White House Lawyers Secretly Prep Trump Team for Brutal Midterms

The White House is forecasting a rough November for congressional Republicans.

In private briefings, attorneys at the White House Counsel’s Office are preparing executive branch staff for a blue wave in the 2026 elections, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The 30-minute briefings feature a PowerPoint presentation detailing how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it, reported the Post. Other components of the past-due education involve guidance on how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.

“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” one attending official told the Post. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”

A White House official said that the meetings were “nothing new” and that the counsel’s office has provided oversight guidance to relevant stakeholders since Donald Trump returned to office.

Yet multiple sources that spoke with the Post explained that recent meetings with the office were acutely focused on the midterms and their fallout.

Trump, who was once a golden ticket for the Republican Party at the ballot box, has in his second term cooked up a litany of issues, any one of which could be a death knell for conservatives come November.

In the 15 months since he returned to America’s highest office, Trump has launched the U.S. into a war with Iran, sparking a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living pretty much everywhere. He also invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, axed thousands of staffers from the federal government and crippled some government agencies, and used his office to target his political opponents.

He has hobbled America’s press, sowed doubt and distrust in the country’s democratic elections, undermined the judiciary system, pardoned hundreds of people who served his personal interests—such as those who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021—imposed nonsensical tariffs on U.S. trading partners, aggressed America’s international alliances, abused the purpose of executive orders, and endorsed violent immigration policies and detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps, among other issues.

His lagging popularity has been reflected in nationwide polls: 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Friday, a growth of two percentage points since the poll was previously conducted in February.

Despite the cost of his own influence, the president has placed enormous pressure on his party to win, well aware of the consequences that await him if they don’t.

“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in January. “I’ll get impeached.”

President Donald Trump derailed his own speech Monday to insist how mentally healthy he is, following new poll data showing that a record high of Americans think he’s lost his mind.

“I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago, I don’t know,” Trump told the audience at a small-business summit at the White House.

“I’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling well’—well, someday, I might say that to you, and you’ll be the first to know. Actually I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it, just like you did in the last administration,” Trump said.

Americans have already been seeing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline: A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so.

Trump continued ranting about his pitch to require candidates for office to take cognitive tests. “No president has ever taken one except me, and I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one,” he said.

Trump went on to describe the test, which sounds a lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. It is not a test for intelligence.

“You know the first question is very easy. They always show the first question, it’s: You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a—what’s another good—a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?” Trump said, claiming the questions got increasingly complex.

He then veered into a tirade against California Governor Gavin Newsom before resuming his point. “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody’s gonna get all 30 questions correct. Nobody. ’Cause when you get to those last questions they’re pretty hard, you got to be pretty sharp.

“One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor, who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times. So, I don’t know. I think I’m done with those days, I’m tired of taking those tests,” Trump said.

Trump segued again, insisting on the importance of picking an intelligent leader during times of war. He went on to claim that his military campaign in Iran only lasted six weeks, though the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for more than two months; that the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, even though the U.S. was only really involved for eight; and that the war in Iraq was 10 or 12 years long, when, again, it was really only eight.

A federal judge on Monday apologized to Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, for what his lawyers described as “excessive restrictions on his liberty that serve no justifiable purpose.”

Cole Allen, who stormed into the Washington Hilton last month, was placed on temporary suicide watch upon arriving in jail in Washington, D.C.—even as he did not appear to be suicidal. He was also placed in a “safe cell,” a padded enclosure extremely similar to solitary confinement, made to wear a restrictive vest, and was only allowed out of his cell to speak to lawyers or receive medical attention.

His treatment in jail has been worse than that of the January 6 rioters, warned Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who oversaw many of their cases.

“The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the [Central Treatment Facility],” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history.… He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.

“He can be both kept safe and treated with dignity. Right now, it’s not working. I think it’s legally deficient and ultimately if the DOC can’t do it, I’ll speak to the U.S. attorney’s office,” Faruqui continued. “I know they have other facilities they can contract with. If you all cannot handle it, we’re going to have to reassess that with the marshals and the Department of Justice.”

Insecurity about the midterms is rising—and Republicans are shoving some of the blame onto House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Concern is spreading that Johnson has “lost control of his conference,” creating an environment that is unlikely to pass meaningful legislation before the November elections, The Hill reported Monday.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer warned that the caucus’s relentless infighting has hurt the GOP brand, potentially sinking both chambers of Congress.

