Republicans Are Suddenly Very, Very Worried About Holding the Senate

With midterms on the horizon, Republicans fear their party is heading toward disaster—in the Senate as well as the House of Representatives.

Some Senate Republicans are sounding the alarm that the caucus is not addressing critical issues ahead of the 2026 election season, namely affordability, which is predicted to be the top issue come November.

The party has failed to pass major policy wins beyond Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last July, suffering from a razor-thin legislative majority in Congress that has fractured at nearly every juncture, including basic government funding packages. And the possibility of pushing another GOP bill to curry favor with voters seems slim—just last week, Trump told his caucus that Republicans had “gotten everything passed that we need.”

“We’re not going to win the midterm by going to the American people and saying, ‘Look, we passed 11 out of 12 appropriations bills and we confirmed all of President Trump’s nominees,’” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy told The Hill. “The American people don’t care. That’s not what, when moms and dads lie down to sleep at night and can’t—that’s not what they’re worried about. They’re worried about the cost of living.

“In their minds, they’re tired of selling blood plasma to go grocery shopping,” Kennedy said.

The 2026 agenda isn’t conducive to another legislative overhaul, either. This year earmarks significantly more time for lawmakers to spend in their home states than in Washington, a major departure from the 2025 calendar. That’s forced Republicans to focus on bills that absolutely must pass, such as government funding efforts, the farm bill, and the National Defense Authorization Act.

The shift in priorities has left conservative lawmakers to fend for themselves, more fixated on the advertising efforts of their individual campaigns than working as a party to pass more legislation that would sway their districts.

“Are we doing enough? We’re not doing anything,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is campaigning in Alabama’s gubernatorial race, remarked to The Hill. “Everybody’s working on getting elected.”

Top Republicans are hitching their wagon to the aging success of the OBBA, hoping that the mid-2025 legislation can still win at the ballot box a year and a half after the fact.

Meanwhile, Republicans are losing on a host of critical issues: The White House has so far failed to meaningfully address the fact that Trump was named in the Epstein files tens of thousands of times; the cost of living is boiling over; a conservative stonewall fueled the longest government shutdown in U.S. history; and immigration—the party’s terra firma—has buckled since ICE agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

Republican Congressman Randy Fine is still an idiotic, Islamaphobic bigot. 

On Sunday night, the lawmaker, known for his disturbing history of anti-Palestinian comments, wrote on X, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Fine said he made the comment in response to what is clearly a joke from Nerdeen Kiswani, the founder of New York City–based Palestinian organizing network Within Our Lifetime. 

“Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets,” she quipped last Thursday. “Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

“Lmao at the Zionists frothing at the mouth at this, thinking they’re  doing something. It’s obviously a joke,” Kiswani wrote later without mentioning Fine. “I don’t care if you have a dog, I do care if your dog is shitting everywhere and you’re not cleaning it.” Another post from Kiswani made clear it was a reference to people upset by the amount of dog shit left sitting on top of piles of frozen snow throughout the city.

Only someone whose bigotry transcends logic would think that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani would somehow decree that dogs could no longer be indoor pets (although there are certainly some valid questions around the conduct of urban dog owners). 

At this point, it’s obvious that Fine is that someone. This is the same congressman who has constantly celebrated the death and suffering that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza, stating, “The Palestinian cause is an evil one.… We nuked the Japanese twice [in World War II] in order to get unconditional surrender.” 

Fine’s comments have been widely condemned, especially as they come right before the beginning of Ramadan. 

“Resign now, you racist slob,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote. 

“Imagine if an American politician said this about Jews,” Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control activist Cameron Kasky said. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to pacify critics of the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files by sending Congress a letter Saturday with a list of 130 names—which for some reason, included dead celebrities.

The list contains some absurd names, including people whom Epstein had merely mentioned but never met, such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Janis Joplin. Monroe passed away when Epstein was only 9. While the list does include the names of known Epstein associates, such as President Trump, Les Wexner, and Steve Bannon, it also includes Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who have pushed for the files’ release.

Also named on the list are Trump enemies like George Clooney and former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is also mentioned with her name spelled incorrectly.

Arguably the most egregious part of the letter, however, is the assertion from Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that the DOJ had fulfilled its legal requirements and considers the legal matters of Epstein and his associates and accomplices settled. Khanna called out Bondi’s antics on X.

The DOJ has yet to release all six million files relating to Epstein, and this list of names looks like an attempt to placate critics. But the end result is the opposite, with Bondi exposed for avoiding the information that would be damaging to Trump and his friends. It’s obvious that the Trump administration is trying in vain to pacify the public about Epstein but is failing blatantly.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat turned Donald Trump sympathizer, falsely claimed that the president has never violated a court order.

Speaking to Dasha Burns on Politico’s The Conversation, Fetterman launched into a fantastical defense of Trump when pressed on how he felt about the president calling him “the most sensible Democrat.”

“I know and I love a lot of people that voted for Trump, and that’s part of why I refuse to call these people Nazis or they’re brown shirts or they’re trying to destroy our democracy,” Fetterman said. “Now I’m not defending the president, but I will say he hasn’t defied a single court order yet. He hasn’t.”

To defend Trump’s rule as—of all things—lawful is preposterous. Let’s lay out just a few violations, shall we?

In April, the Trump administration illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, even though he had received a judge’s protective order—and when the government eventually brought him back, it just tried to deport him again. That same month, Trump also defied a court order requiring his administration to allow the journalists from the Associated Press to report presidential events.

In May, a federal judge found that the Trump administration had “unquestionably” violated a court order requiring the government to provide written notice and an opportunity for detainees to apply for protection before deporting them to a third country.

In October, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had flouted a judge’s order by requiring states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive emergency management funding.

In November, the Trump administration continued to sign criminal indictments with Trump’s improperly appointed U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan’s name, even after a judge ruled that “all actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment … constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside.”

U.S. courts have ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcemnt has illegally detained people 4,400 times since October, and yet Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown continues undeterred. But this isn’t the kind of thing that bothers Fetterman—the only member of his party who voted to keep funding the Department of Homeland Security.

In total, the Trump administration has been sued more than 650 times—a sure sign of a lawful reign worthy of Fetterman’s staunch defense.

One of President Trump’s oldest donors is closing a manufacturing plant in Ohio and moving it to China, a slap in the face to the American workers he claimed to be fighting for.

Hedge fund billionaire John Paulson plans to offshore the East Lake, Ohio, plant of Conn Selmer, the largest U.S. manufacturer of brass and orchestra instruments.

“We can’t have American producers closing American factories and offshoring. We need to protect American jobs and protect American manufacturing,” Paulson said just last year.

“We came in with a full proposal, fully prepared to bargain, and they started off with a presentation of telling us how bad we were doing,” said UAW Local 2359 president and plant worker Robert Hines. “To go publicly on CNBC to support the Trump administration’s positive views on tariffs and all that stuff, and then you turn around and [say you] want to go send the work right over to China … it’s a slap in our face.”

Paulson raised $50.5 million for Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign. And like Trump, he’s pushed pro–domestic worker rhetoric while leaving those same workers out to dry.

“It’s going to take a lot of money out of East Lake,” Hines said. “We’ve had people come out [and] show love to try to keep the place open, and the company just isn’t open to it. They’re not answering or returning anyone’s calls.”

Newly uncovered details in the Epstein files reveal that the FBI spoke with a victim who accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, despite Attorney General Pam Bondi’s vehement denial that the Justice Department had any such evidence, as of last week.

Agents apparently spoke with a victim of Jeffrey Epstein who also accused Trump of sexually and violently assaulting her. It is unclear what happened with the investigation, though the government deemed her to be a “credible accuser,” according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. A woman with identical biological details sued Epstein’s estate and won a settlement in 2021.

The investigation into the accuser is made apparent on a page titled “prominent names” in an internal, 21-page slideshow cataloguing the Justice Department’s various investigations into Epstein and his longtime criminal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump’s name is listed in the document, along with two allegations against the sitting president.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out,” reads the first entry, noting that the victim would have been between 13 and 15 years old and that the incident took place sometime between 1983 and 1985.

But the second accusation against the president, which involves Trump agreeing with Epstein that a 14-year-old victim was a “good one,” carries a different kind of credibility inside the DOJ, since the person who provided the statement was also used as a key government witness to convict Maxwell, according to the files.

