Category: National Politics

A loyalist prosecutor handpicked by the Justice Department to lead a contentious conspiracy investigation into several of President Donald Trump’s political opponents abruptly quit his job on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Joseph diGenova, had been in charge of what Trump’s allies have often referred to as the “grand conspiracy,” a sprawling inquiry based in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida that has sought to implicate federal officials who have investigated Trump in a single plot to deprive him of his rights.

DiGenova’s resignation was the latest setback in the case that began last year and has dragged on for months. Even though members of his team have issued numerous grand jury subpoenas to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials who have sought over the past decade to hold Trump accountable in a series of criminal inquiries, diGenova had yet to obtain an indictment.

“It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” DiGenova told CNN and CBS during phone interviews on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Trump has repeatedly put pressure on prosecutors to bring criminal charges against his opponents, calling them out in private meetings and in social media posts. He has also expressed displeasure about the slow pace of the retributive investigations he has helped to set in motion.

But time and again, Trump’s desire for vengeance and his willingness to break through the walls of independence that have traditionally separated the White House and the Justice Department have resulted in failure. Judges and grand juries have repeatedly stymied his attempts to strong arm prosecutors into bringing charges.

Sometimes, as in the case of diGenova, prosecutors themselves have effectively reminded him that it is no simple matter to file indictments against people without real evidence or viable legal reasoning. The resignation was likely to cause consternation among far-right influencers who have long heralded the grand conspiracy case as the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to go after the president’s critics.

From the beginning, the influencers pushed for charges to be brought against the widest array of Democrats possible, asserting that a cabal of “deep state” operatives — led by former President Barack Obama — had worked for years to destroy Trump and deserved to be punished.

With his move, diGenova became the second prosecutor who has either resigned or been removed from the case. The prosecutor in charge of an early phase of the investigation was forced to leave in the spring after telling her superiors that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges against one of its first targets, John Brennan, a former CIA director who provoked Trump’s ire by helping to assemble an intelligence assessment that determined that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The grand conspiracy inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors seeking to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and a separate investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents — as an overarching, multiyear scheme to damage his political prospects.

From the outset, diGenova faced an uphill battle in seeking to prove the basic theory of his case: that the various inquiries into Trump — conducted by different prosecutors and spanning nearly a decade — could be reasonably tied together in a single conspiracy. Those hurdles have led several current and former prosecutors in the office in southern Florida to wonder whether the investigation was largely a show put on to placate Trump.

DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney from the Ronald Reagan era who had not worked as a prosecutor in nearly 40 years, took control of the case in April after his predecessor, Maria Medetis Long, was kicked off the investigation. At 81, he was an unusual choice to oversee an inquiry involving multiple targets that quickly grew to include at least a dozen prosecutors, including his wife, Victoria Toensing.

Moreover, diGenova was a longtime ally of Trump’s who had publicly claimed that the Russia investigation was a plot by law enforcement to frame him and keep him out of the White House. DiGenova had also worked as a lawyer for Trump’s 2020 campaign, supporting his false assertions that the election that year had been rigged against him.

While Brennan was the initial focus of the inquiry, it has also involved an effort to implicate former FBI Director James Comey, who has been charged in a separate case in North Carolina. Late last month, diGenova’s office issued a subpoena demanding testimony from one of Comey’s close confidants.

More recently, subpoenas had been issued to federal agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in the classified documents investigation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Vice President JD Vance was billed as the headliner of the second night of the Republican convention, but President Donald Trump stole the show.

With a hug and a handshake, Vance exited stage right after his speech as Trump returned to the place he likes most — center stage — to make his final pitch of the convention to keep Republicans in power.

At one point Trump asked attendees to raise their right hands and pledge to him that he would vote with their family and friends. Dutifully, they did.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to hell.”

The two-day rally in Dallas came as Trump’s approval has sagged below 40% and Republicans fear losing control of both the House and Senate. Republicans hoped the gathering would help energize a base beleaguered by high prices and the Iran war to turn out in droves. But the two days of red meat tossed from the stage seemed unlikely to satiate independent voters whose support has flagged.

Here are seven takeaways from the convention:

Vance makes his 2026 (and 2028) pitch

Vance arrived in Dallas widely considered the front-runner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. His speech offered some early clues about how he might approach a campaign.

Vance focused on restoring the primacy of the traditional nuclear American family, a theme he has championed in the administration. He did not mention the war in Iran, an operation he has defended publicly but raised concerns about privately. But he issued a plea for conservatives not to abandon the White House over policy.

“Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he urged.

Vance speaks in a far more scripted political style than Trump. He caught fire with the crowd when he snapped back at a protester who interrupted his remarks by waving Palestinian and Mexican flags. “My friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” he said.

