Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims
“The Trump administration is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the 2026 election. At the center of the effort is President Trump himself. In a Monday appearance on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump said: ‘Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there. I won the state three times, but I got no credit for it. I won that state three times but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft.’ The Democratic presidential candidate won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which he continues to make repeatedly, have been exhaustively debunked.” (02/03/26)
“Trump and his top officials’ blame-the-gun comments certainly risk backlash from a key Republican constituency, but they also put the gun-rights movement in a no-win position. The heel-turn was foreseeable since this isn’t the first time Trump has proved unreliable on guns. Trump backed the idea of stricter gun laws three times during his first term.” 902/03/26)
“Shifting justifications for a war are never a good sign, and they strongly suggest that the war in question was not warranted. In the Vietnam War, the principal public rationale of saving South Vietnam from communism got replaced in the minds of the warmakers — especially after losing hope of winning the contest in Vietnam — by the belief that the United States had to keep fighting to preserve its credibility. In the Iraq War, when President George W. Bush’s prewar argument about weapons of mass destruction fell apart, he shifted to a rationale centered on bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Now, with President Donald Trump threatening a new armed attack on Iran amid a buildup of U.S. forces in the region, the Washington Post’s headline writers aptly describe the rationale for any such attack as being ‘in flux’ and, for the online version of the same article, ask, ‘what’s the mission?'” (02/03/26)
“The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents. Authoritarian rule, would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. … But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.” (02/03/26)
“Politicians generally don’t like citizens creating laws any more than they like citizens limiting their terms in office. It really cramps their style.” (02/03/26)
“The pattern is all too clear by now. When Trump hits a stone wall, his strategy invariably is to backpedal tactically and change the subject to create new headlines and sometimes new crises. Often, the new subject is merely a ludicrous diversion. Other times, he is playing with fire. Are the ICE raids creating ‘a moral and political debacle’ for the administration, as Trump’s usual allies on The Wall Street Journal editorial page delicately put it? Then let’s lower the temperature, bring in new leadership, begin prolonged negotiations to get the pictures off TV, and get tongues wagging about other stories. How about a two-year closing of the Kennedy Center that every self-respecting artist is boycotting, for ‘repairs’ that were never needed before? Or a new Trumpian Arc de Triomphe, bigger than the one in Paris? Most serious people get that this stuff is a silly distraction. And then there is Iran.” (02/03/25)
“Progressive discourse has become highly adept at identifying oppression, exclusion, and harm. But it is far less capable of understanding the basic conditions of political order.” (02/03/26)
“Taylor Rehmet, a 33-year-old Lockheed Martin machinist and president of the Texas chapter of the international machinist union, in a Saturday special election, flipped a Republican-held state Senate seat in the suburbs of Fort Worth. The neophyte Democratic candidate won a district by 14 points, while Donald Trump carried it by 17 points. While the 31-point swing is particularly wide, Democrats have consistently outperformed in state legislative special elections throughout Trump’s second term. Therefore, Rehmet’s triumph is no fluke, and more than a mere extension of a trend, perhaps, an acceleration. Of course, we must always be careful not to overinterpret a single data point. But some lessons can be reasonably drawn from Rehmet’s shocking upset.” (02/03/26)
