Trump Is Making Republicans Wet Their Beds
The president's war in Iran and mass deportation campaign are having major - and negative - political consequences. Plus, his outgoing labor secretary discovers you can in fact have too many scandals.
On this day in 1966, three activists staged a “Sip-In” in Greenwich Village in New York, demanding service from bars refusing to serve gay men. Predating the more famous Stonewall Riot by three years, the protest was nonetheless a key event in the movement for gay rights.
Good morning. It’s Swin again. Today is another day ending in “Y,” so that means it’s another day of President Donald Trump trying to rig the midterms. You should not be complacent at all about this authoritarian threat, but his corrupt efforts are probably going to fail. One of the key reasons for that is that this president is so towering in his unpopularity that it makes the 2026 elections even harder to steal than they otherwise would have been. It’s an acidic level of unpopularity that Trump’s party and administration reeeeealllllllly cannot spin away – and boy, is there panic starting to show in some darkly comic and desperate ways. More on that below…
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Republicans know their policies are a political problem, Trump’s scandal-plagued labor secretary bites the dust, GOP lawmakers have a bill to denaturalize US citizens, and hopefully, soon you’ll have a good reason to read Infowars.
Bleak Times for the Ruling Party
In the past few months, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this matter, officials in the Trump White House have privately begged a number of their hardcore, anti-immigration allies to lay off the president for the rest of the year. The White House’s secret message goes as follows: Please stop yelling at us for pausing certain tactics since the height of our Minnesota siege. Republicans need to win the midterms. Our mass deportation policies are clearly a drag on our poll numbers. We promise to ramp the ethnic cleansing back up to 11 after the midterms, okay?
I am, of course, paraphrasing. But the message was loud and clear: GOP leaders have seen all the numbers, and are queasy about how their own policy priorities might be doing them in, electorally speaking. “I’ve heard that argument a million times, and it’s generally accepted as the political posture of this administration – and it’s widely rejected by those of us in the Mass Deportation Coalition,” Mike Howell, a former Trump DHS official who is leading a new network dedicated to pressuring the Trump-Vance administration on this issue, tells me. “We were told not to talk about mass deportation before the midterms, so instead we are screaming it – across the country.”
To be fair to Howell’s coalition, they are only asking President Trump to keep doing what he promised the country, if not world, that he would do in a second term. But it’s not just Trump’s militarized ethnic cleansing that’s giving conservative politicians and consultants reason to fear the wrath of the midterms.
Ahead of Election Day in November, you could easily argue that the Republican Party’s greatest obstacle to keep the House and the Senate isn’t the woefully inept Democratic Party. It’s Trump’s (and the Republican Party’s) disastrous, illegal bloodbath in the Middle East, which is jacking up gas prices and shoving the United States – and planet – to the brink of complete economic rupture.
Since last year, we’ve been reporting on how behind the scenes, the national Republican elite have been freaking out that Trump’s stagnantly “awful” poll numbers would invariably drag his party down in the 2026 elections. As of this month – per conversations I’ve had with an array of Trump appointees, longtime Republican operatives, conservative media luminaries, and GOP lawmakers – those anxieties have only skyrocketed at a higher altitude, and it’s in large part driven by the Iran war. They all say they’re fucked. They’re just trying to figure out just how badly. And yet, primarily out of fear of God Emperor Donald, they’ll keep riding that Trump-sized freight train all the way to Political Suicide Township.
“The bedwetting is making the whole bedroom damp,” a senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity (naturally), tells me.