TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Former Florida Gov. Buddy MacKay, who lost to Jeb Bush in 1998 but still served 23 days in office after the sudden death of Gov. Lawton Chiles, has died. He was 91.

The former Democratic governor took a nap after lunch at his home in Ocklawaha, Florida, on Tuesday and never woke up, his son Ken MacKay told The Associated Press. All of the governor’s adult children were present at the time, he said.

“It was a very peaceful end to a great life,” said MacKay, who hopes his father is remembered as a defender of Florida’s environment and an advocate for minorities.

Floridians honored MacKay not just for his brief service as governor, but his time as a state legislator, congressman and diplomat.

“We mourn the passing of Buddy MacKay,” Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X. “A U.S. Air Force veteran and lifelong public servant, MacKay was dedicated to our country and our state. May he rest in peace.”

In a social media post, Bush offered his condolences to MacKay’s family, saying that his one-time competitor had served the state “with honor and distinction.”

MacKay, Chiles’ lieutenant governor for two terms, had been trounced by Bush in the 1998 gubernatorial election when Chiles died six weeks later on Dec. 12, 1998, at the governor’s mansion. That put MacKay in the top job for three weeks, where he focused on overseeing the final stages of the transition to Bush’s administration.

“It was overwhelmingly sad,” MacKay recalled in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press. "(Chiles had) gotten that far through his term and it all just stopped. For me, there was nothing but to be a caretaker and try to help with the transition. The main thing we could do was stay out of the way.”

The MacKays never moved into the mansion and Florida hasn’t had a Democrat in the governor’s office since.

“He was very, very sensitive to the fact he was there as the final caretaker,” the late Democratic political strategist and MacKay adviser Jim Krog once said. “He was clearly conscious of the fact that he was governor and there were some loose ends that needed to be tied up.”

MacKay was out of politics in 1990 when he persuaded Chiles, who had retired from the U.S. Senate two years earlier, to run for governor against incumbent Republican Bob Martinez. The Chiles-MacKay team was elected that November and again in 1994.

MacKay, who also served in the Florida Legislature and U.S. House of Representatives, ran statewide three times and lost each time, but never lost his quiet sense of humor.

“I got out of politics because of illness,” he said the day after being defeated by Bush. “The voters got sick and tired of me.”

An inveterate policy wonk, MacKay finished his political career as a special envoy to Latin America for President Bill Clinton before retiring to his central Florida home near Ocala. MacKay stood by the former president when many Democrats distanced themselves from Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He kept busy in the final years of his life doing pro bono work for the Southern Legal Counsel and also serving in a mediation role in the juvenile court system.

MacKay narrowly missed winning election to the U.S. Senate race in 1988 when he lost to Republican Connie Mack III by less than 1 percentage point. It was the closest statewide race in the state’s history until the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

In a Democratic primary field that at one time included former governors Claude Kirk — a one-time Republican — and Reubin Askew, who withdrew before the election, MacKay rebounded from a runner-up finish in a six-way primary to win a runoff against then-Insurance Commissioner Bill Gunter.

With Democrats still largely in control of Florida politics, MacKay was expected to sweep past Mack and hold Chiles’ seat.

But Mack, who had also been in the U.S. House, came up with a “Hey Buddy, you’re a liberal,” catchphrase that MacKay couldn’t shake at a time moderate Florida was moving away from traditional Democratic politics.

It took two days after the 1988 election before the official vote count showed Mack had won, by fewer than 34,000 votes out of more than 4 million cast.

Like many of Florida’s leading Democratic politicians of the second half of the 20th century, MacKay began his political career at the height of the state’s integration movement.

MacKay had grown up working in the fields with Black laborers but went to segregated schools and ate in segregated restaurants.

“It was fairly wrenching,” he said. “It was always very awkward. My family was involved with agriculture and I worked many days in the field with African American crews and some of those adults were part of our family and raised me.”

MacKay’s views on race and the potential for desegregation changed dramatically during his time in the U.S. Air Force between 1955 and 1958.

“Not until I went into the military did I see the potential for getting this behind us,” MacKay said. “I walked in there and from the first day it was totally integrated and there wasn’t a problem. It was a very freeing experience.”

Kenneth H. MacKay Jr. was born March 22, 1933, in Ocala.

“In the old South, which I was born into, ‘Buddy’ means junior,” MacKay said. “Judges and school teachers called me Kenneth, but nobody else did. I’m more of a Buddy than a Kenneth.”

He became an attorney and citrus grower after leaving the service. He won election to the state House in 1968, the state Senate in 1974 and to the U.S. House in 1982 before losing his U.S. Senate bid.

MacKay spent his final years at the home he shared with his wife, Anne, on Lake Weir. According to his son Ken, MacKay remained active in his church, and enjoyed tending to his camellias and spending time on the family farm, where they raise citrus and cattle.

© Phil Sandlin/AP

Meet Linda McMahon, Trump's Education secretary pick

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Donald Trump remade the GOP in his image. Chris Sununu doesn’t think it’ll stick.

That’s because the outgoing Republican governor of New Hampshire, who routinely oscillates between supporting Trump and criticizing him, believes his party is bigger than both its enduring standard bearer and the political movement he created.

“Trump is extremely unique. There's no ‘Trump lite’ or ‘Trump 2.0’ that can replace or replicate what he's brought to the table, for better or for worse,” Sununu said in an interview.

And the GOP, he insists, is still a “big tent,” ticking off varied constituencies like the Log Cabin Republicans, fiscal hawks, libertarian-leaners and social conservatives.

Sununu needs this to be true, at least if he wants a future in politics beyond punditry. The scion of a New Hampshire political dynasty whose old-school brand of Republicanism has been supplanted by hard-liners and flamethrowers in the Trump era, Sununu has been thrice reelected and consistently ranked as one of the nation’s most popular governors — even as he sometimes defies his party’s Trumpian bent.

Yet Sununu, who declined to seek a fifth term, has a mixed track record of translating his success in navigating a MAGA-fied GOP to other like-minded politicians. This year alone, he helped elect former Sen. Kelly Ayotte as his successor but failed to get former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley across the finish line in the Granite State’s GOP presidential primary. And he has no obvious constituency outside of New England should he seek higher office himself.

Sununu, 50, who passed on a Senate run in 2022 and a presidential bid in 2024, insists he’s not looking at either office for at least the next few years. Instead, he says he’s content to return to the private sector and, as he often notes, “make some money.”

As he prepares to hand over the office he’s held for eight years, Sununu spoke at length with POLITICO about his efforts to reduce opioid overdose deaths, how he plans to stay involved in politics, why he’s still largely against legalizing recreational marijuana and how Trump doesn’t have the GOP in as much of a vise grip as it seems.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What would you say is your biggest policy achievement as governor?

When I first ran for governor, the two big issues facing the state were obviously the opioid epidemic and the mental health crisis. And we just jumped right in. We really focused on rural access to care and reinvented recovery-friendly workplace programs. It was really about opening up access.

Trump has talked a lot about trying to stop the flow of fentanyl, an opioid, over the southern border. Do you think the policies he’s proposing can help do that?

The No. 1 problem with the fentanyl crisis is the open border. Closing up the border definitely makes it harder for that stuff to come in.

How do you want to see Trump and Republicans in Congress tackle the border? There was a plan on the table last year…

That plan was terrible. The key to all of this is closing the border, but making the ports of entry much more robust to handle the number of people who may want to come across in a legal and authorized and processed way. And, most importantly, the “Remain in Mexico” policy has to be reinstated. Aside from closing the illegal crossings at the border, you need to have immigration reform that deals with creating a more modernized pathway for folks to become citizens the right way.

