Pete Hegseth May Get Impeached Before Dems Even Take Over Congress

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t need a blue wave to knock him out of office—Republicans are already pissed enough on their own. 

Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie told CNN Wednesday that he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns next week. Multiple GOP sources said they expect the measure to pass. 

Massie introduced his impeachment articles in mid-September as a privileged resolution, requiring the House to vote on it within two days. House Speaker Mike Johnson called an early campaign-season recess in order to kill the measure, but Massie told a reporter that he’d take up the effort after the midterm elections. 

Following previous reporting that Donald Trump intended to oust Hegseth as the fall guy for the Republicans disastrous midterm elections, the president told ABC News Thursday that he had “every intention to keep him.”

Massie had his own response. “If Trump’s going to replace appointees like Hegseth, he should do it while he can still get the replacements confirmed in the Senate,” he wrote on X Thursday.  “Also, my Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what’s coming when Dem’s control Congress. They’ll have hearings & trials.”

The previous evening, Massie had warned, “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns.” 

While House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has suggested that Democrats are not interested in “getting even” with Republicans, he indicated Thursday that the Defense secretary would be a potential target when he became House Speaker. 

“Why is Pete Hegseth still around?” Jeffries wrote on X. 

Donald Trump is trying to rig another election.

The president suggested making an eyebrow-raising change to the Alaska Senate race, writing on Truth Social on Thursday that the votes cast for independent candidate Dan J. Sullivan Jr. should be tacked on to the vote count for incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan.

“The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over—He easily wins,” Trump wrote. “There is no other fair solution!”

Sullivan is currently neck and neck in the Alaska race with his Democratic opponent, Mary Peltola. As of the time of publication, Peltola has 48.17 percent of the vote, while Sullivan has 47.88 percent. Sullivan Jr., meanwhile, has 1.68 percent of the vote. Combining the results for the two Sullivans would squeeze the Republican ahead of Peltola, though actually doing so would violate the law.

Alaska is still tabulating its votes, however: Just 74 percent of the Last Frontier has reported its Election Day results. The state also uses ranked-choice voting, meaning it could take longer to count the rankings, as well.

Whether Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher, decided to enter the midterms by his own accord is currently in doubt. The New York Times reported last week that he was recruited by individuals connected to Peltola’s campaign. On Saturday, CBS News reported that the political independent had left his hometown and flown to Anchorage. In his own words, Sullivan wrote on Facebook in June that he entered this race because he was “unhappy with the 12 year record of the current Senator” and felt that “we need a change.”

“It’s that simple,” he said.

Republicans didn’t buy it. Party leaders have since accused Democrats of election fraud and of attempting to brew confusion about the ballot ahead of Election Day. Alaskans, in turn, have argued that they’re not confused by the situation at all. One Anchorage resident told CNN last week that the controversy had not shaken his vote, informing the network that you can “absolutely” tell who’s who on the ballot.

“And I don’t even have my glasses on,” he quipped. “It’s pretty clear. It’s in black and white.”

But the Trump administration is still trying to change the record. In other panicked missives, Trump has called for criminal prosecution of Peltola, and directed the Justice Department to sue Alaska and its election officials in a flagrant attempt to block the certification of the vote if the Republican Sullivan loses. The DOJ has already issued letters to a number of prominent Democrats informing them that they may be targets of a federal investigation.

Democrat James Talarico didn’t just win big in Texas’s Senate race—he won before Election Day.

According to data from the Texas secretary of state’s office, Talarico got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall. While the election results have not been certified by the state of Texas yet, all 5,303 polling locations and 254 counties in the state were reporting results, according to the secretary of state’s website.

The total margin of victory stands at 55 percent for Talarico versus 43 percent for Paxton, greater than the 50–43 margin the last poll predicted before the election. Texas has a 12-day early voting period, and it shattered its own turnout records, with 7.4 million Texans voting during that time.

Talarico’s win was already historic, as he is the first Democrat elected to represent Texas in the Senate since 1988, when then-incumbent Lloyd Bentsen won reelection. But a win by 12 percentage points, in a state Trump won by 13.7 percentage points in 2024, shows just how unpopular Republicans were in these midterms.

