Trump’s Own RNC Chair Warns Party Faces “Almost Certain Defeat”

The chair of the Republican National Committee is issuing a dire warning to Republicans: Anticipate losing next November.

The president’s handpicked RNC leader, Joe Gruters, has been preaching the caucus’s impending doom ahead of the 2026 midterms in a transparent attempt to lower expectations. Gruters joined several right-wing podcasts and Christian television networks to spread the word that the GOP is coming up against a “looming disaster.”

“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard,” Gruters said.

“This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” Gruters told Salem News Channel, a new media entity co-owned by Trump’s son Don Jr.

Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since Donald Trump returned to office, white-knuckling every branch of the federal government. If history is any indicator, that won’t bode well for the party come next year: In a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party loses grounds via midterms, a phenomenon known as the “presidential penalty.” Those are the basic odds, even before Trump’s devastating tariffs and wildly controversial immigration agenda are taken into account.

But early indicators—such as a healthy dose of special elections in the last year—suggest that the national backlash to Trump’s second-term agenda could be worse for the party than usual. Democrats have seen surprising gains in unexpected areas of the country, including in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be on the verge of panic. Anxious about midterms, the White House has spent months trying to pressure red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn a handful of seats in Congress. But so far, the pressure campaign has backfired: On Thursday, Indiana state senators overwhelmingly voted against the effort, citing Trump’s open threats and his crass mouth as their rationale.

Gruters’s comments have similarly raised a stir. The Heritage Foundation’s news site, Townhall, blasted The Bulwark for first publishing Gruters’s opinion, claiming that the “story is FAKE” because the publication had edited out Gruters’s words to eliminate his alleged faith in the caucus. But in doing so, Townhall cut out Gruters’s conclusion: “We are facing almost certain defeat,” he said.

President Donald Trump just got hit with a lawsuit over his enormous $300 million ballroom that would dwarf the White House.

In a 65-page complaint filed Friday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit organization working to save America’s historic places, argued that Trump did not have the constitutional authority to fast-track construction for a project of this scale, and has violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The lawsuit also notes that Congress is required to approve any construction on federal land, and the White House is located at the White House and President’s Park, a national park.

In October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is charged with advising the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, seeming to clear the way for him to make any changes he likes to the nation’s monuments. A Trump official said the members would be replaced by those who were “more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” but two months later, the seats still remain empty.

The legal challenge is just the latest issue to complicate Trump’s plans for a behemoth ballroom. Trump has reportedly had a falling-out with his architect, James McCrery II, who argued that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.

Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the construction process, claiming that the original structure of the White House wouldn’t be touched—before razing the entire East Wing. He also claimed that the project would only cost $200 million, but that number has since ballooned to $300 million.

The privately funded ballroom has presented a golden opportunity for the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations to make good with the Trump administration—and a few defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Palantir have also tossed the president some cash for his vanity project.

Trump has repeatedly turned his attention away from actually governing to the destruction of American landmarks. Trump has redone the Oval Office in the gaudy gold style of Mar-a-Lago, added stupid signs and white marble bathrooms to the White House, paved over the Rose Garden, pitched an “Arc de Trump” monument, and the builder in chief recently declared his intention to “fix” the 100-year-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington. Fix what, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours.

Unfortunately for Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, what he posts on the internet stays forever.

Beckwith deleted a Thursday post that confirmed the Trump administration had threatened to pull federal funding from Indiana if state legislators refused to bend to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in the since-deleted post. “They told many lawmakers, cabinet members and the Gov and I that this would happen. The Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.”

He was responding to another post by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that Trump would withhold national funding from Indiana if it refused to draw new congressional lines, just five years after approving the last batch of maps.

“Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame,” the official account for the Heritage Foundation wrote.

But Indiana’s Senate did reject the White House’s pressure campaign late Thursday, with 21 Republican senators voting against the scheme. Their rationale for doing so ranged from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort.

