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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The stories that won't go away [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-14

David Freedlander/New York:

“What do all three of these people have in common?” said one political operative who has worked with each. “They are all egomaniacal sociopaths. And to imagine that any of them would step down for the so-called greater good is to pretend that they are three completely different people.”

But in a city of 8.5 million, it is hard to find three people less likely to take one for the team than Sliwa, Adams, and Cuomo. All three have been civic figures since at least the 1980s. Each one views the prize of City Hall as some combination of their rightful due and a chance at redemption.

The strategy almost makes sense. While current polls show Mamdani leading the field, they also show him carrying only 35 percent of the vote. Get two of his three top opponents to drop out for the good of the city, and the non-Mamdani electorate would stave off the red menace.

It’s funny because even in the miracle scenario in which the three of them unite behind one non-Mamdani candidate, all of their names will be on ballot regardless — so they’ll have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money to educate NYC voters on who they settled on. https://t.co/HKDl14xKMW

Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:

The memo instantly caused heads to explode in MAGA World. Despite the thousands of trees that were chopped down in 2024 to inform voters that the presidential election hinged on egg prices, the reality is that millions of voters were motivated by their belief that a Trump restoration would confirm all their wildest, bitter beliefs about cosmopolitan elite Democrats and their immorality and disdain for “the real America.”

A holiday weekend Sunday night news dump from the Trump Justice Department stunned many of the president’s supporters by seeking to shoot down conspiracy theories that have animated millions on the far right since the time of Epstein’s death and which at times were fully endorsed by Trump’s inner circle.

MAGA rage over the Trump regime's failure to show an Epstein conspiracy reveals what matters inside a right-wing bubble.

MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything

Multiple MAGA influencers are openly arguing they can't release the Epstein list because it'll help Democrats win the midterms, which is... quite the admission of what's happening here. They are fucked.

Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box:

I’m not saying MAGA is dead, but if he can’t quell the furor over the Epstein files, Trump could end up very damaged in ways that affect the midterms, the 2028 presidential election, and the long-term future of the movement.

The Epstein scandal is unlike any Trump scandal before. It looks like the kind of scandal that has undone second-term presidents.

My initial reaction was pure schadenfreude — an enjoyable distraction from democracy circling the drain. I assumed the Epstein furor would be just another passing summer storm for Trump. Before long, his flunkies would fall back in line because that’s what flunkies do. Trump has survived criminal convictions, impeachments, and countless scandals that would have ended other political careers. Surely, he’d survive this one without much damage.

Why the Epstein Scandal Could Devastate MAGA Trump has never faced a scandal like this one

The “why didn’t the Biden administration release the Epstein files” dodge ignores the fact that Biden and his cabinet didn’t run on releasing the Epstein files. But Trump’s family members and cabinet members (Kash, JD, Bondi, Noem, et al) made it a central campaign promise.

POLITICO:

GOP warning sign in new poll: Trump’s voters don’t love his tariffs In an exclusive POLITICO-Public First poll, Republican voters show limited support for the president’s handling of China. President Donald Trump’s disruptive trade policies are threatening to alienate a significant tranche of his own voters, a major red flag for Republicans going into 2026. A new POLITICO-Public First poll conducted last month found between a quarter and nearly half of people who voted for Trump in 2024 have doubts about various elements of his tariff policies, especially around his approach to China. Just half of Trump voters surveyed believe his tariffs on the world’s second-largest economy would benefit American companies — a core premise of the president’s protectionist trade agenda. The survey is a warning sign for Republicans, given how much the president has focused on trade and the promises he’s made to bring industries back to the U.S. Trump has also reignited global trade tensions in recent days, firing off a series of combative tariff letters to other nations threatening to impose significant new tariff rates on them.

x We didn’t meet any Trump supporter at Turning Point USA’s event in Florida this weekend that didn’t want more information to be released about the Epstein files. https://t.co/7xnpB0Omiy — Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) July 13, 2025

Greg Sargent/TNR:

Whistleblower Emails Expose Fresh Trump Abuses in Abrego Garcia Case Newly released communications show the lengths the Trump administration went to in order to label Kilmar Abrego Garcia an MS-13 leader. On June 24, Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint to the Justice Department’s inspector general and to the Senate and House judiciary committees, alleging extensive misconduct inside DOJ. The complaint’s most explosive, widely covered charge was that a top DOJ leader, Emil Bove, told officials that in deporting migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, they may have to ignore court orders stopping the removals and tell the courts “fuck you.” But the whistleblower complaint also detailed internal deliberations over Abrego Garcia’s case, and this part is also damning. The newly released emails—submitted by Reuveni’s attorneys to Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, in response to Durbin’s queries—sharpen our knowledge of this part of the story.

x Jon Ossoff on Trump: “He promised to release the Epstein files. Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was gonna release the Epstein files?” pic.twitter.com/qjWSCUzZyd — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 12, 2025

Michael Grunwald/New York Times:

Democrats Can Finally Stop Pandering to Farmers Here’s some bad news: The “big, beautiful bill” that President Trump signed into law on July 4 accelerates the egregious bipartisan tradition of showering taxpayer dollars on well-off farmers. It is projected to pour more than $90 billion into new agricultural subsidies and tax credits for farm-grown fuels like corn ethanol, while making it easier for the biggest farmers to vacuum up cash and the least sustainable biofuels to qualify for credits. It gets worse: The congressional Republicans who passed the bill without Democratic votes also ended the tradition of pairing the lavish handouts known as the “farm safety net” with an actual food safety net for the poor. The bill slashes nearly $200 billion from the federal food stamp program known as SNAP, making life harder for millions of vulnerable families. But here’s a potential silver lining: The G.O.P.’s decision to sever the half-century-old pairing of farm handouts with food assistance offers Democratic politicians an opportunity to stop supporting environmentally and fiscally ludicrous subsidies for farmers who wouldn’t dream of voting for Democrats. Instead, they could start pushing sensible policies focused on eaters instead of growers. It’s time someone in Washington did.

x For the first time in 4 years, likely voters now rank threats to democracy as a higher priority than inflation and the economy (Cygnal) — Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) July 13, 2025

Pascal Sabino/Bolts:

This Illinois Reform May Bring Relief to Overworked Public Defenders Public defenders have "nowhere to go for help," at the mercy of floundering local budgets and local prosecutors’ policy swings. Illinois is creating a statewide office to change that. There may be some relief on the horizon for overworked and understaffed public defenders. The Illinois legislature in May adopted the State Public Defender Act, known to its supporters as the FAIR Act, to establish a statewide public defender’s office. It passed nearly entirely on party lines, with Democrats in support, and now sits on the desk of Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker.

x The Epstein saga is showing that after all this time of everyone trying to outsmart Trump the goal should’ve been to out-dumb him. — Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) July 12, 2025

Two stories from the New York Times on the ongoing chaos that’s forcing a rewriting of American world standing. First:

American Allies Want to Redraw the World’s Trade Map, Minus the U.S.

Facing growing chaos, the European Union and numerous other countries are seeking to forge a global trading nexus that is less vulnerable to American tariffs. The bloc learned this weekend that Washington would subject it to 30 percent tariffs starting Aug. 1. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U. executive branch, responded with a pledge to keep negotiating. She also made it clear that, while the European Union would delay any retaliation until early August, it would continue to draw up plans to hit back with force. But that was not the entire strategy. Europe, like many of the United States’ trading partners, is also looking for more reliable friends. “We’re living in turbulent times, and when economic uncertainty meets geopolitical volatility, partners like us must come closer together,” Ms. von der Leyen said on Sunday in Brussels at a news conference alongside the Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto.

and second:

Under Attack by Trump’s Tariffs, Asian Countries Seek Out Better Friends Most nations are still negotiating in hopes of avoiding punitive import taxes. At the same time, they’re looking for trading partners as a way around the United States. For most countries that received President Trump’s letters last week threatening steep tariffs, especially the Asian nations with economies focused on supplying the United States, there are no obvious substitutes as a destination for their goods. But they are doing their best to find them. Business and political leaders around the world have been roundly baffled by the White House’s imposition of new duties, even as governments shuttled envoys back and forth to Washington offering new purchases and pledges of reform. Mr. Trump is erecting new trade barriers and demanding deep concessions by Aug. 1, claiming years of grievance because America buys more than it sells.

it’s really difficult to write accurately about Trump when you (i.e. NYT) won’t allow yourself to call him the liar, the thief and the idiot that he is. That limits them to talk about the response, and that’s what most of their news stories are.

David Shuster on Greg Abbott and the Texas floods:

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