Trump’s plans for larger-scale deportations, do you think that’s the right way to go?

Specifically for criminals, yes. These are the first folks that should absolutely be deported. Beyond that Congress and the president can kind of tackle the next phase, but I think it does have to be broken in phases.

Back to New Hampshire for a minute. I want to talk about cannabis. You’ve largely been a skeptic of legalizing recreational marijuana, which failed again this year in the state Legislature. Why should New Hampshire miss out on tax revenues from this when all the surrounding states provide access to it?

You should never legalize drugs for the money. That's awful. If you're legalizing marijuana because you need more money, then you have a horribly malfunctioning state. So there's an ethics and a health issue here. I can tell you virtually every one of the governors [in the surrounding New England states] has indicated to me various problems with the legalization of marijuana, whether it's the exacerbated mental health issues, whether it's the black market that it fundamentally creates, whether it's the advertising problems, the proximity to schools that creates a lot of problems for parents. There's so many reasons not to do it. If you were going to do it here, [you would need to do so in a] responsible and controlled way that keeps it away from kids and allows the state to control the marketing messaging. I was semi-open to it if it could be controlled in the right way.

Before the election, we spoke about abortion and how Democrats were running hard on the issue in New Hampshire. You said the issue was losing salience and that voters were more concerned with the economy. The Republican won the governor’s race, so what is your assessment now?

In 2022, Roe v. Wade had just happened; it was much more of an unknown issue. This time around, two more years have passed. People in New Hampshire — no one’s denied an abortion, no one’s denied their rights [the state restricts abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions]. So the fearmongering hasn’t borne true. There are some individual states and places that are more restrictive or less restrictive, but that’s up to voters [in those states] to decide. It’ll still be an issue, but it's just not going to be the political backbreaker issue that the Democrats want it to be.

Do you think that there's still room within the Republican Party for criticism of Trump when warranted?

Of course there is. Did [former Rep.] Matt Gaetz just get pushed right out of his nomination to be the U.S. attorney general? Yes. Look, it's never easy criticizing the president and the standard bearer of your party, and there's always that kind of political honeymoon period that happens when you first get elected. But there are already signs of folks that are willing to push back and criticize and say no when they feel like they have to say no. And that should give the American people a big sigh of relief that it’s not the evil dictatorship that the liberal media was telling us it was going to be.

Trump is term-limited. So that opens up the question of what happens in 2028. Do you think Vice President-elect and Ohio Sen. JD Vance has a lock on the nomination in ‘28? Or do you think there will be a real, contested primary?

There’ll definitely be a real, contested primary. I think JD is great, by the way. He's shown himself to have overcome a lot of the early criticisms that he [faced]. He's competent. He's incredibly smart on his feet. He knows the issues. He's very cordial. He gets along with the other side — that was shown through the vice presidential debate, and I think that gave strength to the entire ticket. So there's no doubt he's in a great position if he wanted to run in ‘28. But no one's going to just hand it to him. You’ve got to bring him through his paces. I imagine if he wanted to be a front-runner, he would be. But no, you're gonna have a lot of folks from all walks of life running.

You know I’m going to ask if you’re thinking about it.

No. Not for ’28, I’m definitely not thinking about it.

So are you ruling out a presidential run in 2028?

I don't rule anything out, but there's no story there. It’s literally zero on my list in terms of thinking about anything. I can't see myself running in 2028. That would be, holy cow, that would be a real change of my plans. I don't see any path to that actually happening. I'm excited to go back to the private sector.

So what are your plans? What’s next for you?

I’m going to enter the private sector and make some money, do some business-type stuff, but I'll also be in the media a bit. I have some ideas to keep myself kind of scratching the political itch through various venues in the media and content creation around smart political content.

You’ve been making a push to support Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Tell me how that can work.

You can really look to the states to get ideas. Musk has to use — even though he’s an outsider, he has political capital — he needs to use it and make sure he’s not just putting a list of good ideas in front of Congress, a Republican Congress that is typically tepid about actually doing anything substantive. Congress just can’t help themselves about overspending, Republicans included. So he and Trump could use their combined political capital to ensure that whatever they do is lasting. It would be a huge legacy initiative for them. You gotta really push Congress to dig in for a balanced budget of some sort. Ultimately, they're going to have to start talking about entitlement reforms or Social Security reforms that just have to come because we have the bills coming due.

Trump wants to end daylight saving time. You said in a recent op-ed that you support that. But the current push in Congress is to make daylight saving time permanent. What’s your thinking on that? 

I don't care whether you make it permanent or you get rid of it, but let's stop changing the clock, right? That's my point. I don't care. Pick an hour. You get the exact same thing, whether you make it permanent or get rid [it]. The whole point is, let's stop changing the clock.

© Rod Lamkey for POLITICO

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

New quantum microchips are raising the possibility that the multiverse, something that was to be found only in comic books and sci-fi, could in fact be real. For those trying to keep up with American politics this isn’t really news. We seem to be cracking up, in so many different ways, into different cultural and political tribes, different media eco systems, different political planets. Our parallel universes are now fragmenting into many new galaxies. It makes it hard to keep up and navigate through the nebulous nebulas, the belts of idiocy and bottomless black holes of hubris. We're headed into a whole new political solar system. My mission, as a political cartoonist, is to explore these new uncharted worlds, to seek out new irony and fresh hypocrisies, to boldly go where no other cartoonists have gone before. Here are the latest entries from my cartoon log of the year 2024.

President Joe Biden paid tribute to former President Jimmy Carter on Sunday, calling him a statesman and humanitarian who lived life “measured not by his words but by his deeds.”

“Some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man of a bygone era, when honesty and character and faith and humility — it mattered. But I don't believe it as a bygone era. I see a man not only of our times, but for all times,” Biden said, speaking at a podium in St. Croix. “Someone who embodied the most fundamental human values we can never let slip away. Although sometimes it seems like it is. We may never see his like again. We’d all do well to try and be a little more like Jimmy Carter.”

The president addressed Carter’s death while on holiday vacation in St. Croix, an act that speaks to their decades long friendship and political allyship, connected by their deep-rooted respect for one another. Biden has long expressed an admiration for Carter, a sentiment that was palpable in the president’s statement Sunday evening.

Biden spoke for roughly 10 minutes, lingering to take questions about his memories of the late president, including when he became the first senator to endorse his 1976 campaign and the support the Carters gave him when he lost his son Beau to cancer. And when he was asked what incoming President Donald Trump could take away from Carter, Biden said it’s “decency.”

“Everybody deserves a shot. Everybody. Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking by someone who needed something and just keep walking? Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk? I can’t,” Biden said.

“One of the reasons why we’re looked to by the rest of the world for the bulk of our nationhood, we've laid out what our values are,” he continued. “The rest of the world looks to us. And he was worth looking to.”

The former president’s death on Sunday prompted an outpouring of tributes from fellow presidents and political leaders all over the world.

Carter entered the White House in 1977 as a new kind of president, a peanut farmer who capitalized on being an outsider. He aimed to reform the political culture. But the 39th president gained widespread acclaim for the charitable endeavors he took on after leaving the White House. He wrote more than two dozen books, built homes for Habitat for Humanity and monitored elections, among other acts.

President-elect Donald Trump, who frequently and derisively compared Carter’s presidency to that of Biden while on the campaign trail, said Carter did “everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans.”

“Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, also released a statement honoring Carter.

