“Why Bother?”: No One Is Even Trying to Rein Trump in Anymore

America has a runaway president, and no one on his team is willing to rein him in.

White House officials and elected Republicans have abandoned their attempts to sway Donald Trump’s opinion, finding it futile to push back on the president’s demands, Axios reported Wednesday.

Despite a growing distrust of the president’s instincts, Trump’s inner circle has found it increasingly difficult to change his mind once it’s made up, according to numerous aides, advisers, and donors that spoke with Axios.

“Why bother?” one longtime adviser told the outlet. “He’s the boss.”

The Republican Party has repeatedly caved to Trump’s whims since 2016, allowing him to meander through his second term without the threat of consequence or even a second opinion. As a result, Trump thrust America into war with Iran without any clear goals, aggravated some of America’s longest allies—notably Canada—by shitposting online, incensed the public by tearing down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, and effectively made an already contentious midterm cycle a referendum on his popularity.

“He’s an 80-year-old man who did it his way,” a donor who recently met with the president told Axios. “What he wants, he gets.”

Part of the determination to stay in the president’s good graces stems from Trump’s enormous political clout—a reality that many in his orbit claim is unlikely to expire anytime soon.

“Discount Trump at your peril,” a top adviser told Axios. “He wields enormous power in the party, in politics and culturally.”

“Anyone who thinks he’s going to retreat into the shadows is either stupid or has bad political instincts,” they added.

Insiders are apparently planning to live and die by Trump, even if that means allowing him to run roughshod over the country’s better interests.

“He’s going to remain the dominant political figure even after his term ends,” the adviser told Axios. “And everybody knows it.”

President Trump is trying once again to skirt the Constitution and mess with the U.S. census.

The White House is proposing changes to the 2030 census that would exclude every non–U.S. citizen without permanent residency, flouting the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which states that the census must count the “whole number of persons in each state.” The proposal, released online Wednesday, also seeks to stop asking about race and ethnicity, which has been included in every census since 1790, and ban any future questions on sexual orientation.

If Trump’s current effort survives court challenges, it will affect congressional redistricting, which is already being manipulated by Republican-led states thanks to the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. It could also affect antidiscrimination efforts and laws by preventing the collection of relevant statistics.

During Trump’s previous term as president, his administration attempted to include a question about citizenship status, only to abandon the effort after being blocked by the Supreme Court. Trump also attempted to exclude all undocumented immigrants from the count with a July 2020 executive order. A federal court in California ruled against the order, and the census results weren’t completed before Trump left office, after which President Biden repealed those changes.

But Trump clearly didn’t give up on the plan. The administration is supposed to send a report to Congress, which has final approval over the census per the Constitution, by April 1, on its proposed questions for the survey. Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have proposed similar changes to the census themselves to support their gerrymandering efforts.

All of this could hurt participation in the census even if Trump’s changes don’t go through, as respondents would be suspicious of what the federal government plans to do with the data. That could lead to inaccurate results and hurt communities across the country. These days, the White House is trying to use every tool at its disposal to manipulate elections or serve its mass deportation agenda, regardless of what the Constitution or federal law says.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a Somali immigrant in St. Paul, Minnesota, and sent him to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Adam Abdullah told Minnesota Public Radio over the phone Tuesday that he was a legal resident when federal agents stopped his car last December, at the beginning of the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge immigration crackdown in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

“When they come to me, and I ask them why you pulled me over, they say, ‘We are immigration, so give me your work permit,’” Abdullah, 31, said. “And I asked them, ‘Do you have a warrant, and what’s the reason to pull me over?’ And they say, ‘We don’t need a warrant; we are immigration, and we know you are Adam Abdullah.”

Abdullah was only given 10 minutes to speak to MPR on the phone, but managed to tell the station that the agents didn’t explain why he, an asylum-seeker with a work permit and Social Security number who regularly checked in with ICE, was targeted. The auto mechanic arrived in the U.S. in 2023. After being arrested by ICE last year, he was initially held at the Freeborn County Jail in Albert Lea, Minnesota, before being moved to detention centers in Kentucky and then Louisiana.

Eventually, immigration officers told Abdullah they would send him back to Somalia via Miami. But in Miami, he said he was told that his flight would stop in Cuba for refueling before stopping in other countries on the way to Somalia. But he never made it to Africa at all; the stop in Cuba was permanent. Abdullah also reported that his wrists and ankles were shackled through every flight.

Abdullah told MPR that he’s been at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Six for about two weeks, with limits on phone calls and exercise time. He said he’s learned that he’s one of eight Somalis at the prison, several of whom were arrested in the Twin Cities.

“Calls are limited to five to 10 minutes, and we don’t even know if they’re confidential,” said his immigration attorney, Marc Prokosch, who noted that Abdullah is his first client to be held in Guantánamo. “And that’s the only way that we can communicate with our clients is through these phone calls that may or may not be under attorney-client confidentiality.”

