Donald Trump

Nate Silver says Donald Trump's approval in the second term tracks gas prices. It moves with prices and with economic anxiety, it dropped sharply around Liberation Day in April 2025 when tariffs scared people, and the rest of the fall has been fairly steady. Trump is 80, and he has been the central figure in American politics since the middle of 2015, so fatigue is part of the decline too.

That decline is why the Senate is in play. Ezra Klein said Democrats would not be favored to win the Senate if Trump had not gone to war with Iran and pushed gasoline into the mid-$4 range, higher in California. In the first term, a good economy worked as a halo. Paychecks, jobs, a rising stock market, an

Nate Silver says Republicans lose the elections where Donald Trump is the dominant figure but is not himself on the ballot. Trump can get disengaged voters to crawl over glass for him, and those same voters will not do that for Roger Marshall or Ken Paxton. The pattern runs through 2018, the Georgia runoffs, special elections, and 2022, when something kept Joe Biden from the wipeout a weak approval rating would usually bring.

Trump has not cleared that problem away. Ezra Klein noted that Trump could have ended the Texas primary and left John Cornyn the nominee, which would have put Republicans in a stronger position and made a Senate loss less likely. Trump's account of a midterm defeat is

Nate Silver says midterm polls have not consistently underestimated Donald Trump. The misses people remember are the presidential years, 2016, 2020, and 2024, when the polls were low on Trump and Democrats were left thinking of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The two Trump-era midterms went the other way. 2018 was one of the most accurate polling years on record, and 2022 was accurate too.

A shared error can still decide the Senate. Ask what happens if the Senate polls are off by three or four points in the same direction in every race. Democrats hold a lot of leads of about three points, including in Ohio and Texas, and a miss of that size could leave the majority waiting on ranked-choice v

Nate Silver says the Senate map opened because the story after 2024 was wrong, not because midterms stopped punishing the president's party. The steadiest pattern in American elections is a backlash against that party, a little larger in a lame-duck term. An average midterm moves the country about seven and a half points against the president's party from the previous presidential year. This year looks closer to an 11-point shift. Donald Trump won Ohio by about 11 points, and he won a run of these states by 10 to 13, so a shift of that size makes Ohio a toss-up.

Candidate quality moves less than the national swing, about five points at most. Roy Cooper is a strong Democratic recruit in Nort

Nate Silver says this midterm feels momentous because a result in line with the polls would mark the end of the Trump era. Donald Trump would still have two years left as president, but the 2028 campaign would start the night the votes were counted, and a bad night would make him a super lame duck, the way Bush was after 2006.

What makes that hard to accept is the map. Kansas and Texas look competitive, which would be Democratic gains deep in Republican territory and would feel like a different regime. Generational turnover, Trump being three quarters of the way through the two terms the Constitution allows, and AI all sit in the same shift. AI may already matter more in this election than

Nate Silver's gut on the midterms is contradictory. Fundamental conditions feel terrible for Republicans, and if the year is worse for them than 2018, Democrats win the House popular vote by 10 or 11 points. He worries more that state polls are wrong than that the national race is miscalibrated.

Before the 2024 election his model had Kamala Harris winning and his gut had Donald Trump winning. In 2024 he listed 21 reasons the political environment favored Donald Trump and only four or five reasons it favored Harris. The midterm year reverses the balance. Republicans have a second-term 80-year-old president who had a bad midterm in 2018, when he was younger, more popular, and the economy was

Scott Galloway calls Elon Musk a traitor to the West. He says a democracy let an unelected person decide geopolitical strategy and battlefield technology that threatens the West, and he describes Musk as someone who sleeps with a loaded gun beside the bed and is addicted to ketamine.