“From his service in the @USNavy, as Governor of Georgia and as the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter lived out his Christian faith and values with integrity and devotion,” Pence said on X.

Former President Bill Clinton recalled presenting Carter and his wife Rosslaynn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

“From his commitment to civil rights as a state senator and governor of Georgia; to his efforts as President to protect our natural resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, make energy conservation a national priority, return the Panama Canal to Panama, and secure peace between Egypt and Israel at Camp David; to his post-presidential efforts at the Carter Center supporting honest elections, advancing peace, combating disease, and promoting democracy; to his and Rosalynn’s devotion and hard work at Habitat for Humanity—he worked tirelessly for a better, fairer world,” Clinton said in a statement with and former first lady and secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Carter “a great man, a great role model and a great humanitarian” in a post on X.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer honored Carter’s “vision and generosity.”

“My thoughts are with the Carter family and all those mourning this incredible man. May his memory be a blessing and an enduring reminder of what it means to truly serve,” Schumer said on X.

World leaders also paid homage to Carter's legacy. "Whether supporting elections around the world and spreading healthcare solutions through the Carter Center or still building homes with Habitat for Humanity into his nineties, Jimmy Carter lives his values in the service of others to the very end," said Keir Starmer, U.K. prime minister.

"France sends its heartfelt thoughts to his family and to the American people," said French President Emmanuel Macron.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on X, "My deepest condolences to the Carter family, his many loves ones, and the American people who are mourning a former President and a lifelong humanitarian."

Carter’s death was particularly felt in his home state of Georgia, where he served as governor and lived after the end of his presidency.

“Among his lifetime of service and countless accomplishments, President Carter will be remembered for his commitment to democracy and human rights, his enduring faith, his philanthropic leadership, and his deep love of family,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) on X.

Two-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said that Carter was “a giant who never saw anyone as smaller than himself.”

“Jimmy Carter built homes, saved lives and tended to souls. God bless President Carter, may the family he and Mrs. Carter raised know only comfort in these days of grief,” Abrams wrote on X.

Flags are expected to be flown at half-staff at Trump's inauguration in January in honor of Carter's death.

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© Pool photo by Eddie Mullholland

Jimmy Carter had such confidence in his improbable path to the White House that he bet Americans worn down by Vietnam and Watergate would welcome a new kind of president: a peanut farmer who carried his own bags, worried about the heating bill and told it, more or less, like it was. And for a time, the voters embraced him.

Yet just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency that was widely seen as failed, it sometimes seemed as if all that was left of Carter was the smile — the wide, toothy grin that helped elect him in the first place, then came to be caricatured by countless cartoonists as an emblem of naïveté.

But it was Carter’s great fortune to enjoy a post-presidency more than 10 times as long as his tenure in office — in March 2019, he became the longest-lived president ever — and by the time he died at 100, he had lived to see history’s verdict soften.

Carter entered home hospice care after a series of hospital stays, the Carter Center confirmed Feb. 18. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away Nov. 19, 2023.

If the 39th president did not achieve all he sought in four years in the White House — and he did not — his abiding concern for human rights in international affairs, and for energy and the environment as a defining challenge of our time, can now be seen as prescient. If, in later years, his unyielding support for Palestinian rights (and his frequent sharp criticisms of Israel) drew many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt stands as a milestone of modern diplomacy.

If he was the first president to confront what we now call “Islamic extremism,” he was far from the last. And if he sacrificed his re-election to the super-powerlessness of the Iranian hostage crisis — and a botched military raid to rescue the captives — his administration’s persistence nevertheless brought all 52 diplomats safely home in the end.

At a time when only six women had ever served a president’s Cabinet, Carter had appointed three of them — along with three of the five women ever to serve as departmental undersecretaries, and 80 percent of those to serve as assistant secretaries. There is almost no battle over policy or public image that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama ever faced as first lady that Carter’s trusted wife, Rosalynn, did not fight first — whether campaigning for mental health, or sitting in on Cabinet meetings.

James Earl Carter Jr. could be pious (“I’ll never lie to you,” he pledged while campaigning in 1976). He could be petty (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was roundly mocked). He could be tone-deaf (lecturing his countrymen on a national “crisis of confidence” in a way that only accented the problem, and dispensing with some of the pomp of the presidency that ordinary people actually liked and expected).

But he could also be disarmingly candid, in a political culture that almost never rewards that trait (who can forget his confession to Playboy magazine that he had lusted after women not his wife and committed adultery many times in his heart?). And he had a gift for improbable friendships — not least with the man he so narrowly and bitterly defeated, Gerald Ford, and with John Wayne, the arch-conservative whose support nevertheless helped him pass the 1977 treaty surrendering the Panama Canal.

He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor Blacks, and was the only president ever to live in public housing — upon his discharge from the Navy, when he went home to take over his family’s peanut business after his father’s death. He was the son of a staunch segregationist, and in his early career, right up to his election as governor of Georgia in 1970, he often finessed the issue of race. But on taking office in the state house, he proclaimed that “the time for discrimination is over,” and Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South.

Carter’s life had a classic Horatio Alger arc. As a teenager, he joined the Future Farmers of America and cultivated, packed and sold his own acre of peanuts. He fulfilled his dream of an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and went on to become a protégé of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, in the post-World War II submarine fleet. He married a childhood friend of his sister Ruth, and raised four children.

His first political post was that quintessential American office: chairman of his local school board, where in the early 1960s, he first spoke up in favor of integration. Two terms in the Georgia State Senate and an unsuccessful run for governor in 1966 paved the way for his election as governor in 1970. By the end of 1972, he had become determined to launch a presidential campaign, but the long odds against him were exemplified in a 1973 appearance on “What’s My Line,” where none of the celebrity panelists recognized him and only the movie critic Gene Shalit eventually guessed he was a governor.

But Carter’s status as an unknown outsider was a distinct advantage in the wake of Watergate — an edge understood early by the late R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times — and he quickly became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, winning the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In 1976, he published his campaign manifesto-cum-memoir, the self-confidently titled, “Why Not the Best?” and the rest is history.

At his inauguration, Carter brought a bracing fresh breeze to Washington, walking from the Capitol to the White House after his swearing-in. But soon enough he brought a stern and scolding tone as well, ordering the White House thermostats to be set at a frigid 65 degrees (a move he ostentatiously announced in a televised “fireside chat,” wearing a tan cardigan), selling off the presidential yacht Sequoia, banning hard liquor from White House parties and limiting the playing of “Hail to the Chief” at official functions.

Much of the national media and Washington’s chattering class quickly pronounced the new president a rube, out of his depth and surrounded by a “Georgia Mafia” equally unschooled and uncouth. He requited with prickly disdain for his critics. The very style that had seemed unpretentious and refreshing now seemed sanctimonious and crabbed, and on the substance, he just couldn’t seem to catch a break. He was saddled with a national economy stuck in “stagflation,” and by June 1978, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution was analyzing why his presidency had failed: because it lacked an overriding vision.

In an afterword to excerpts from his White House diaries, published in 2010, Carter would write: “As is evident from my diary, I felt at the time that I had a firm grip on my presidential duties and was presenting a clear picture of what I wanted to accomplish in foreign and domestic affairs. The three large themes of my presidency were peace, human rights and the environment (which included energy conservation).” But, he added, “In retrospect, though, my elaboration of these themes and departures from them were not as clear to others as to me and my White House staff.”

In 1980, Carter faced a challenge for re-nomination from Sen. Ted Kennedy, and then lost the November election to his polar opposite, Ronald Reagan. He sulked for a while, then bought a $10,000 Lanier word processor, composed the first of the more than two dozen books he would write on leaving office, and set about establishing his presidential library and Carter Center in partnership with Emory University in Atlanta.

