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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Chickens are coming home to roost [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-23
Greg Sargent with Juliette Kayyem/TNR:
Transcript: Don Jr. and MAGA Erupt as GOPers Start Turning on Hegseth As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sinks deeper into scandal and Republicans start abandoning him, a shrewd national security observer explains why President Trump has no easy way out. Sargent: Speaking of these purges at the Pentagon, John Ullyot, a former chief Pentagon spokesperson, just published a piece in Politico that was crushing for Hegseth. It went through all of his failures, including the first round of stories about sharing classified info on a Signal chat and then the absurd efforts to cover that one up. I want to highlight, though, a particular line from Ullyot’s piece. It said this, “There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.” Juliette, this is the thing I keep coming back to. Is there any planet on which this doesn’t get worse, much worse politically for Trump over time? Kayyem: No, because Hegseth was unqualified to run the Pentagon.
ICYMI, this POLITICO piece by John Ullyot is part of the Pete Hegseth firestorm. You have to look past the sycophantic language to get MAGA’s attention (which it surely did, as Don Jr was outraged and declared the author persona non grata):
Former Top Pentagon Spokesperson Details ‘Month From Hell’ Inside the Agency The total chaos at the Department of Defense is becoming a major distraction for the Trump administration, writes John Ullyot. There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately.
x GALLUP: Record-high 53% of Americans now say their financial situation is getting worse — the first time since 2001 that a majority has expressed financial pessimism.
https://t.co/5VYjF1oXkn pic.twitter.com/sSlGuQbwv2 — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) April 22, 2025
Record-high number of Americans don’t need to listen to cable news to know what’s going on in their lives.
Jamelle Bouie/New York Times:
Trump Wants You to Think Resistance Is Futile. It Is Not. The goal of Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison itself — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law.
POLITICO:
Why Dems ‘keep talking about due process’ in the case of man mistakenly deported to El Salvador Democrats are lining up to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia, despite immigration politics traditionally favoring Republicans. It’s part of a calibrated approach that Democrats are betting will keep the debate focused on the Trump administration’s refusal to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States, after a federal judge ordered them to “facilitate” his return and the Supreme Court upheld the decision. In interviews with nearly a dozen Democratic lawmakers and strategists, they said the real-life implications of Trump’s deportation of the native Salvadoran offer an opening to turn what could be an esoteric argument about democratic rights into a vivid cautionary tale. “You have an individual, a Maryland resident, a union member whose union leadership has been calling for his relief, married to a U.S. citizen here with legal status, who was kidnapped, arrested, wrongly deported to El Salvador,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), part of a group of lawmakers who traveled to the country Monday to advocate for Abrego Garcia. “That is a terrifying prospect if it is allowed to be continued and let it go, because it opens the door for this to happen again. It emboldens the Trump administration to continue to disappear people.” “I think the most important part of this story is the lack of due process,” she said in an interview.
They keep talking about it because what Trump did is wrong. By the way, it’s a political loser for the GOP (see the Grassley video below). And also by the way, it’s fucking stupid to think Democrats won’t talk about this, and they should fire any consultant who says otherwise. Parties need to stand for something, even when kitchen table issues matter most.
x NEWS — Senior Dems are increasingly confident they’ll land Roy Cooper to run for Senate next year, according to multiple sources.
DSCC Chair Gillibrand has been personally involved in the recruitment effort, I’m told.
Cooper is convinced he’s the party’s best shot at beating… — Stephen Neukam (@stephen_neukam) April 23, 2025
TNR:
Trump Ramps Up War on the Media in Dark Rant on CBS and 60 Minutes Donald Trump is determined to gut the free press. Trump’s latest tantrum is over two segments on the show Sunday. The first was an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which correspondent Scott Pelley traveled to the site of a Russian attack earlier this month that killed nine children. The second was a report from Greenland by correspondent Jon Wertheim on how people in the Danish territory are receiving Trump’s threats to take over the island. The president is trying to intimidate news networks that produce even the slightest bit of critical coverage against him, threatening lawsuits and FCC action. He has also threatened other news outlets, such as ABC and NBC, with ABC even capitulating with a legal settlement before Trump took office. In a presidential term already full of abuses of power, hopefully the free press in America continues to report critically of the Trump administration, otherwise they’ll be paving the way for autocracy.
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