Ed Elson lays out the episode Scott Galloway is pointing at. Drones in Ukraine that rely on Starlink and Starshield, both SpaceX products, started falling because Starlink was turned off, and reports, including the Wall Street Journal, say Elon Musk did it. Musk's account, Ed Elson says, is that the decision belongs to the government, and Donald Trump said he was not responsible. Ed Elson adds that Musk has not

Michael Lewis says the people Elon Musk called blockers were doing their job beautifully. They were not partisan, no one would ever accuse them of incompetence, and they were dedicated to the country. Blocker was a new insult. Before January 20th, 2025, they went by civil servant.

When Musk went into the government with his team at Doge, he said the same thing he had said when he went into Twitter. People already there will want to stop you, so find the blockers and get rid of them. The six main characters in his book never called themselves blockers. Musk would have described them that way. Lewis says they are mainly trying not to break the law. He lines the word up with impressionist and

Peter Kafka opens the episode by calling Larry Ellison an 82-year-old billionaire and one of the 10 richest men in the world. Larry Ellison bought his son, David Ellison, a media empire. The companies were once called Paramount and Warner Brothers. Peter Kafka says they are now called Skydance.

Peter Kafka also calls Larry Ellison the eighth richest man in the world, tight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and connected to both TikTok and a traditional media conglomerate. He says the public does not know that much about Larry Ellison.

Eric Spracklen, who runs Twitter @ThatTrumpGuy, tells Zuby about a clip from a Hillary Clinton campaign office. He walked in as a volunteer ready to knock on doors, stayed three or four minutes, then said he supported Donald Trump. Spracklen's clip made the Drudge Report and other conservative outlets. The first tweet drew four or five thousand retweets in an hour, then counts fell as people said Twitter blocked retweets, likes, and shares. A second tweet, accusing Twitter of stripping likes and retweets, reached almost 25,000 retweets in a couple of hours. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talked about the clip. Spracklen reads the drop as live suppression, and says @ThatTrumpGuy still cannot

Trump is expected to win 2020 in a landslide, not a close race. There was not a pathway to 270 electoral votes, but there was a pathway to 306. He is expected to win every state won before and maybe pick up one or two, while California and Illinois stay too far blue.

After the election, people sent private messages saying Trump isn't that bad. It was not just one or two people. A nice amount ate their pride, said they were sorry, and admitted they were kind of wrong.

Politics matters only as far as it changes society and culture. America has 350 million people, and they still have to live together even if they do not share the same beliefs or like the same people.

Illegal immigration was the issue that clicked first. At a bank in college, one legal immigrant cashed a paycheck just under $10,000 every week and split it among 20 illegals. In the US, $10,000 or more in cash has to go to the IRS, and the bank could not stop what looked like blatant fraud.

Before Trump ever ran for president, the same media now trashing him was basically championing him. Donald Trump was treated as the American dream, showing up on magazine covers, in movies, and on TV. The warm portrayal came first; the hostile one arrived after he entered politics.

He played football and wrestled in high school, then played football in college and graduated with a degree in marketing. He came from a Republican household but stayed pretty apolitical because other parts of life mattered more. A Trump rally with his mom in Columbus felt absolutely overwhelming and pulled him in.

On Pirate Wires, Mike Solana and Liv Boeree open on a week of superintelligence news. The show says Donald Trump answered Bernie Sanders by signing an executive order that renamed artificial intelligence to superintelligence across federal departments, at a White House meeting the episode calls a morally binding pact for AI labs to police themselves. It places Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg in the room. Solana describes Sanders's Stop Artificial Superintelligence Act as a pause on advanced AI, a permanent ban on superintelligence work, and prison for violators, plus only a soft maybe on withholding technology from countries trying to build it. He says Eliezer Yudk

The Munger test shows how support for having the state decide what people can say on the internet disappears when Donald Trump replaces the word state because there is no such thing as the state. The people who run the state are the same people who run corporations. Public choice requires comparing a real market setting with a real government setting to avoid romance about perfect government incentives.

Casey thinks that Donald Trump would use another platform to post. Then, a bot would be set up to screenshot the post and upload it to Twitter. It may be somewhat of a positive for Trump to be on Twitter so we know about whatever topics are on his mind-- even if it's talking off the top of his head with no information.