Over the ensuing decades, he would build houses Habitat for Humanity, monitor foreign elections, conduct semi-sanctioned (and sometimes unsolicited) diplomacy, and continue to offer various unvarnished assessments of his successors of both parties. Posing in 2009 in the Oval Office with all the living members of the presidential club just after Barack Obama’s election, he could not restrain himself from leaving a conspicuous physical distance between himself and his fellow southerner Bill Clinton, an old frenemy whose extramarital affair in office so offended Carter, long the nation’s Sunday school teacher-in-chief. (He continued to live the part: Carter kept teaching Sunday school in Georgia year after year, taking a picture afterward with everyone who attended.)

Most surveys of professional historians still rank Carter in the third quartile of effective presidents (as it happens, on par with his friend Jerry Ford). Carter himself preferred the simple summary of his vice president, Walter Mondale: “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.”

In the long line of the presidency, that’s not the best boast ever. But it’s far from the worst.

© Giles Price/Camera Press via Redux Pictures

President-elect Donald Trump appears to be siding with Elon Musk and his other backers in the tech industry as a dispute over immigration visas has divided his supporters.

Trump, in an interview with the New York Post on Saturday, praised the use of visas to bring skilled foreign workers to the U.S. The topic has become a flashpoint within his conservative base.

“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said.

In fact, Trump has in the past criticized the H-1B visas, calling them “very bad” and “unfair” for U.S. workers. During his first term as president, he unveiled a “Hire American” policy that directed changes to the program to try to ensure the visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants.

Despite his criticism of them and attempts to curb their use, he has also used the visas at his businesses in the past, something he acknowledged in his interview Saturday.

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” Trump told the newspaper.

He did not appear to address questions about whether he would pursue any changes to the number or use of the visas once he takes office Jan. 20.

Trump’s hardline immigration policies, focused mostly on immigrants who are in the country illegally, were a cornerstone of his presidential campaign and a priority issue for his supporters.

But in recent days, his coalition has split in a public debate largely taking place online about the tech industry’s hiring of foreign workers. Hard-right members of Trump’s movement have accused Musk and others in Trump’s new flank of tech-world supporters of pushing policies at odds with Trump’s “America First” vision.

Software engineers and others in the tech industry have used H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers and say they are a critical tool for hard-to-fill positions. But critics have said they undercut U.S. citizens who could take those jobs. Some on the right have called for the program to be eliminated.

© Pool photo by Brandon Bell

Far-right activist Laura Loomer said she was suspended for 12 hours on X following a clash with its billionaire owner Elon Musk and the MAGA base over highly skilled foreign workers.

Loomer said in a post Friday afternoon that she was temporarily booted from the social media site for “raising concerns and speaking the truth about the technocratic takeover of our country and the White House.”

“How can you call yourself a ‘free speech absolutist’ and then punish someone by restricting their speech?” Loomer wrote. “We need to have an honest conversation about Big Tech influence over MAGA.”

Loomer said X also removed her blue checkmark and deactivated her subscriptions. Users can get paid by X for their posts by offering subscriptions to their feeds but the content must be in compliance with X’s rules, which Loomer violated, according to her post.

The online brawl started after Loomer criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for artificial intelligence adviser — Sriram Krishnan, a former partner at venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz who was born in India. Loomer took issue with Krishnan’s previous support for allowing more highly-skilled immigrants to enter the United States. She later fired off a slew of posts at Musk alongside claims that highly-skilled immigrants don’t have "running water or toilet paper."

Loomer was previously banned from several social media sites in 2020, before Musk owned the platform. She has a history of spreading far-right conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant views. Loomer has a direct line to Trump and traveled with him to a presidential debate in September.

Musk, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s reelection, bought the social media company then known as Twitter in 2022, in part because he said the company blocked users too aggressively. Part of his mission with controlling the platform, he said at the time, was to foster a space for free speech and open debate.

Trump himself has yet to weigh in as the online rift has boiled over into the public view, though a spokesperson for his transition team pointed to an X post written by incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller that cited a 2020 speech from Trump about American innovation.

But the brouhaha between Trump’s backers in Silicon Valley and the anti-immigrant MAGA base reflects some key challenges for today’s Republican Party: the coalition that helped give Trump a second term won’t always get along.

Musk has not commented directly on Loomer’s suspension, but he posted "a reminder" that the algorithm automatically minimizes the reach of a user if they're repeatedly blocked or muted by other credible accounts.

“Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore.” Musk wrote on X.

© Matt Rourke/AP

An online debate over high-skilled immigration between Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and MAGA evangelists reveals Donald Trump’s Republican Party is grappling with growing pains as it prepares to retake the White House.

Days after the powerful allies of Trump in Silicon Valley took to social media to argue for a greater number of high-skilled immigrants, with a side-swipe at American culture for emphasizing "mediocrity over excellence," some members of the far-right said such policies would make America "look like India."

Enter Republican leaders like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who is trying to bridge the party’s divide on a key electoral issue for Trump, even as the president-elect has yet to weigh in on the debate.

Everyone fighting over high-skilled immigration "is engaged in saving this country,” she wrote on X.

She continued, “Here is some tough reality for some of you: There are some big MAGA voices with large social media platforms throwing down their opinions yet they have never run a company that relies on thousands of skilled/highly trained workers with a constant need for reliable labor yet they claim authority over the subject matter.”

Her comments come as other Republican lawmakers have publicly denounced calls from tech entrepreneurs to increase foreign high-skilled immigration.

"The United States graduates over half a million STEM students per year. If there is an issue in the tech workforce, then we need to address it at the educational level, not import a problem away," said Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) in an  X post on Thursday.

A Trump transition spokesperson declined to comment but pointed POLITICO to an X post from incoming White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller wrote Thursday that cited a Trump speech from four years ago. “Above all, our children, from every community, must be taught that to be American is to inherit the spirit of the most adventurous and confident people ever to walk the face of the Earth,” Miller quoted Trump from the speech given July 3, 2020, at Mount Rushmore, which went on to cite many examples of American innovation.

It’s the latest chapter in a controversy that spread after far-right activist Laura Loomer criticized Trump for naming Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and investor who has advocated for lifting country caps on green cards, as his senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence, calling him a "career leftist."

Loomer wrote, "We are substituting a third world migrant invasion for a third world tech invasion," and later followed up with, "'High skilled immigrant' doesn’t have running water or toilet paper."

Musk hit back, writing on Christmas Day that a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” is the “fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley” that could be addressed through an increase of skilled-labor visas. Ramaswamy followed on Thursday with a post that blamed a culture that "venerates Cory from 'Boy Meets World,' or Zach & Slater over Screech in 'Saved by the Bell,' or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in 'Family Matters'" — a favoring of popularity over smarts that "will not produce the best engineers."

That earned a swift rejoinder from Nick Fuentes, a conservative firebrand who wrote, “I don’t know who needs to hear this but the latest push for H-1B visas actually has nothing to do with jocks and nerds or high school prom — it’s about whether we want 500 million indians to move here.”

H1-B visas, which allow U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in tech and other specialized jobs on a short-term basis, have come under scrutiny as hardline immigration advocates claim they lower wages for U.S. workers.

In the latest twist, Loomer said Musk removed her X verification on Friday, first reported by the anti-Trump outlet Meidas Touch. "So much for free speech. Quite totalitarian if you ask me," Loomer wrote in a post. A spokesperson for X did not respond to questions.