“[REDACTED] remembered Epstein introduced her to Trump saying ‘This is a good one, huh’ and Trump responded ‘Yes’. (date range roughly 1984, [REDACTED] would have been 14),” the slide reads.

Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, and was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache.

Yet the White House has continued to vehemently deny that Trump did anything wrong while he was close pals with the child sex trafficker—even as evidence emerges to the contrary.

On Wednesday, Bondi went so far as to claim the Justice Department had no evidence that underage girls were at parties attended by the president. California Representative Ted Lieu then accused Bondi of lying under oath, referring to a document from the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center that illustrated a witness had called the bureau to report such a case in 1995.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to spend tens of billions of dollars on mega-prisons where the agency can disappear thousands of people.

In a memo shared with New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte, ICE outlined its $38.3 billion plan to launch a “new detention center model” that would expand the agency’s detention capacity by 92,600 beds by the end of FY26.

“This effort aims to meet the growing demand for bedspace and streamline the detention and removal process, focusing on non-traditional facilities built specifically to support ICE’s needs,” the memo said. “This model includes the acquisition and renovation of eight large-scale detention centers and 16 processing sites, as well as the acquisition of 10 existing ‘turnkey’ facilities where ICE ERO already operates.”

The large-scale processing centers, also called “mega-centers,” would house between 7,000 and 10,000 detainees for “periods averaging less than 60 days,” and serve as the site of international removals. Other processing facilities would house between 1,000 and 1,500 detainees for between three and seven days.

Currently, the country’s largest immigration detention facility is Camp East Montana, a 5,000-bed short-term tent facility built at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Within the first 50 days of operation, the facility had already racked up 60 federal code violations. The facility had failed to provide detainees with regular access to working toilets and showers, substantive meals, or legal assistance, and failed to take mandatory and proper health screenings.

Now Donald Trump wants to build eight more Camp East Montanas—and make them even bigger.

The number of immigrants in U.S. detention has already reached record high levels, surpassing 73,000 detainees in January as a result of the government targeting children, families, immigrants without criminal records, and lawful asylum-seekers. The Trump administration has said it aims to detain 100,000 people at any given time.

More prisons wouldn’t solve the problem of disappearing detainees, address the horrific conditions and lack of health care access at many of these facilities, or ease the steadily climbing number of detainee deaths—they would only provide ICE more cover to move immigrants from state to state in order to skirt legal challenges. An attorney in Minnesota would have to act quickly to stop the deportation of their client from Texas or Florida or someplace else—if they could even figure out where their client got sent.

The memo was sent to Ayotte as part of ongoing talks to open one of these mega prisons in Merrimack, New Hampshire—sparking concerns from state and local leaders.

ICU nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by a swarm of ICE agents in Minneapolis moments after he assisted a couple of women. One of them, according to new reports, was also a health care professional—who was denied the chance to help Pretti in his final moments.

In an exclusive interview with The Intercept, the emergency medical technician—whose credentials were reviewed by the outlet but who remained unidentified due to fear of retaliation by the government—claimed she tried to perform CPR on Pretti but was thwarted by a masked ICE agent who restrained her.

“I could tell the second that I laid eyes on him that he was horrifically injured,” the EMT said. “I immediately said, ‘I’m an EMT! He has a brain injury! He has a serious brain injury! I need to help him right now.’”

Moments before Pretti’s death, video captured from onlookers at multiple angles depicted the 37-year-old filming ICE activity before intervening between another protester and an agent who had violently shoved her to the ground. The two protesters were then sprayed with a chemical irritant, and Pretti was ripped away from the other demonstrator while she continued to slip on a mound of snow.

At least seven officers were on top of Pretti, wrestling him to the ground, when one of them, standing above the situation and seemingly supporting the other agents, grabbed his gun and shot Pretti. Video footage captured the sound of 10 gunshots ringing out.

Footage of the seconds that followed capture the EMT’s voice on audio, ringing out that Pretti was suffering “decorticate posturing,” a phenomenon in which the hands and legs curl into the body as a result of brain trauma.

“I was literally begging the agent who was holding me back to let me do CPR,” she recalled. “Because I knew that if he wasn’t pulseless at that point already, he was going to become pulseless very, very soon.”

Then Pretti died. His death was later ruled a homicide by the Hennepin County medical examiner.