And Talarico was not the only Democrat to win in Texas: The party swept every statewide race, is on track to take over the state House, and flipped all four of the state Supreme Court seats that were on the ballot. Texans not only followed the rest of the country in punishing Republicans during these midterms, but they came out in large numbers early, and upended decades of GOP dominance.

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the oldest person in Congress at 93 years old, will not be retiring early—meaning newly elected Democratic Governor Rob Sand will choose his successor in the event that he passes away.

“Sen. Grassley is not resigning,” a Grassley spokesperson told the Washington Examiner, rejecting the idea that Grassley would step down before the year’s end to allow outgoing Governor Kim Reynolds to appoint a fellow Republican in his place. “He remains committed to delivering for the people of Iowa, who overwhelmingly elected him to a six-year term in 2022.”

Back in September, Grassley expressed concerns about what a Democratic governor in Iowa would mean. “One of the reasons I’m worried about who’s going to be elected governor—I don’t plan on dying in office, but if I did, I don’t want a Democrat governor choosing my successor,” Grassley said.

Now, that’s exactly what will happen if he does pass, an event that is not unlikely given his age. Grassley is up for reelection in 2028, meaning if he dies in the next two years, there’s no way a Republican senator takes his place. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats already have a 10-seat majority in the Senate.

Sand in September said that he’s open to appointing an independent in Grassley’s place if he does die, but we’ll have to wait and see if he stays true to that, given that his comment came well before Democrats took back the Senate so resoundingly. Democrats also won three of Iowa’s four House seats.

Regardless of Grassley’s politics, he is the primary example of the gerontocracy that plagues Congress, particularly in the Senate. A 93-year-old should be spending their time with their family and friends, ruminating on the long life they’ve been blessed to live. Instead, Grassley is letting his own ego and interests fuel him, and it’s placed the Senate in a precarious position for Republicans in the event of his passing—especially given the state’s new Democratic governor.

Donald Trump really didn’t care about the midterms. Then he panicked.

The president’s mood and regard for the consequential elections fluctuated rapidly in the months preceding them, according to a senior administration official that spoke with The Wall Street Journal. All too frequently, Trump placed his ego above the interests of the American public, apparently convinced that his foreign policy and legacy would ultimately matter more than domestic issues.

Trump was obstinate when faced with the facts. When aides shared his negative polling numbers throughout the spring and summer, highlighting the affordability issues sparked by the Iran war, Trump pushed back by claiming the polling was fake, the official told the Journal.

But toward the end of summer, Trump suddenly switched his tune, The New York Times reported. “We’ve gotta win. Anything we gotta do,” he privately told advisers, according to the outlet.

But when he finally decided to invest in the midterm races, Trump favored GOP candidates that he believed would be loyal to him, even if they faced more dire political odds.

Trump-endorsed candidates lost just about everywhere. Senator Susan Collins lost Maine, and Senator Darline Graham lost South Carolina. Former RNCC Chair Michael Whatley couldn’t break through in North Carolina, and Representative Mike Collins fell flat in Georgia. The GOP even lost Texas, which turned away from Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton in favor of Democratic alternatives.

Voters in Ohio were repulsed by an ad produced by biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who tapped his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother to bad-mouth her, even though she abandoned her daughter when Acton was just 12 years old.

The president’s understanding of American priorities at times seemed so far removed from reality that it bordered on the absurd. At one point, Trump reportedly told his advisers that he believed his ceaseless commentary about Ohio Senator Jon Husted’s ass was making Husted more “interesting” to Ohio voters. But it did not. Instead, Husted lost by a margin of nearly five percentage points on Tuesday.

“It really didn’t have to be this way,” Representative Ralph Norman, who lost the South Carolinian GOP nomination to Graham, told the Journal. “Pride goeth before the fall. It’s going to be a wake-up call for the Republican Party.”

By the end of September, diesel prices had hit a record high, and Democrats seized on the opportunity to target historically deep-red districts. A pollster remarked on a Republican call that “people will mark the last week of September as the week the bottom fell out,” according to the Journal.

But Trump’s mind was elsewhere, unable to comprehend the national blowback to the rising cost of living. He’d call Senate Majority Leader John Thune to talk about killing the filibuster or attempting to choke voting efforts via the Save America Act. Thune would try to bring up affordability, but he couldn’t get through, the Journal reported.