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Happy Thursday. It’s Swin again. I cannot possibly pretend what I’m about to tell you isn’t immensely funny. It is also, I would argue, a meaningful sign of just how badly screwed the Republican Party and its MAGA overlords likely are, with election night just over a month away.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ you’ll discover what the GOP and Trumpworld elite REALLY think about their collective decision to make a lone California-based Twitch streamer one of the main characters of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. (Hint: The data is in and they’re not happy.) Plus, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an absurd speech, and an even more absurd book, to a captive military audience in Virginia. Let’s jump in.
‘LMAO’
My job is to talk to as many Trump administration officials, well-connected Republican operatives and data dorks, GOP lawmakers and aides, and other conservative bigwigs and influence peddlers as I can. The gig is as unglamorous as it is irritating, but it puts me in a position to confidently tell you: What you’ve been hearing in the media isn’t hype or liberal wish-fulfillment.
The 2026 freakout among the top tiers of the Republican Party and conservative movement – about President Donald Trump’s catastrophic poll numbers, and the very real possibility that this year’s midterms are going to be an electoral slaughterhouse for the GOP – isn’t just real. Lately, the behind-the-scenes, party-wide sense of terror has been growing conspicuously worse, almost by the day, as we approach November. (And this is easy to forget, but: Trump-aligned pollsters started thinking he and the party were “fucked” even before he launched his disastrous Iran war in February; so imagine what they must be thinking now.)
So today, I want to give you a concrete example of how “fucked” they think they are with a month left on the clock, and where they think their own people have inflicted extremely unforced errors. I could point to more obvious warning signs, such as how much of the Republican Party is blaring the alarm bells over Iowa – Iowa! – being in play. Instead, I’m going to dish on how frustrated some prominent Republican consultants and Trump advisers are about their party’s never-ending anti-Hasan Piker strategy.
Yes, that Hasan Piker, the hard-left Twitch streamer who has infuriated Democratic elites with his efforts to push the party leftward and to a more pro-Palestinian position. The anti-Piker strategy may have started with Dems and their think tanks but boy, did it end up being a uniquely hysterical and sometimes horny obsession in Republican circles and right-wing media.
And, as a variety of seasoned Republican operatives and advisers to the president quietly tell me, many of the GOP’s movers and shakers don’t think the attacks are working. At all. And they have the non-public data to back up the argument. In fact, one of Trump’s own pollsters is now throwing cold water on the Piker-hating electoral strategy, in a brief conversation with Zeteo.