Some of the newest arrivals to the Republican party, MAGA converts in Silicon Valley are pushing an immigration agenda that boosts their industry in a party that has built its brand on anti-immigrant sentiment.

Some of those recent converts are hoping to recast the heated disagreement as a healthy and open conversation — and a better alternative to how Democrats handle the issue.

"MAGA debate is about people sharing their ideas and getting others to subscribe to them," said Cameron Winklevoss, a tech executive who backed Trump, in a post on X. "Left debate is about people sharing party talking points (usually wrong) and getting others who don’t subscribe to them cancelled."

Meanwhile, Democrats are praising immigration as one of America's powerful drivers of prosperity.

In a Washington Post interview, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley, supported Krishnan and entrepreneurs in tech who have chosen to become American citizens.

He posted, "It is GREAT that talent around the world wants to come here, not to China, & that Sriram can rise to the highest levels. It's called American exceptionalism."

And it's causing some other Democrats to cast the division between Republicans and the Trump movement at large as racist.

“The far-right backlash against Indian immigrants confirms what we in the Democratic Party have long known,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said in a post on X. “That the far right is implacably hostile to all forms of non-European immigration regardless of legal status. It’s not about status. It’s about race. The far right prefers 'purity' over prosperity.”

© John Bazemore/AP

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

Trump pushes back on attacks over Elon's growing influence

lead image

President-elect Donald Trump is setting the record straight: He’s calling the shots, not Elon Musk.

"No, he's not going to be president, that I can tell you," Trump said with a laugh at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix on Sunday, his first major speech following the November election. "And I'm safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn't born in this country."

The president-elect made the tongue-in-cheek comment while praising South African-born Musk as a “great guy.” Musk, along with tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is set to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, an agency with the goal of shrinking the size of government and cutting spending.

Trump’s comments came as Democrats have sought to use Musk, the world’s richest person, as a foil, accusing him of undermining the incoming president.

Just days before, Trump — along with Musk — intervened in House Republicans’ initial government spending package, leading to chaos as Congress raced against the clock to avoid a government shutdown.

Some congressional Democrats raised concerns about Musk’s influence over congressional Republicans, and have taunted Trump by alleging that Musk is the one in charge. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, put out a video calling Trump “vice president” to “President Musk.”

Republicans have sought to downplay any rift between the two, with Trump’s team dismissing those claims as “ridiculous.” Amid the spending bill debacle last week, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, said, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

“All the different hoaxes, and the new one is, ‘President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk,’” Trump said to the crowd on Sunday. “No, no. That’s not happening.”

Musk has been flexing his political muscles in recent months, including pouring more than $260 million into the 2024 election in support of Republicans. Last week, he said that he’s planning to fund moderate primary challengers to incumbent Democrats. Some Republicans have floated him as the next pick for speaker of the House in recent days, as Speaker Mike Johnson’s future appears shaky.

The Musk comments came toward the end of Trump’s hour-plus-long victory lap of a speech, where he touted winning the popular vote, praised his “all-star” Cabinet picks and outlined goals for his upcoming term.

Trump’s speech was similar to those he delivered on the campaign trail over the 2024 cycle. He made bold claims about lowering taxes, taking back the Panama Canal and vowed not to rename military bases, a nod to his plans to end “woke” ideology in the military.

© Rick Scuteri/AP

At a moment when members of the opposite party rarely appear together on television, most political interviews are fleeting and the election may have doomed the last digital town square, David Axelrod’s podcast was an oasis.

Now, after a remarkable 605 shows over more than nine years, Axelrod is concluding his program by interviewing his fellow Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel.

I’m sad to see “The Axe Files” go, in part because it’s more essential now than ever.

Yes, it was respectful and it generated more light than heat. There were no food fights. But I come to praise Axe, not bury him in a shroud of bygone-day nostalgia for civil discourse.

What made the program so compelling — and unique in this period — was that he had candid, deeply personal and extended interviews with the leading figures in both parties. Where else can that combination be found today?
political interviews are fleeting
I should disclose here that Axelrod also had on a range of figures from the media, along with other walks of life, and I sat for a session in 2016. That’s the right word because the show was always equal parts therapy session and journalistic inquiry.

Axelrod doesn’t have psychiatric training — that I know of — but he was once a superb political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He’s got ink in his DNA and that came through in every program, when he’d try to make news or at least prompt reflection. I could always tell he hated the shows where his guests showed up with talking points. (Been there!)

These were no interrogations, though. Axelrod usually began the interviews by asking people about their backgrounds — “tell me about your folks” — and where they grew up. The son of an immigrant, Axelrod would invariably find common ground with those only a generation or two removed from freedom’s flame, no matter their politics.

Which gets to why the show was so vital. He revealed people as fully-formed, complex and, yes, contradictory humans. If you were looking for a cartoon caricature of the red or blue tribe to confirm your preferences, well, you had plenty of other options.

Axelrod is a partisan and is deeply alarmed with President-elect Donald Trump’s restoration. But I know he was proud of how many Republicans said yes, in some cases reluctantly, and sat down for a probing interview with a former Democratic strategist and the architect of Barack Obama’s political rise.

If we’re being honest, these Republicans agreed in part because Axelrod is an elite figure on the American political scene and the invitation conferred a level of status on the invitee. He has been in the proverbial smoke-filled room — plus even some in Illinois that weren’t proverbial — and political practitioners of all stripes respected that background.

Yet Republicans also said yes because Axelrod is, to borrow a word from his faith tradition, a mensch.

He’d challenge his guests but never sandbag them. The point was for people to tell their stories, reveal something of themselves and get on to the difficult business of discussing what politics is today. It was fitting that two of Axelrod’s final interviews were with two of the most prominent GOP figures from this year’s campaign: Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and CNN commentator Scott Jennings, who has become something of an Axelrod protégé (in the personal, not political, sense, if you’re listening Kentucky Republican primary voters).

Who were these two figures so many people read about or heard about this year? Well, if you listen to their “Axe Files” appearances you’ll know a great deal about what shaped them.

There was something else that made the show, like all the best podcasts, so captivating: Axelrod respected his audience’s intelligence. This was not 101-level stuff. If you can’t understand why his having 90-year-old Abner Mikva, the legendary Chicago lawmaker and jurist, on the podcast just months before Mikva’s passing was so poignant, perhaps the show wasn’t for you.

To be unsubtle about it: The jump from so much of the TV news blather that passes as political insight to podcasts like the Axe Files was akin to the aughts and teens transition from laugh-track broadcast TV sitcoms to premium shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. Who could go back? Who would want to?

Take Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who’s a fixture of TV news. Well, you know what Sanders isn’t discussing in a seven-minute interview? How there were three names not discussed in his Brooklyn boyhood home: Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Oh, and that he also wouldn’t have had the same voting record on guns had he represented his boyhood home rather than rural Vermont.

Sanders revealed as much in 2015 when he was Axelrod’s first guest. He also discussed his student civil rights activism at the University of Chicago, Axelrod’s alma mater and home to the Institute of Politics he founded.

“That pod set the tone,” Axelrod told me this week.

He also got the late Sen. John McCain to talk revealingly about all the time McCain spent visiting, chatting and reading Arizona news clips with an ailing Mo Udall, the former Arizona lawmaker who spent his final days confined in a nursing home. Unstated, because it doesn’t have to be, can you imagine a prominent Republican showing up every week to comfort a prominent Democrat gripped by disease?

