Republicans Turn on JD Vance for 2028 After Election Bloodbath

Republicans are already turning on Vice President JD Vance’s nascent presidential run, in favor of candidates from the Sunshine State.

As Election Day results rolled in last week, Vance received a text from one of his confidants advising him to consider sitting out of the next presidential race, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Within 24 hours of polls closing, one veteran New York fundraiser started to field calls from deep-pocketed donors who expressed concerns that they couldn’t possibly back Vance in 2028. A candidate sourced from within the Trump administration was too big a liability considering the sweeping rebuke of the president they’d just witnessed.

Vance has been desperate to paint Republican losses as the result of the war in Iran, and not Trump. But there’s enough evidence that Vance has become tainted by association. The vice president couldn’t even keep the GOP candidates in his home state of Ohio, let alone mount a national campaign, the fundraiser said. Other donors privately expressed similar concerns. Even Donald Trump appeared to be growing frustrated with Vance, telling reporters Sunday night that “a lot of people didn’t like his comments” about the effect of the Iran war.

“Not me,” Trump hastened to add.

Instead, Republican operatives are now looking to candidates from the lone red-wall state where the national blue wave didn’t reach: Florida. In the Sunshine State, there was less Republican participation overall, but GOP candidates still managed to hold onto the major seats of power.

Now, GOP operatives are looking to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take up the baton, Axios reported Sunday.

As Vance received a clear message urging him to stand down in 2028, Rubio’s phone “blew up” with messages saying the exact opposite, one source familiar with the scene told Axios.

“There was this sense of ‘We lost the Latino vote, you can get it back, etc,’” the source said. “To some people, Rubio seemed to entertain the idea for the first time. Or he didn’t shut it down fast enough.”

Last week, multiple outlets reported that Rubio intended to step down to start mounting his own presidential campaign, but the secretary denied planning any such thing.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has already clearly positioned himself for a presidential run in 2028, Axios reported.

President Donald Trump scurried away from reporters Friday who asked about his new loser status.

Trump had an awkward interaction with reporters outside the White House after they asked him to explain his decision to replace chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller.

“I wanted to make a change,” Trump said. The president had previously dismissed reporting that he was planning to oust his “ice maiden”—but that was before Republicans suffered staggering losses in the midterm elections this week.

“We gotta make moves, sometimes in life you gotta make moves,” Trump said.

“We’ve beaten Iran. We are doing very well with Iran, we are talking to Iran, we have been. We haven’t lost a soldier in seven months, or six months,” Trump said.

In July, just four months ago, Trump attended a funeral for four U.S. service members who were killed in Iranian attacks in the Middle East, amid reports accusing the Trump administration of hiding casualty numbers. As of October, 23 soldiers had died as a result of Trump’s disastrous military campaign.

Trump quickly departed from the press gaggle, as one reporter shouted after him, “How does it feel to lose?” The president continued to flee and did not respond.

When in doubt, call them a terrorist. The White House is tapping into its standby strategy in its latest attempt to cripple nonprofits.

Donald Trump is weighing an executive order that would brand some nonprofits as having terrorist ties, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. In doing so, the executive order would nix the organizations’ nonprofit status and fundamentally unravel their operations.

Sources familiar with the matter told the Journal that the executive order has been in the works for months and is not yet finished. It remains to be seen if Trump signs the effort or scraps it altogether.

It was not immediately clear which groups could be targeted, though the dangerous label could offer a much more immediate route for the administration to penalize its perceived political opponents than by pursuing potential legal violations through the IRS.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted that such an effort was underway while speaking before the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in mid-July.

“We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, which charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign-influence activity, and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence,” Bessent said at the time. “Where the evidence leads, we will not hesitate to follow.”

Nine organizations have already been identified as having terrorist ties, though those designations came from federal agencies such as the Treasury Department, as opposed to from the White House, according to the Journal.

But there have been numerous other occasions in which Trump and his allies have baselessly resorted to the “T-word” to advance their agenda. Earlier this year, officials across the Trump administration branded Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as terrorists in order to brush their deaths at the hands of federal agents under the rug. And even in the most recent election cycle, Republicans resorted to slandering Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed as terrorists in futile attempts to discredit their authority and undermine their influence.

Days after defeating Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan’s Senate election—overcoming $38 million in American Israel Public Affairs Committee funds, a tidal wave of bigotry and Islamophobia, and an eleventh-hour betrayal by Democratic Representative Haley Stevens—Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has launched the “Habibi PAC.”

A Federal Election Commission filing shows that the first Muslim to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate made the PAC official on Thursday. The leadership PAC is not connected to his campaign and will allow him to raise money for other candidates, perhaps a sign of greater political ambitions.

Habibi, meaning “my beloved” in Arabic, is a term of endearment that El-Sayed has used often during his campaign, even using it to refer to Vice President JD Vance in his victory speech early Wednesday morning.

“JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” El-Sayed said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators determined that failing medical care preceded the deaths of 23 immigrants in detention.

The San Francisco Chronicle obtained internal reports on the deaths of 29 immigrant detainees who died between January 2025 and January 2026. In the 29 cases the Chronicle reviewed, 23 immigrants died after receiving medical care the agency itself found was deficient.

ICE investigators determined that detention staff “deviated from safe limits of practice,” or “did not provide medical care within safe limits of practice” for the 23 detainees.

In at least eight of the cases, medical staff failed to perform CPR correctly, or at all. In only three of the cases, investigators determined that the deficient medical care did not directly contribute to the person’s death.

The agency continues to insist that there has been no spike in detainee deaths, though 2025 saw the most immigrant detainee deaths since 2003. So far in 2026, 31 immigrants have died in ICE detention.

During President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, and insufficient food and water.

In many cases, immigrants report having been denied adequate medical care. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff released a report in October 2025 documenting at least “85 credible reports of medical neglect” at U.S. detention centers. In January, ICE announced that it had stopped paying for immigrant detainees to receive health care—and wasn’t planning on paying again for months.

For the Trump administration, the cruelty is part of the point. The Department of Homeland Security even rejected plans to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane.