unseal Epstein Grand Jury Transcripts in Florida."

The NYT reports.

A federal judge in Florida on Wednesday denied a request by the Trump administration to release grand jury transcripts from an investigation into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, stymying efforts by President Trump to blunt criticism from many of his supporters.

Either that or it's a great relief.

What do you think is Trump's reaction?

Stymied

Relieved

 

pollcode.com free polls

AND: Follow on NYT headlines:

1. "Polls show Republicans breaking with Trump over the Epstein files" ("The incident has revealed a schism among Mr. Trump’s base, with anger over the Epstein files appearing more concentrated among the traditional Republican wing of the party. Republicans who do not identify as part of Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement were more likely to be dissatisfied with how the administration has handled the files...").

2. "Attorney General Alerted Trump He Was Named in Epstein Files/It was not clear in what context Trump’s name was raised in the files" ("One person close to Mr. Trump, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said that White House officials were not concerned about the latest disclosures given that Mr. Trump’s name appeared in the first round of information that Ms. Bondi released").

"Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, announced on Sunday that he would not seek re-election next year, a day after President Trump threatened to back a primary challenger against him..."

"... because Mr. Tillis had said he was opposed to the bill carrying Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda.... The president’s allies celebrated Mr. Tillis’ announcement as more proof of Mr. Trump’s political strength. 'Don’t Cross Trump,' Jason Miller, who served as a top adviser for the president’s re-election campaign, wrote on social media. 'The voters gave him a mandate to implement a specific agenda, and they want everyone to get behind his efforts!'... Mr. Tillis in his statement blamed the lack of any middle ground in Congress on both political parties, pointing to the recent departures of Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, without naming them. 'When people see independent thinking on the other side, they cheer,' he said. 'But when those very same people see independent thinking coming from their side, they scorn, ostracize and even censure them.'"

The NYT reports.

"The erosion of working-class support — among Black, white and Latino voters alike — has unnerved every ideological wing of the Democratic Party."

"Ben Tulchin, a pollster who worked on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, said the old political calculations for how Democrats can win elections were now obsolete. 'The math doesn’t work,' he said. 'For years, the belief was Democrats have had demographic destiny on our side. Now, the inverse is true.' Some Democrats hope that this is only a phenomenon of the Trump era, and that G.O.P. gains will evaporate once the president is no longer on the ballot.... But Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist who served as chief of staff to former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who left the party last year, warned that such optimism was misplaced. 'Trump is the symptom, not the disease,” he said. “The disease is the fact that you have lost touch with a whole swath of voters that used to consistently vote Democratic.”... [Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from the Bronx said] 'I am convinced that Donald Trump is a singular phenomenon in American history.... I am unconvinced that his appeal is necessarily transferable to the Republican Party writ large. That remains to be seen.'"

From "The Democrats’ problems run deep, nearly everywhere.This is where voters shifted toward President Trump in each of the last three elections" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are a lot of interesting graphics showing the dramatic shift toward Trump (or something more than just Trump)).

Chris Cuomo — bulging out of his T-shirt — says Democrats should find "a message" and "then you find the messenger."

And Bill Maher — possibly still digesting that dinner he had with Trump — tells him how wrong he is.

"The Democrats always say message. Who hears a message?"

 

Trump's "message," according to Maher is "I'm me, I'm strong and I'm daddy." To Maher, the people are "like an animal, they're instinctive, like, I smell fear, or I smell alpha... and Democrats have to come up with an alpha, and it's not Tim Walz, and it's not Tim, the other Tim who ran... You know that you gotta appeal to people at a sort of post-civilization stage where we're kind of on a primal level. You just do. And Trump does it better than anybody."

Cuomo takes the cue. But he doesn't go with the idea that Trump is who he is. He says Trump figured out who the people hate and essentially said: "I know who you hate, and I know what you hate...  and I hate them too, and I will make them pay." And Democrats hate Trump: "They just hate him. They do. So he can't even get shot and get compassion."

If Maher is right and Cuomo is wrong and Trump just is who he is and what he is is daddy, alpha, and the people respond by instinct, then what are the Democrats to do? Wait to be taken over and rearranged by some left-wing father figure? Or maybe a true Mother? If Cuomo is right, Democrats need only absorb something of the people's emotions and reflect them back convincingly enough. Neither man believes the people can become educated and rational. We're out here stewing in the "sort of post-civilization stage."

Assuming the Democratic Party needs someone to come in and remake it, as Trump did for the Republican Party, who could that person be?