Axelrod knows politics ain’t beanbag, and even though he’s out of the campaign business he’s close enough to it that he still pays a price for some grudges. Which is why you won’t find the current president in the Axe File archives: President Joe Biden was the only major Democratic contender in 2020 to skip the show, a snub rooted in the (now-revived!) hostilities between Bidenworld and Obama’s orbit.

But if Axelrod’s proximity to the top echelons of politics had some side effects on his bookings, his prominence also ensured some of his best gets.

My favorite, by far, was the remarkable 2016 conversation he had with a basketball legend, the gone-too-soon Bill Walton. I found Walton to be a great American character — his devotion to the Grateful Dead, the West and John Wooden needs no elaboration — and Axelrod met his match that day. Do yourself a favor and take in their chat. You’ll get through it and feel exhausted and satisfied — like you just played in a game of three-on-three against Big Red.

I listened to it, like I did many of Axelrod’s pods, on a long drive. The good ones passed the time. The great ones left me feeling like I had pulled up a chair at his table at Manny’s Deli and was eavesdropping over two people shooting the shit over half a Reuben and bowl of matzo ball soup.

Which is not to say Axelrod showed up like Larry King talking to Kato Kaelin, unprepared and just asking whatever came to mind while taking a few calls from Walla Walla and beyond to fill the hour.

Axelrod read deeply about his guests and often surprised them with how much he knew about their backgrounds. It took hours of work, so I get why he wants to wrap it up with over 600 under his belt. Especially when he has a separate podcast — speaking of kibitzing — with Mike Murphy and John Heilemann, Hacks on Tap.

But I’ll miss the “Axe Files” and I know others will, too.

As he introduced Emanuel on his final show, Axelrod said his goal had been to offer “one small antidote to the coarse nature of today’s politics and social media culture that so often reduces people to negative caricatures and robs us of our common humanity.”

Mission accomplished, brother.

© Josh Reynolds/AP

Donald Trump is getting a rude awakening that his grip on the GOP isn’t absolute.

Over the past 48 hours, 38 House Republicans rejected the stopgap spending bill that the president-elect publicly threw his weight behind after tanking Speaker Mike Johnson’s original proposal to keep the federal government running past Friday. Their defiance came even as Trump and his allies threatened to field primary challenges against GOP members who didn’t fall in line.

Then, on Friday night and early Saturday, the House and Senate passed a different version of the spending plan — one that didn’t include Trump’s demand to extend or end the debt limit.

It’s the latest example of Trump confronting the limits of his power, especially over his own party. Senate Republicans already dealt Trump a massive blow when a handful of them made clear they wouldn’t support Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, leading to him withdrawing. And that was after they chose John Thune over Rick Scott for Senate GOP leader against the wishes of Trump’s allies.

Taken together, rank-and-file Hill Republicans’ early rebuffs of Trump show the party is far from total lock-step with the president-elect.

“For a long time there were always calls for ‘who in the Republican Party will ever stand up to Trump?’ And now we certainly have it. But it may not be in an ideal way,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee in Trump’s first administration.

“This is an inflection point: How Trump responds from outside the caucus, how he deals with those who are not ready to make deals … this is really just prepping the battlefield and testing the waters for the next four years to come,” Bartlett said.

Trump’s push to get Republicans to accede to his demands ran headlong into longstanding GOP resistance to suspending the debt ceiling. Doing that is a huge ask of fiscal conservatives, and viewed through that lens, it’s unsurprising that the bill went down.

While Trump had hailed the reworked deal as “SUCCESS in Washington” and urged “All Republicans, and even the Democrats” to vote for the bill that he called “VITAL to the America First Agenda,” some in his party broke rank.

“Republicans campaigned on cutting spending and reducing the $35 trillion national debt. You can't achieve that by suspending the debt limit,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) wrote on X on Thursday. “Until President-elect Trump takes office, I won't grant Joe Biden an extension on an unlimited debt ceiling.”

Rep. Greg Lopez (R-Colo.), another Republican who opposed the bill Thursday, said in a statement that he could not back a continuing resolution “that does not consider our nation's growing $36 trillion debt and removes the debt ceiling, creating an open check book for Congress to spend more money it already doesn't have.”

And Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) said on X that “ending reckless spending and tackling the national debt immediately” is what will allow Trump to “shake up the status quo.”

“I understand President Trump’s concern that a debt ceiling fight will delay the implementation of his agenda but to Make America Great Again, we have to end business as usual in Washington right here, right now,” McCormick wrote.

Their resistance is an early indicator of areas in which Republicans are willing to break with Trump on policy — and a warning sign that while the incoming president has enjoyed broad sway over Johnson, that influence may not extend to every member in the party’s rank-and-file on every vote. And with such a slim majority in the House, the defiance of just a few Republicans can have an impact.

“We talk about MAGA, Freedom Caucus, etc., but there’s a sizable chunk of the conference that are OG Tea Partiers,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and Hill alum. “Raising the debt ceiling tests the boundaries of what is otherwise an enormous influence over the party.”

A person close to Trump, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, characterized the outcome as a win for the president-elect because it showed the whip count within the caucus and “eliminated a bunch of the pork.”

And Johnson, speaking to reporters after the House vote, signaled that Trump was on board with the reworked spending plan. Johnson was in “constant contact” with Trump, he said, and the president-elect “knew exactly what we were doing and why.”

But Trump has been prodding Johnson to deal with the debt ceiling for over a month, the person close to the incoming president said. And in the hours after his preferred deal went down in flames, he began advocating to push out the debt ceiling even further — to 2029.

The spending debacle has left some Republicans concerned that, like in his first term, Trump may not be able to get as much done as hoped because, they say, he is focused on the wrong things.

One person close to Trump, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly, worried the president-elect’s decision to use his political capital to unsuccessfully try to pass a new funding bill suspending the debt ceiling could echo back to his failed attempts to kill Obamacare early in his first term — instead of pursuing a more popular policy such as an infrastructure overhaul.

“I’m hoping we’re not in that same spot right here,” the person said.

© Evan Vucci/AP

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

President-elect Donald Trump’s allies are opening a new front in MAGA’s war with traditionalist Republicans — feuding over the leadership of top Senate campaign groups.

Typically a little noticed and relatively drama-free affair, hiring at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and its allied GOP super PAC Senate Leadership Fund has devolved in recent weeks into bickering over whether prospective new leaders are sufficiently loyal to Trump and the movement he created.

And after initially targeting the highest positions, MAGA Republicans’ objections are now extending even to less senior hires. The latest gripe is aimed at Brendan Jaspers, who was just tapped as the NRSC’s political director for the 2026 midterms. The campaign against him has included private efforts to undermine his credentials and, publicly, some pointed social media posts from top Trump allies.

MAGA activists and consultants said their concern about Jaspers stems from his work as director of campaigns at the anti-tax Club for Growth, which opposed Trump in the 2024 primary before later making up with him.

“With all the available talent that is available,” said a top 2024 Trump adviser who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, “the NRSC seems more intent on finding people who only ran efforts against President Trump.”

The person argued that Jaspers “did just that.”

Tom Schultz, the Club’s vice president of campaigns, refuted that claim, saying Jaspers’ work centered on Senate and House races and school-choice advocacy, and that he “did not participate” in the independent expenditures opposing Trump in the primary.

Jaspers has quickly become a flashpoint in a broader struggle to gain influence in the Senate campaign apparatus. MAGA Republicans have complained about hiring choices by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the incoming NRSC chair. And privately even some GOP consultants supportive of Scott are baffled by his decisions that seem primed to antagonize Trump’s orbit.