Why Beckwith would have felt pressured to delete his post—within hours of making it—is not clear.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would have won the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

But so far, bullying lawmakers and barking demands has not been a successful midterm strategy for the Republican leader. Redistricting efforts have crumbled in other red states where Trump issued gerrymandering directives, though not always due to the same ferocious local pushback.

President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and other prominent figures can be spotted in a new collection of photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

At least three of the photographs showed Trump, who has come under immense scrutiny for his reported ties to Epstein and his efforts to prevent the release of the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.

One black-and-white photograph featuring Trump shows the president smiling as he posed with six women wearing leis, whose faces have all been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump sitting on a plane next to a blonde woman whose face has been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump listening to a glamorous-looking woman, as Epstein stood, smirking beside him.

Yet another photo showed a pile of Trump-branded condoms.

These photographs, plucked from a trove of 95,000 images and redacted at the discretion of members of the committee, are just the beginning. “Committee Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead,” the release said. Representative Robert Garcia told reporters Friday that some of the photos that were not released were “incredibly disturbing.”

MAGA architect Steve Bannon also made multiple appearances in the photographs released Friday—including one that was particularly disturbing.

One photograph showed Epstein sitting behind a desk, while Bannon sat opposite him talking. On the desk between them sat a framed photograph that appeared to show an at least partially naked woman lying limp on a sofa or bed.

Bannon had reportedly assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life, conducting a series of interviews with the alleged sex trafficker between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unreleased footage.

Another photograph showed Epstein and Bannon taking a mirror selfie, and another photograph showed Bannon speaking with director Woody Allen, who has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared to have signed one photograph, which showed him smiling beside Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

Other prominent figures who appeared in photos were Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Three of the photographs showed sex toys, including a “jawbreaker gag.”

This story has been updated.

The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.

The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.

Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”

The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.

Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.

The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season.

The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.

But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”

President Donald Trump still can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that the United States is a democracy. 

While signing an executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence, Trump whined that states needed to be “unified” on his approach to AI, in order for the country to win global dominance over China. 

“We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote, that’s President Xi [Jinping]. He says ‘do it,’ and that’s the end of that. You know, we have a different system,” Trump said. “But we have a system that’s good—but we only have a system that’s good if it’s smart.”

As the president spoke, sitting behind his desk, he covered his right hand, where a massive, mysterious bruise has formed. 

Meanwhile, the folks watching at home weren’t impressed by Trump’s longing for a unitary government and his dismissal of his own country’s so-called “different system.”  

“Yes, it’s called DEMOCRACY,” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom on X. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has longed for another form of government. After visiting China earlier this year, the president said he wished his Cabinet secretaries would greet him with stoic compliance (even though their meetings are already a well-documented spectacle of sycophancy).

With just six legislative days left before she plans to resign, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly working on one last long-shot bid to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The recent MAGA defector has been quietly taking the temperature on a motion to vacate the chair, three sources familiar with her efforts told MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. 

In order to remove Johnson, Greene would need the support of eight other Republicans. “Marjorie is approaching members to get to nine who will oust the speaker,” one of the sources told MS NOW. “And if we don’t get to work on codifying Trump’s agenda, anything can happen.”

But Greene, who has spent the last few weeks publicly criticizing Johnson, denied the reporting. The Georgia Republican told MS Now that it was “not true” and that she was “not interested in participating in” their story. 

While a bid to unseat Johnson would likely fail, these reports come amid mounting complaints about his leadership.   

Last week, Representative Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that Johnson wouldn’t have the votes if there was a roll call vote. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” Stefanik said. “It’s that widespread.” Representative Nancy Mace also shared in Greene’s frustration, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna recently sidestepped the speaker to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.

On Tuesday, Greene told CNN that Republican women specifically were starting to lash out at Johnson because “he sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously.”

Greene has stated that she’ll resign from her seat on January 5, giving her limited time to find support for her measure. She had previously attempted to remove Johnson last May, but that attempt failed after a majority of Democrats stepped in to save the speaker. 