But he failed to sustain the kind of enthusiasm that Trump commanded either night. Nor did he win anything beyond perfunctory praise from the president, who quickly ushered him off the stage.

As the balloons fell, it was the president alone, along with a tenor singing. Trump is not giving up his crown quite yet.

Trump throws an affordability Hail Mary

Trump has called affordability — a top buzzword for Democrats this year — a “hoax.” In his speech Wednesday night, the president claimed that prices are on their way down. At the same time, he rolled out an audacious plan to address people’s concerns about costs: a massive cash giveaway.

He branded his dubious and detail-free plan to send $5,000 to every American adult a “Trump Dividend.”

But Trump was virtually the only one talking about it.

A day later, the splashy $1 trillion-plus plan barely made a ripple on the convention stage.

The president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., didn’t so much as mention it.

Neither did the speaker of the House.

Neither did the vice president.

Only Trump did.

If the president wants the dangled cash to be a major factor in the midterms, the rest of the Republican Party didn’t use the rest of the convention to sell it.

Republicans have a new rogues’ gallery of liberal villains

Forget about Nancy Pelosi.

In Dallas, Republicans made clear that the former House speaker has been dethroned from her decades-long position as the party’s favorite political villain.

Speaker after speaker assailed Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, for pushing what they described as an extreme and anti-American agenda. Their images, including Piker’s naked torso, were broadcast on the jumbotron over the stadium. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is a frequent target of the right, got less airtime.

At one point, Speaker Mike Johnson outlined the new rogues’ gallery of liberals — “Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani” — while casting the rest of the Democratic Party as squishes who would succumb to them.

In their attacks on Piker and El-Sayed, several convention speakers embraced anti-Muslim rhetoric, including a promise popular among conservative activists to “ban Shariah law.”

“We must stand and defeat the Islamists,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in his speech.

GOP frames the election as common sense versus crazy

Republicans know that Trump is unpopular. They are banking on making Democrats unpopular, too — or at least unappealing and unelectable.

Over and over, speakers cast Democrats as out of the mainstream, frequently calling them socialists, communists and even worse. At times they stretched the truth. Democratic socialists might have won a number of Democratic primary victories since 2024, but no serious figure in the party is promoting communism.

“You guys are going to trigger the commies,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said at one point as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

Vance, in the closing of his speech, summed up the message so many had delivered before him over two days: “It’s about the party of common sense beating the party of the crazies.”

Texas is a 2026 battleground

Six months ago, when it first emerged that Republicans were likely to pick Dallas for this convention, it was unclear whether Texas would wind up as a top midterm battleground.

It’s clear now.

A parade of speakers — from the president on down — used their precious time onstage to talk about Texas’ razor-close Senate race. They sought to boost Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general (even as Trump mocked his sartorial choices on back-to-back nights), and tear down James Talarico, the Democratic nominee. On the eve of the convention, Trump’s super political action committee had reserved $10 million in ads to help Paxton.

“Tala-freako maybe tops the list,” Vance said of Trump’s nickname for Talarico.

But it wasn’t just the Senate race. Republicans gerrymandered the state in 2025 to create as many as five new safely Republican House seats. But Republicans running in several of those seats appeared at the convention, seeking a boost in regions that Trump won handily.

Was it must-see TV? Early signs suggest no

Trump has long been known as a master of the television audience. Not this time. An average of 2.5 million people tuned in to watch his Wednesday night speech on Fox News, one of the few major TV networks that aired the remarks in full, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That was an average primetime audience for the network, based on the most recent quarterly statistics, and below the usual viewership for programs at that time.

In other words, no Trump bump.

To be fair, the president’s programming faced some steep competition. The first game of the National Football League season was on at the same time as his speech. The season’s second game was on Thursday during Vance’s and Trump’s speeches.

Republicans make their bid to buck history

Parties in power traditionally attempt to expand their appeal in midterm elections through targeted outreach to independent voters. That was not the strategy charted by Trump and his allies in Dallas.

Only a handful of speakers offered any kind of outreach to moderate voters (one of those exceptions was Rep. Mike Lawler of New York). Far more focused their remarks on stoking fears of Shariah, transgender athletes and Democratic candidates who were repeatedly described as communists. Again and again, Trump begged his supporters to “pretend” that he would be on the ballot — an attempt to get enough of them out to prevent the usual losses for the party in power.

Trump and his allies are staking their chances on their ability to drive their own voters to the polls. At the top of the list are Trump loyalists who typically skip midterm elections.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings and widespread economic discontent, along with historical trends, point to a clear Democratic advantage come November and the midterm elections. But Republicans also see reasons for optimism, and it’s not just about gerrymandering.