I asked Grok, and it set out 4 "key attributes" : "1. Charisma and Media Savvy.... 2. Outsider Status or Unconventional Background.... 3. Clear, Bold Vision.... 4. Connection with the Base...."

Grok then came up with 5 individuals who might have the attributes, and I'll put this below the fold so you can guess before you look — guess, then laugh... or cry: 

"Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI."

That's point #3 on a 4-point list by Ruy Teixeira, in "Trump 2.0: A Survival Guide for Democrats" (Free Press).

DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.... Racial preferences are very, very unpopular and have been for a long time.... 

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

And that fits so tightly with the Democrats' 2 favorite arguments: 1. You're dumb, and 2. You're racist. Which reminds me — the #1 item on Teixeira's 4-point list is: "Avoid name-calling."

I'm halfway through quoting all 4 items, so let me continue. #2 is "Moderate — starting with immigration." And #4 is "Embrace energy abundance."

Yeah, the Democrats cannot do these things. Not unless they get their own Trump. Someone extremely daring, charismatic, and powerful who barges in and reshapes the party around him. It could have been RFK Jr., but they used their grubby little ways to keep him off the ballot. And now who is out there?

"From the way I’ve set this up, you might assume there are two possibilities: either we are indeed at the start of a new conservative era — the Conservative Golden Age — or

"... we’re still within the New Liberal Era, and Trump’s win in 2024 won’t be enough to terminate it once we look back a few decades from now. It’s still an open question. If two consecutive Eisenhower terms weren’t enough to interrupt the Long Liberal Era, and likewise for Clinton and the Long Conservative Era, then in principle, liberalism could survive two non-consecutive terms for Trump.I actually think there are four possibilities.... Scenario 1 — Conservative Golden Age.... The easiest route to Scenario 2 — The New Liberal Era is Still Alive, Baby! — would be if Trump mismanages some sort of crisis.... Scenario 3 — Stalemate.... Finally, Scenario 4 — Off the Charts — means that the liberal/conservative axis, as I’ve depicted it in the chart, will cease to represent American politics well. Maybe it’s centrist oligarchs and technocrats against a horseshoe theory coalition of the populist left and right.... Then, there are some darker scenarios...."

I'm reading Nate Silver's "Are we entering a Conservative Golden Age? Or will the vibe soon shift back to the left?"

"[T]here would be clear advantages: to participate in the great drama rather than watching from across the border, to shape the imperium rather than negotiating a position in its shadow."

"If I were a young Canadian, especially one outside the Laurentian heartland, I think I would feel this vision’s pull. And yes, even if I were a young left-leaning anti-Trump Canadian — because what better way to serve those causes than to actually pull Washington leftward, to add your votes to the coalition that just failed to defeat Trump? That’s the reason that it would be somewhat strange for American conservatives to actually welcome Canadian accession at this time — because it would immediately destroy the Republican Party’s political advantage."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "O Canada, Come Join Us" (NYT).

"A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn."

"Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding.... But... it isn’t happening any more.... The era lasted almost exactly 10 years.... The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared... to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms....

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "How Liberal America Came to Its Senses/The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump" (The Alantic).

I'm not agreeing with the tale Chait tells. In fact, I find some of it hilarious. I'm presenting it for critical discussion. So let's continue. How did America "come to its senses"? Chait writes:

"Pilloried by Democrats during his 2012 run, Romney has emerged as a strong voice for a bygone kind of politics."

Said Jake Tapper, introducing Mitt Romney on "State of the Union" yesterday.

Romney gave a long interview, and maybe you saw a clip of it, but I want to do my own edit:

ROMNEY: Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly. He said what he was going to do, and that's what he's doing. I mean, people are saying, oh, I don't like this appointment or this policy that he's talking about. But those are the things he said he was going to do when he ran. So you can't complain about someone who does what he said he was going to do. And I agree with him on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things. But it's like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he's going to do and see how it works out.... 

TAPPER:  Are you worried at all about being a target for retribution, you or members of your family?

ROMNEY: No, actually, I have been pretty clean throughout my life. I'm not particularly worried about criminal investigations.

"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."

"I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trump voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trump’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trump’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trump’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison."

Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.

Douthat invites French to say something nice about MAGA. French says:

"Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism."

"It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century. It should be said that social dynamism is more complicated than it appears at first blush. It’s not just getting on your Harley and hitting the open road. It’s not really about rugged individualism or the libertarian version of freedom as the absence of constraint...."

Writes David Brooks, in "What Democrats Need to Do Now" (NYT).

Somehow I thought you should know he's saying that. Be it known that it’s not just a matter of getting on your Harley and hitting the open road.