After enduring months of bullying by the president to pass his gerrymandering plan, Indiana Republicans overwhelmingly voted to kill the effort on Thursday. Their rationale for doing so, however, was shockingly personal.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, longshot effort would win the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

There were plenty of reasons to put the kibosh on the initiative. For one, doing so in the middle of the decade would be extraordinary. While political gerrymandering is technically legal, it typically aligns with the release of census data at the beginning of a new decade.

Initial reports speculated that just a handful of Republican state senators would reject the bid to draw new congressional maps. Instead, 21 Republican state senators voted against it—more than half the GOP caucus in Indiana’s upper chamber—citing reasons from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort, according to CNN.

“Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion. And I think a lot of them responded with, ‘That isn’t going to work,’” state Senator Sue Glick told CNN. “And it didn’t.”

State Senator Michael Bohacek—a longtime disability advocate whose daughter has Down syndrome—pulled his support for the new maps after Trump called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”

“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” Bohacek said in a statement. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”

State Senator Greg Walker said he voted no after he felt targeted by several swatting attempts. Voting yes, he told CNN, would have only encouraged the dangerous harassment.

In the end, the White House’s pressure campaign was costing Republicans support in their own districts. State Senator Jean Leising told the network that, after speaking at her grandson’s middle school this past fall, practically every member of his basketball team had fielded text messages about her—”and they were all bad.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost it Thursday when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins quoted President Trump’s own statements on the economy and Christmas.

“If the economy is as strong as the president has said it is, then why is he telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children?” Collins asked, referring to Trump’s comments at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday, in which the president told a Mount Pocono crowd, “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.”

Leavitt tried to deflect, saying that Trump actually meant that he wants products made in America by American small businesses, even if they cost more, because Americans would get a better-quality product and would be supporting their fellow Americans.

“Again, with respect to affordability, every economic metric, Kaitlan, and I wish you would report more on it, does in fact show that the economy is getting better and brighter than where it was under the previous administration,” Leavitt added, specifically pointing to inflation, real wages, and gas prices.

Collins pressed further, pointing out that grocery prices have been up, but Leavitt kept repeating that inflation was down and that the press didn’t report on the high levels of inflation under President Biden.

“My predecessor stood up at this podium and she said inflation doesn’t exist. She said the border was secure, and people like you just took her at her word, and those were two utter lies. Everything I’m telling you is the truth backed by real factual data, and you just don’t want to report on it because you want to push untrue narratives about the president,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt’s replies did nothing to explain why Trump would tell people to settle for less this holiday season. At his Pennsylvania rally, the president was repeating comments he made in the spring to try and explain away the impact his tariffs were having on consumer goods. But back then, as well as this week, his comments only raised more questions about the economic health of the U.S., and no amount of bluster by his staff can shut those questions down.

Want to visit the United States? Customs and Border Patrol will make you submit your social media history—and your family history and DNA too.

In an 11-page notice published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, CBP outlined several proposed changes to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, which screens and approves applicants traveling into the United States through the Visa Waiver Program.

Under the new rules, social media would become a “mandatory data element” for ESTA applications, and all applicants would be required to submit a social media history going back five years. But that’s not all.

The notice also said that it would add several “high value data fields” to the ESTA application, including “biometrics.” Examples listed were face, fingerprint, iris, and even DNA.

The Department of Homeland Security announced in November that it would begin uniformly collecting facial biometrics from all noncitizens upon entry and exit to the United States, removing prior exemptions for some travelers. In the new rules, CBP states that applicants, including third parties applying on an individual’s behalf, would be required to provide a “selfie” of the applicant’s face in addition to their passport photo.

Other “high value data fields” include information about applicants’ family members, their names, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as when and where they were born.

Travelers would also be prompted to submit their personal and business telephone numbers used in the last five years, and email addresses used in the last 10 years.