Six factors working in Democrats’ favor:

Out-of-power parties typically pick up seats in the midterms

The Democrats’ most basic advantage is the fundamental pattern of midterm elections: The party that controls the White House usually loses seats.

In midterms from 1934 to 2018, the president’s party bled an average of 28 seats in the House and four in the Senate, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

If Democrats added 28 House and four Senate seats this cycle, they would win majorities in both chambers. The House, in particular, is seen as a promising target for Democrats this cycle, in part because Republicans are clinging to a razor-thin advantage in that chamber.

Trump is deeply unpopular

Parties have occasionally defied the historical trend and won seats in the midterms on the strength of popular presidents.

But this year, Trump is widely expected to hurt Republicans’ chances. His approval rating, dampened by voter disenchantment with the war in Iran and stubbornly high inflation, has recently sunk to the lowest level of his second term. The New York Times polling average currently shows that 58% of Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance, while only 38% approve.

Voters are dissatisfied with his handling of immigration and the war with Iran. Trump is also losing ground with white working-class voters on the economy. And he is deeply unpopular with voters of color without college degrees.

House races in particular tend to follow the national mood closely, and analysts see Democrats as favorites to win the House.

The Iran war has driven up prices, and voters are focused on inflation

Polls consistently show that the economy and inflation are the top issues for voters. And voters say they are unhappy with the economy under Trump.

His war with Iran, now in its seventh month, has driven up the price of oil, fertilizer, healthcare and other goods and services, as well as mortgage rates. Gas costs more than $4 a gallon, and the AAA motor club reported that drivers over Labor Day weekend were facing “the highest gas prices ever for this time of year.”

By July, consumer prices were up 3.7% from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, far above the Fed’s target rate of 2%. The cost of diesel, which powers the farming economies of key midterm battlegrounds, hit a record high Friday.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said his party’s candidates were competing in challenging territory by keeping their campaigns focused squarely on costs.

“Americans see what’s happened,” Schumer said in an interview. “They’re paying more, and getting less.”

Democratic candidates are outraising their rivals

In five of the six most closely watched Senate contests, Democrats had outraised Republicans through the first half of the year, according to campaign finance filings. In some races, such as those in Texas, Ohio and Alaska, the gap was vast.

Democrats’ fundraising advantage in two other states, North Carolina and Georgia, has helped to transform races once seen as toss-ups. Analysts with the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster, now say both races lean toward Democrats.

The large hauls suggest enthusiasm for individual Democratic candidates. But Republican groups still have a huge money advantage over Democratic ones.

Several Democrats have shown strength in states Trump carried

Two popular, moderate Democratic Senate candidates in the South, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia and former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, appear to have maneuvered into particularly strong positions. Both have vast fundraising advantages and clear polling leads.

Democrats are also bullish about the chances of former Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, to flip a Senate seat in Alaska. She is running on “fish, family and freedom.” Her Republican opponent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, must contend with two other Republicans on the ballot, including one with the same name.

Peltola, the lone Democrat on the ballot, led Sullivan by more than eight percentage points in a nonpartisan primary in August.

Democratic primaries have set turnout records

One clear reflection of Democratic energy going into the fall: the huge turnout the party has recorded in primary after primary. Some primaries, including ones in Michigan and Texas, set midterm records for the party.

Strong turnout in primaries is not necessarily predictive of a strong performance in the general election. But Republicans acknowledge that there has been a significant enthusiasm gap between the two parties this primary season and describe it as one of their starkest challenges heading into the fall.

Six factors working in Republicans’ favor:

Republicans won the gerrymandering war

In a burst of rare mid-decade redistricting, Republicans were able to give themselves a structural advantage in House races by redrawing maps to carve out more safe red seats.

Congressional maps are typically drawn just once a decade to reflect population shifts after the census. But after Trump urged lawmakers in Texas to draw new maps favoring Republicans, Democrats and Republicans across the country engaged in an intense, cross-country redistricting tug of war to try to shift the House map in their favor.

Aided by favorable rulings in state and federal courts, Republicans emerged with a national map that tilts in their favor and could help them counter a difficult political environment. Seven Republican-led states had redrawn their maps while only two Democratic-led states did so.

The new maps could position the Republican Party to net roughly five to 10 additional House seats. Still, despite that edge, the House battle is still seen as tilting toward Democrats because of the political climate.

The GOP is sitting on a mountain of cash

The main Republican groups have a large overall financial advantage — totaling hundreds of millions of dollars — over the main Democratic ones, and the Democratic National Committee is in debt.