“It’s not like these things are hard. That’s the thing,” Cramer told The Hill. “I feel like the Senate has teed up things fairly easily for them, even to the point where if they don’t like it, they can blame us. And they still haven’t taken the opportunity to actually govern, and I do think it’s hurting the brand. The House is rowdy.”

Johnson barely kept the party afloat last week amid what Texas Representative Troy Nehls aptly dubbed “hell week.” “We can’t really agree on much of anything,” Nehls said on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Republicans in the lower chamber struggled to tackle high-priority GOP issues such as extending the government’s warrantless spying powers, passing the farm bill, and funding the Department of Homeland Security. Votes stretched on for hours, and committee hearings flew off the rails. But the squabbles—and the dissent—persisted.

“We’re moving from one fire drill to the next every single week, and then half the time it feels like, why are we even here?” one House Republican told MS NOW on Friday.

Some of the bluster followed weeks of intraparty protests, in which members of the House GOP adamantly opposed bills introduced and passed by their Senate colleagues. Yet House Republicans were all too willing to bend as the clock ticked down to deadline on various policy issues, prompting scorn and criticism from the upper chamber.

“It’s like a wreck over there,” one Republican senator told The Hill on the condition of anonymity, noting that their mainstream GOP colleagues in the House shared their frustration.

“They don’t know if they’re coming or going. Everybody is fighting,” the senator said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has tapped a top New York Democrat to lead redistricting efforts in the state after the Supreme Court handed the Republican Party a major advantage for the upcoming midterms.

Jeffries directed Representative Joe Morelle, the former majority leader in the New York state assembly, to meet with state leaders in order to redraw congressional districts “for the balance of the decade,” the two said in a joint statement Monday. New York currently has 19 Democrats and seven Republicans in the House of Representatives.

This directive comes less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 along party lines in Louisiana v. Callais to effectively dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. The court’s conservative majority raised new hurdles for those seeking to prove a racial gerrymandering claim, and gave its blessing to those who would claim partisan gerrymandering as a legal defense.

Within hours of the decision, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had already signaled that she supported a redistricting effort in her state. “The Supreme Court has been chipping away at our elections for years. It is clearly carrying out Donald Trump’s will with this decision,” she wrote on X Wednesday. “New York has always led the fight for voting rights and we’ll lead again. I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy.”

Jeffries’s order was also given in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implementing a map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his state’s new gerrymandered congressional map official Monday.

DeSantis signed the map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections, hoping to prevent GOP losses as President Trump’s unpopularity continues to grow.

“Signed, Sealed, and Delivered,” DeSantis posted on X shortly after noon Monday, along with a map of the state’s new districts.

The move occurred without a flashy signing ceremony or press conference, less than a week after Florida’s legislature signed the map into law. That vote took place just hours after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now seats belonging to Democratic Representatives Kathy Castor, Jared Moskowitz, Darren Soto, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are at risk.

The move is already being challenged in court, with a lawsuit filed less than 90 minutes after DeSantis’s post. Florida’s Constitution bans drawing districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent,” and last week, Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell called out the DeSantis staffer who drew the map, Jason Poreda.

“The man who drew this map testified under oath that he used partisan data to draw up every single district,” Driskell said. “Every single one. And when the governor’s attorney was asked whether Democratic voters were being underrepresented in our congressional delegation, his answer was that ‘this is a normative question.’”

The map, if it stands, could backfire in an election year where Trump is dragging Republican poll numbers historically low, as the new districts aren’t considered entirely safe for the GOP. Florida’s new maps, along with efforts in Republican-led states around the country, were actually spurred by Trump last year, and have set off Democratic redistricting in states like California and Virginia; others could soon join in.

The war on Iran is very much back on, and President Trump is making more genocidal threats.

Iran on Monday bombed a South Korean ship and civilian sites in the United Arab Emirates, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that the United States would be using its Navy to force ships through Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as part of “Project Freedom.” The U.S. military also stated that it sank six Iranian small boats and that Iran has fired missiles and drones at other vessels in the strait.

This has sent the president into a rage.

If the Iranians try to target U.S. ships in this area, they will be “blown off the face of the earth,” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Monday afternoon.

“We have more weapons and ammunition at a much higher grade than we had before,” he warned.

Iran’s attack on the UAE is the first since the ceasefire was declared one month ago, as escalating tensions threaten to once again reignite a wider conflict in the region.