Trump signed an executive order last year to send immigration detainees to Guantánamo Bay, and promised to send 30,000 immigrants there during his 2024 presidential campaign. As of May, reports indicated that there were only six immigrants detained there, all from Haiti, although Abdullah’s interview suggested that more have arrived in the last few months from different countries.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to stop the Trump administration from sending immigrants to the prison, and a hearing is scheduled for October. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to MPR that a recent flight to Cuba contained “some of the worst of the worst” “criminal illegal aliens.”

Canada is making sure Americans feel the consequences of President Trump’s trade war by focusing its tariffs on states where Republicans may lose a midterm election.

In Ohio, where Republican Senator Jon Husted and former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown are locked in a tight battle, Canadian tariffs are particularly important, as Canada is the largest export market for the entire state—buying $17.5 billion in U.S. products, primarily automobiles and machinery (which are now sanctioned). And while Husted, like most Republicans, has attempted to justify his support for Trump’s initial tariffs, this recent escalation has made that stance much harder to take.

“It depends on how it ends,” Husted said. “If we get a good deal, both Canada and America can come out of this well, but it’s going to require both sides.”

Maine is bracing for impact just as hard, as Canada placed a 50 percent tariff on wood and agriculture products, a massive export from the border state. It’s also where Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson are expected to have a close race. While both have criticized the trade war, Jackson is blaming Collins for not doing more to fight it.

“Retaliatory tariffs hitting today are going to drive up costs for everyday Mainers,” he wrote on Tuesday. “This trade war was entirely preventable, but Susan Collins chose to back Trump’s agenda instead of standing up for Maine’s working class. This November, we’ll put working families first and retire Susan Collins.”

In Kansas, things look a little different, with Trump directly putting his own party at risk. The president’s Labor Day threat to end sales of Canadian airplane manufacturer Bombardier will likely have a negative impact on Kansas, where the company’s U.S. headquarters are located. It employs over 1,000 Kansans, and has been defended by GOPers and Democrats alike. But that will be a harder sell for Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates Ty Masterson and Senator Roger Marshall given that their party leader is responsible for creating the problem.

“Bombardier supports 1,500 Kansas families, providing good-paying jobs that put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads during a cost of living crisis caused by Washington. And now, the president is trying to take that away,” Democratic Senate candidate Adam Marshall wrote on Monday. “The decision to ban Bombardier from selling in the U.S. is a direct attack on Kansas workers and Kansas jobs—yet Roger Marshall is notably silent. We cannot allow this chaotic economic policy to continue to hurt Kansans; they deserve so much better. As your Senator, I will always stand up for Kansas workers.”

“I’m going to fight to keep Bombardier’s over 1,200 Kansas jobs. I’ve already taken that concern inside the Oval Office,” Marshall wrote on Tuesday without naming Trump. “We agree on the mission: bring more good-paying manufacturing jobs back to Wichita. America buys more than half of what Bombardier sells. If that’s the market, more of those planes should be built here. Wichita has one of the nation’s top skilled manufacturing workforces and is a leader in aerospace manufacturing.”

Trump’s personal spite toward Canada has spiraled into an issue that millions of Americans will now have to deal with. Now the downballot Republicans—already struggling to campaign against his abysmal 38 percent approval rating—will have to deal with it too.

MAGA voters have turned on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh amid Missouri’s congressional map bedlam.

Far-right influencers took to social media Tuesday after Kavanaugh declined to intervene in favor of the pro-Republican map swap, excoriating the Trump-appointed high judge for effectively deflating the president’s midterm plan.

Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vax activist and “doctor,” circulated Kavanaugh’s headshot on X in the wake of his decision, declaring that “Brett Kavanaugh is a TRAITOR.”

Pro-Trump pundit Eric Daugherty referred to Kavanaugh’s decision as “SERIOUSLY disappointing,” claiming on X that this is “why states like Indiana should’ve redrawn.” SteveLovesAmmo, a self-described “Freedom Aficionado,” said that Kavanaugh’s description illustrated how “SCOTUS is severely compromised.”

The drama began last summer, when Donald Trump ordered several Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in a brazen attempt to create a GOP advantage in the House of Representatives come midterms.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. Yet Trump’s order arrived in the middle of the decade, raising alarms that the nationwide effort was an attempt to undermine American democracy.

Republicans wasted no time implementing the directive in Missouri, where they cleaved portions off of the state’s Democratic stronghold around Kansas City to endanger Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. The new map offered Republicans a 7–1 advantage, a one-seat gain over their current 6–2 delegation.

A group called People Not Politicians collected more than 300,000 signatures in opposition to the new map—more than double the amount required—to force a statewide referendum on the matter, which is due to take place on November 3 on the statewide ballot.

Nonetheless, Missouri opted to use the new maps during its August 4 primary. But this week, things got especially messy.

A federal judge decided on Tuesday that the state should not use the original maps during the November election, in light of its decision to move forward with the new maps last month. But the judge’s decision was in direct conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court, which had decided moments earlier that a previous decision from the Missouri Supreme Court should stand, ordering the old map to be used rather than the new ones.