This intraparty warfare is driven in part by the vacuum caused by Sen. Mitch McConnell’s exit from GOP leadership, in which some Trump allies have moved to gain an advantage in a post-election scramble for power.

Scott, a more traditionalist Republican, infuriated Trump allies when he attempted to bring on as the committee’s executive director a one-time adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, who became a staunch Trump critic after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

That aide, Stephen DeMaura, was just named deputy executive director, while Scott’s former chief of staff, Jennifer DeCasper was given the executive director role. NOTUS first reported the move. DeMaura was expected to assume the role of executive director — and he was introduced as such at an NRSC event last month. But his hire was not announced publicly. And after MAGA activists openly criticized him, that appeared to change, with Scott on Thursday announcing DeCasper as executive director and DeMaura as her deputy.

A spokesperson for Scott did not comment for this story. In a press release sent by the NRSC on the new hires, Scott said, “I’m excited about the organization we are building, the wins we will put on the board, and the results we will deliver for the American people." The release also touted Jaspers as having “helped elect conservative senators such as Ted Budd, Mike Lee, Bernie Moreno, and Jim Banks.” It said DeMaura "has started, led, and grown political organizations of all types across a more than 20-year career in politics and public policy."

A Scott aide pointed to posts on X celebrating the staffing moves, including from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who called them “a strong machine of MAGA warriors.”

The recriminations haven’t stopped at Scott, who ran against Trump in the 2024 primary before becoming a devoted ally in the general election.

A consultant deemed insufficiently loyal by some in Trump’s orbit, Kevin McLaughlin, is also not a contender to lead the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, according to two people familiar with the process, despite rumors that he was in the mix. People who spoke with McLaughlin said he told them he was in the running for the position, spurring threats from close Trump allies that they would form a competing super PAC, but it’s not clear if he was ever seriously considered.

McLaughlin told POLITICO that he had “no conversations with anyone” about taking over at SLF and he strongly disputes the suggestion that he is not loyal to Trump.

The feuding over NRSC hiring has continued, however, and spilled into public view when Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign co-chair, took a shot at the committee on X.

“Whoever is making decisions at the @NRSC needs their head examined,” he posted.

Meanwhile, Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who traveled on Trump’s plane during the campaign, bashed Jaspers specifically — before his position was announced — taking to X to highlight his connection to Club for Growth.

Trump and the Club for Growth have a long and complicated history. The Club, a power center for fiscal conservatives, opposed Trump in the 2024 primary. But the group’s president David McIntosh and Trump, who once called it the “Club for China Growth,” made peace in February.

Trump himself has not weighed in publicly on the recent hires at Senate GOP groups. Complaints about staffing stem from people with varying degrees of closeness to the president-elect. And it is possible that some of the disputes may be more driven by the financial interests and personal grievances of political consultants than concerns about the ideological purity of the party. According to Scott’s team, he and Trump are in contact about his staffing.

But two people with knowledge of the hires said some Trump allies wanted Dylan Lefler, a former campaign manager for MAGA ally Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), to be the group’s political director. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

And the infighting underscores the battle to reshape the traditional GOP into a party in the mold of MAGA wing — and it marks a stark contrast from the tenure of the departing NRSC Chair Steve Daines, who judiciously courted Trump and his allies as he sought to retake the Senate majority in 2024.

Scott’s hiring moves in particular have surprised some GOP strategists, who see them as unforced errors that cause distracting fights with MAGA loyalists. Scott and Trump have a personal relationship, and he was under consideration to be vice president. But any awkwardness between their top staffers could hamper the NRSC as it seeks to grow its majority — especially because there will be so many competing demands on the president-elect’s attention to help various campaign groups with tasks such as fundraising or recruitment.

Scott makes hiring decisions at the campaign arm, but incoming Senate GOP leader John Thune will be heavily involved in staffing the SLF super PAC.

SLF was long run by top McConnell lieutenants, who played a prominent role in selecting aides for the Senate campaign groups. SLF’s current president, Steven Law, announced after the election that he would vacate the post.

The super PAC and its allied nonprofit will direct hundreds of millions of dollars of spending in Senate races. Former Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) was recently named as chair of its board but the top staff position remains open.

© Matt Rourke/AP

Chris Wilson, the founder and CEO of top Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence, was fired after company audits found he likely used firm money to pay for personal expenses, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

It comes after his firm’s CFO was fired and charged with embezzlement earlier this year, a charge that she denies. That led people on WPAi’s leadership team to start looking into how Wilson had spent company money, according to the people.

Two outside auditing firms were hired to conduct investigations, and two business consultants were later brought on to restructure the company and restore its profitability, according to the people. Wilson, who has worked on behalf of presidential efforts for Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz, was fired on Dec. 5, according to the people, and is no longer listed on the company’s website.

The audits of the company’s finances found that over the past several years Wilson used firm money to pay for items that were likely for personal expenses, such as vacations, health charges and the use of a nanny, according to five people with direct knowledge of the situation. Wilson at times used WPAi’s money to pay large portions of his personal credit card bill, which he would also use for company business, according to two of the people. The people declined to share the audit with POLITICO.

The people in this story were granted anonymity to disclose sensitive personnel matters.

Ryan Leonard, a lawyer representing Wilson, called the allegations behind Wilson’s firing “defamatory and false.”

“Chris’s former business partners at WPAi at all times had complete transparency into all aspects of the business, including every single business transaction,” he said in a statement. “The timing of these allegations is particularly surprising given that, following completion of a recent audit, Chris was actually given a raise. While Chris recently left the company following the election, he wishes his former team members at WPAi all the best.”

In a text message to POLITICO before he was fired from WPAi, Wilson said he “was confident that my record of ethical leadership and professional achievement speaks for itself.”

“When you run a company, business and personal sometimes become intertwined,” he said, noting that he paid three full paychecks for all WPAi employees at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic out of his personal bank account so that he didn’t have to lay anyone off. (He said he didn’t reimburse himself after.)

WPAi covered some work trips for Wilson’s wife to accompany him because he had a stroke a few years ago and has been advised by a physician not to take overnight trips by himself, according to a person who has worked with Wilson.

A WPAi spokesperson said the firm couldn’t comment on what it called “ongoing litigation” but added in a statement: “[I]t’s clear that Mr. Wilson has not been forthcoming about the circumstances leading to his departure. We are focused on moving forward and are relieved that this challenging chapter is behind us.” The spokesperson declined to comment when asked about the details of the litigation.

A spokesperson for Axiom Strategies, the mega Republican consulting firm owned by Jeff Roe and one of the minority investors in WPAi, declined to comment.

Earlier this year, Wilson used WPAi money to pay an employee of his personal real estate business, Carver Management, to work a full time job for that real estate entity, according to two people familiar with the matter. A document reviewed by POLITICO also shows that the employee in question worked full-time for Carver. WPA also rents its Edmond, Oklahoma, office space from Carver Management, according to local real estate records.

Three of the people directly familiar with the matter said there had been surprise transfers from WPAi to Carver this year. In April, $40,000 was sent from WPAi to Carver, and $20,000 was sent in September, two of the people said. This year, WPAi has paid for Carver’s insurance coverage and building association dues, according to two of the people.

Wilson said that WPAi paid a “highly reduced price per square foot” for rent from his real estate firm and Carver loses money on the space every month. He also said that the employee in question was paid for Carver work by that firm, not by WPAi.

Such expenses have hurt the company’s bottom line in the last year, according to three of the people familiar with the company. Some vendors have not received payments on time, and non-sales staff received their quarterly bonuses late for several quarters and not at all in the second quarter, said one of the people. That left employees angry, the person said, since the bonuses account for a sizable portion of their election-year income.