It’s clear Trump’s plan to take control of the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t well thought out. Did Trump really expect the Iranian government to just cave to his demands?

On Monday afternoon, shortly after begging South Korea to join the war following the attack on its ship, the president announced  that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine will hold a press conference Tuesday morning.

The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.

The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.

In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.”

“At this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.

The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district.

The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 write-up in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.

Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.

Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.

The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.

Donald Trump is lying about the U.S. military’s escalating extrajudicial strikes on vessels in the Caribbean, according to a sweeping report from The Intercept published Monday.

In late January, Trump claimed to reporters in the Oval Office that the Pentagon’s deadly strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs from South America to the United States had successfully brought down the amount of “drugs entering our country by sea” by 97 percent.

But the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this outrageous claim, Rear Admiral William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, told The Intercept.

“He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” Baumgartner said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.”

In March, Joseph Humire, a Pentagon official, told the House Armed Services Committee that there had been only a “20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.” Humire also credited Operation Southern Spear with causing a 20 percent drop in drug overdose deaths as of September 2025—but the strikes on so-called drug boats didn’t start until September.

“I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept.

As the White House has continued to espouse the strikes’ value as a deterrent against trafficking, there is little evidence that vessels are actually being deterred. Last month, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, with five strikes occurring within as many days, according to The Intercept.

Last month, the Coast Guard boasted a record-setting interdiction of cocaine seized in the Caribbean and the Pacific, suggesting that trafficking has not stopped.

Baumgartner pointed to a recent offloading of 1.2 tons of cocaine by the U.S. Coast Guard, which claimed the haul was worth $19.3 million altogether. “This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner said.

It’s also worth noting that the House Armed Services Committee was explicitly told that vessels were not actually transporting fentanyl, according to Representative Sara Jacobs and five other government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

“They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” Jacobs told the outlet, before pointing out that statistics suggest that 99 percent of the drugs that enter the United States come through legal ports of entry, brought by U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

Baumgartner also easily dismantled Trump’s outrageous claim about how many lives he’s saved: about 25,000 per boat, the president claimed.

“The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”

President Trump is directly ordering Senate Republicans to attempt to turn embattled Democratic Senator John Fetterman to their side to ensure that they maintain their slim Senate majority.

Politico has reported that if Fetterman does turn Republican, it will be because of Trump’s lobbying, the endorsement and “financial windfall” he’s apparently being promised, and the influence of Republican Senators Dave McCormick and Katie Britt, whom he is close with. One anonymous source claimed that Fetterman was open to the idea of switching sides.

Fox News host Sean Hannity gave up the game to Fetterman while he interviewed the Democrat on his show in March.

“I did talk to President Trump last night, and I told him you were gonna be on the show,” Hannity told Fetterman. “And he said ‘OK. I wanna give you a job. Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna be run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’”

But Fetterman says he remains steadfast in his commitment to the Democratic Party—at least publicly.

“I’m not changing,” he told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.... I’d be a shitty Republican.”

Some would say Fetterman has been a pretty shitty Democrat too, fueling this Republican effort to get him to switch sides.

Since first running for office as a Bernie Sanders–backed progressive eight years ago, and keeping up the facade in his 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman has gone out of his way to offer rhetorical and legislative support for President Trump’s agenda while spiting the left flank that helped him secure his Senate seat. He was the very first Senate Democrat to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has defended the actions of federal immigration agents, saying that any calls to abolish ICE were “inappropriate and outrageous.” He is the only Democrat who voted against curtailing Trump’s war powers in Iran, and he is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel in the Senate. In one conversation last year, he reportedly proclaimed, “Let’s get back to killing,” referring to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “Kill them all.” Fetterman later denied the account.

Earlier this month, not a single one of his Pennsylvania House counterparts could offer a vote of confidence for his 2028 reelection when asked by Punchbowl News. These admissions, while unsurprising, add yet another layer of contention to Fetterman’s relationship to his own party.

These positions aren’t just unpopular among the Democrats rebuking him, they’re unpopular throughout the entire state. Last month, CNN polling showed that Fetterman’s net approval rating with state Democrats has plummeted a ghastly 108 points since he took office, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026. “He’s down there with the Titanic,” CNN’s Harry Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”

With all this in mind, it seems only natural that Trump is now actively courting the man he calls his “favorite Democrat.”