Republican advertising spending has eclipsed Democrats’ ad spending in all the top six Senate races except for the contest in Texas, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Trump’s super political action committee, MAGA Inc., which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and had long resisted tapping its war chest to help the party in the midterms, recently made its first general-election investment, a $10 million ad buy in Texas.

Still, it is not yet clear how much the group will spend overall and which races it will target. Trump said Friday that he planned to spend “probably” $400 million to $500 million on the midterms, but that he also expected “to have money left over.”

The Democratic brand is weak

Trump may be deeply unpopular. Yet Democrats might eagerly trade their approval ratings for his.

One Quinnipiac poll in July pegged Trump’s approval rating at 32%, worse than usual for him. But it measured congressional Democrats’ approval rating even lower — at 23%.

Still, the same poll suggested that voters were eager for Democrats to win back Congress. It also indicated that Democratic voters were far more motivated than Republican voters to go to the polls. But Republicans have seized on a series of recent Democratic primary victories by left-wing candidates and democratic socialists to try to paint the party as out of step with many voters.

The Senate map tilts to Republicans’ advantage

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. For Democrats to win back the chamber, they need to flip seats in four states while defending their own most vulnerable ones. Five of the six most competitive Senate races are in states Trump won in 2024. Four are in states he carried by double digits.

And even among three other relatively competitive Senate battlegrounds where Democrats are seen as having an advantage — Georgia, New Hampshire and North Carolina — two are states that Trump captured two years ago.

Democratic divisions could complicate their paths in two key states

In Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins has been seen as one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, the Democrats’ initial nominee, Graham Platner, was accused of rape in early July. Platner denied the allegation but eventually dropped out of the race, requiring his party to scramble to find a new nominee outside the usual primary process.

The candidate that the Maine Democratic Party settled on, Troy Jackson, had finished third this year in Maine’s primary for governor. Some Maine Democrats were dissatisfied by the rushed convention process and many are anxious about Jackson’s chances in a short campaign he had not planned for.

In Michigan, where Democrats hope to keep a seat that is being vacated by a retiring senator, Democrats are still trying to heal the wounds after a tense, expensive primary race that centered on disagreements about Israel. Some Jewish Democrats in Michigan have declined to immediately support the candidate who won the nomination, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who has been a forceful critic of the Israeli government.

The stock market is strong, and crime is down

Wall Street has been on a remarkable, three-year run of gains. There have been some signs that inflation is cooling, too. And the Labor Department reported that hiring was unexpectedly strong in August, with the unemployment rate steady at 4.1%.

Republicans can also point to positive trends on crime, an issue that has often swayed elections over the years. Today, violent crime rates are extremely low by historical standards.

“Republicans have a real chance at defying history in November because of our candidates, massive war chest, and enthusiasm behind President Trump’s agenda,” Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.

Still, voters say that the economy is their No. 1 issue — and polls suggest that they don’t approve of how Trump is handling it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

First, at the start of his second term, President Donald Trump promised a DOGE dividend, a pledge to take the money that Elon Musk’s team would cut from the federal budget and send it to the American people.

Then Trump moved on to a “tariff refund,” a plan to use the money the government was collecting in import taxes to fund payments for the public.

Those ideas never panned out. Nevertheless, Trump is again talking up the possibility that the federal government will send Americans thousands of dollars in cash. At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday, the president pledged that every American adult would receive $5,000 if Republicans retain control of Congress in November.

Trump did not offer many details about the proposal, but there’s reason to think that Republicans in Congress, like they did with his two previous promises of quick cash, could shrug off the president’s suggestion.

That’s in no small part because the $5,000-per-American promise would be enormously expensive to fulfill, with a price tag over $1 trillion. Its actual cost, though, would depend on what, if any, eligibility requirements Congress would ultimately impose on the plan. Trump did not mention a proposal to finance the $5,000 payments, which beyond their fiscal cost could also prove inflationary.

The conceit of Trump’s other pitches was that the money to pay for them was already available, from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency or tariff revenue. On both of those fronts, though, the envisioned funding sources proved illusory: Musk’s team did not save the government much money, and the Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s initial tariffs.

Republicans did succeed in providing Americans with substantial cash payments when they cut taxes last year. Under the design of the tax law, many Americans first experienced the policy change in the spring, when they received larger-than-usual tax refunds. Trump and Republicans have spent much of the year promoting those refunds, hoping that the larger lump-sum payments would be politically resonant before the midterms.

But even after Trump delivered those tax refunds, his approval poll ratings are still sagging.

Those tax cuts were also very expensive, though Republicans did cover some of the fiscal cost by reducing federal spending on healthcare and food assistance for poor Americans.