The government is constitutionally required to keep people safe once they are in custody. The legal principle is tied to due process, outlined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Parameters established by the Department of Justice also stipulate that officers are not allowed to ignore serious medical conditions or risk of harm, such as assault, that could jeopardize an individual’s life. Unfortunately, in Pretti’s case, agents appeared to ignore both of those tenets.

“The responsibility of the government is to make sure that the person in their custody is cared for and alive,” Xavier de Janon, the director of mass defense at the National Lawyers Guild, told The Intercept. “If government agencies fail to keep someone alive and there is proof that it’s their fault, they could be liable for their actions.”

President Donald Trump doesn’t seem the slightest bit bothered by the buffoonery that closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas, earlier this week. 

CNN’s DJ Judd asked Trump if he was “pleased” with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s handling of a humiliating incident, in which the Federal Aviation Administration briefly closed the airspace near the southern U.S. border because the military used a high-powered laser to shoot down what ultimately turned out to be a party balloon. 

“You mean the way it happened?” Trump pressed, and then splayed out his hands in a wide shrug. 

“People learn,” the president sighed. “People learn.” 

On Tuesday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford closed El Paso’s airspace “for special security reasons” without telling the White House, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Homeland Security—causing chaos in the surrounding area.

Duffy, along with White House and Pentagon officials, claimed Wednesday that drones dispatched by a Mexican cartel had breached U.S. airspace. The same day, two officials briefed by the Trump administration said the airport had been shut down over security concerns related to DOD’s use of counter-drone technology. 

As it turned out, the Pentagon had sought to expedite testing for an anti-drone laser at Fort Bliss, which is next to El Paso International Airport—and reportedly ended up targeting a rogue balloon instead of an unmanned aircraft. After initially saying that airspace would be closed for 10 days, the agency reversed the decision and reopened the next day.  

“The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region,” Duffy wrote on X Wednesday. “The restrictions have been lifted and normal flights are resuming.”

Duffy has yet to acknowledge that this statement was not actually true. But Trump’s laissez-faire attitude seemed to say it all: He messed up. 

What could Duffy possibly have learned from this incident? I guess he learned not to do it again—if he even knows what he did. 

Ghislaine Maxwell is in another legal bind.

The longtime girlfriend and sex-trafficking associate of Jeffrey Epstein was revealed Friday to have lied on her naturalization documents, potentially compromising her U.S. citizenship.

The documents were uncovered in the Justice Department’s latest Epstein files document dump and first reported by Migrant Insider. They show that Maxwell ticked “no” on paperwork that required her to admit if she had ever committed a crime or if she had ever procured anyone for prostitution.

The N-400 application that Maxwell submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asked:

• “Have you EVER committed a crime or offense for which you were NOT arrested?”
  
• “Have you EVER been a prostitute, or procured anyone for prostitution?”

For both queries, Maxwell indicated on the form that she had not. In truth, the covert criminal had recruited and trafficked underage girls to Epstein’s operation as early as 1994.

But despite her wide-ranging crimes, Maxwell’s application was approved, and she became a U.S. citizen on November 27, 2002.

Legal experts argue that could bode poorly for Maxwell, as false statements can delegitimize a naturalized citizenship, even if the offense is discovered decades later. The catch could also extend Maxwell’s prison sentence by up to 25 years under 18 U.S. Code § 1425.

“Lying on an N-400 form is a serious federal offense,” an unidentified immigration law expert told Migrant Insider. “Material misrepresentations—especially about criminal conduct—can be grounds for revocation of citizenship and potential criminal prosecution for immigration fraud.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes. Her attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, though the White House has not indicated it will grant one.

But a July interview between Maxwell and the DOJ still proved incredibly fruitful for the convict, sparking concerns that she had been offered a quid pro quo in exchange for a revised “Epstein list.” At the time, the Trump administration was floundering to redirect public fury over the files.

Shortly after she spoke with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—received an extremely cushy transfer, shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas where she has been granted many privileges not typically afforded to inmates.

Her time behind bars has since included meal service in her cell, unlimited toilet paper, puppy access, and access to private visitations in a chaplain’s office outside standard visiting hours. Her requests to be separated from other inmates have also been granted, with tables and cellmates reportedly being relocated at her whim.