This past cycle, WPAi, which Wilson founded in 1998, has done work for numerous Republicans, including the Congressional Leadership Fund, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Reps. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) and Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), according to FEC records.

Wilson’s dismissal comes after his CFO, Catherine Gryder, was fired from WPAi in November 2023 for her own use of company cash, according to two people familiar with the matter. She was fired a few days after her fiancé at the time had come to the firm’s office asking for a check for a painting job he had done for the office even though it didn’t need to be painted, according to one of the people. That raised alarm bells with a WPAi staffer, who then told Wilson about the incident and set off an internal investigation.

Wilson went to the police, and Oklahoma prosecutors charged Gryder in June with one felony count of embezzlement over $1,000. She pleaded not guilty and appeared in court in late November as the case winds its way through the court system, according to court records. An Edmond police report also said that Gryder had admitted to embezzling more than $11,000 from WPAi and Carver “but planned to pay it all back,” and actually did send a $16,000 check to Wilson’s attorney. The incident has not previously been reported.

Gryder’s lawyer declined to comment.

Wilson also declined to comment on specifics of the Gryder case, saying it’s an ongoing criminal matter. In a statement released before his own departure from the firm, he said: “This has been the most challenging experience of my professional career. Throughout this ordeal, I have strived to act in accordance with my faith and uphold my personal integrity. My primary focus has been, and continues to be, shielding our employees and clients from any fallout. I remain unwavering in my commitment to these principles.”

According to the police report, Gryder quietly siphoned off money, spent money on a company owned by her romantic partner and used a WPAi business account to pay for her personal insurance and phone accounts.

“There was a lot of moving money around and trying to hide what she was doing,” said Bill Simmons, who was COO of WPAi at the time and left at the end of August.

This was the second time that Gryder had allegedly done this to a firm owned by Wilson. In 2019, according to the police report, she charged around $17,000 to $18,000 in items from Apple’s music store to a business credit card owned by a firm of Wilson’s.

“Chris, being who he is, tried to work with this person, offer a sense of forgiveness and try to keep moving forward, but the second time was so egregious, there was just no opportunity,” said Simmons. “So once we discovered it, she was fired immediately.”

Gryder’s sparse LinkedIn profile, which still carries her maiden name Catie Ross, calls herself a “Christian. Mom. Wife. Aunt” and says she is an “experienced accountant with a demonstrated history of working in the accounting industry.”

Two decades ago, Wilson was fired by his polling firm’s then-parent company Qorvis and sued for allegedly “stealing corporate secrets and cash while plotting to launch a competing firm,” accusations that he denied, in a case that was eventually settled. Wilson was also sued in 2021 by his ex-wife, who claimed he had continued to improperly use a data software platform to collect voter data that she had gotten in the divorce.

Wilson is disputing the allegations in court and Leonard, his lawyer, said “the lawsuit has no bearing” in facts.

© Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via email with Donald Trump's transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.

The private emails have agency employees considering insisting on in-person meetings and document exchanges that they otherwise would have conducted electronically, according to two federal officials granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Their anxiety is particularly high in light of recent hacking attempts from China and Iran that targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and other top officials.

“I can assure you that the transition teams are targets for foreign intelligence collection,” said Michael Daniel, a former White House cyber coordinator who now leads the nonprofit online security organization Cyber Threat Alliance. “There are a lot of countries out there that want to know: What are the policy plans for the incoming administration?”

Trump — who attacked his then-opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for official business during his first presidential run — is overseeing a fully privatized transition that communicates from an array of @transition47.com, @trumpvancetransition.com and @djtfp24.com accounts rather than anything ending in .gov, and uses private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.

This break with tradition stems from the Trump team forgoing federal funding and the ethics and transparency requirements that come with it.

While it’s unclear how the decision is impacting a transition that is already behind, with fewer than five weeks remaining until Inauguration Day, one person familiar with the collaboration between the Biden administration and the Trump transition team, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions, said it is further hampering the process.

The dynamic is slowing efforts to share government materials with members of Trump’s landing teams, the person said, referring to the groups of transition officials assigned to meet with federal agencies ahead of the inauguration.

The White House has sent guidance to federal agencies to be cautious when communicating with the Trump transition, a spokesperson said, reminding them that they can elect to “only offer in person briefings and reading rooms in agency spaces” if they’re uncomfortable sending something electronically.

They also advised federal employees that they can require transition officials to “attest” that their private technology complies with government security standards.

“Because they don’t have official emails, people are really wary to share things,” said a State Department employee granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “I’m not going to send sensitive personnel information to some server that lives at Mar-a-Lago while there are so many fears of doxxing and hacking. So they have to physically come and look at the documents on campus, especially for anything with national security implications.”

The Trump transition confirmed its reliance on private emails, with spokesperson Brian Hughes saying in a statement that “all transition business is conducted on a transition-managed email server.”

“We have implemented plans to communicate information securely as necessary,” he added, but declined to say what those plans entail. In a statement in late November, transition co-chair Susie Wiles similarly cited unspecified “security and information protections” the team has in place, arguing that they replace the need for “additional government and bureaucratic oversight.”

The transition’s landing teams began arriving this week at some government agencies — more than a month later than past administrations have deployed them — to get up to speed on all of the resources and problems they will soon inherit. It’s a particularly vulnerable time for national security, stressed Daniel, adding that by rejecting government transition support, the Trump team is also opening itself up to hacking once it's in power.

“Once someone gets access to some of their information, they can think of ways to send better phishing emails down the road, because they learn more about you,” he explained. “And if you bring that device into a government space, hook it up to a government network, and access it through that account, they're able to steal your credentials and use that to log on and look like you — look like a legitimate user — and it becomes much harder to detect from a security standpoint.”

History is rife with examples of crises that came early in a new administration and were made worse by challenges passing information from an outgoing to an incoming president and his team, from the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the 1960s to the Waco standoff in the 1990s.

CUNY John Jay College associate professor Heath Brown, who wrote a book about Joe Biden's transition, said modern technology only makes that dynamic more risky and complicated.

“In 2020, it was maybe the single most important worry of the transition team, that they would be hacked, and all of this information, including intelligence information, personnel information about job applicants, the whole procedure would be threatened if there was a hack of the transition team,” Brown said. “The [General Services Administration] is in a position to help with that, but saying no to that help raises questions about whether they have put in place a secure system, as is needed in these situations.”

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© Getty Images/Kevin Dietsch

Political cartoons from the desk of Matt Wuerker.

NEW YORK — New York City’s defiant Democratic mayor ran into one hurdle after another Monday — facing mounting fallout from the investigations into him and his inner circle just as he tries to improve his precarious political standing.

The city’s Campaign Finance Board voted Monday morning to deny Mayor Eric Adams $4.5 million in public funds for his reelection. Ninety minutes later, his longest-serving, closest aide — Ingrid Lewis-Martin — and her lawyer announced the Manhattan district attorney will soon indict her on alleged corruption charges. More than 1,200 miles away, President-elect Donald Trump said he would consider pardoning the mayor in his federal bribery case — a legal lifeline that carries great political risk in a New York City Democratic primary.

The cascade of bad news comes as Adams faces attacks from a bevy of lesser-known Democrats running to unseat him next year, as well as the prospect of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo jumping into the primary. The mayor has been aggressively trying to change his circumstances lately — alleging he was targeted for his criticisms of outgoing President Joe Biden, lambasting local reporters for their negative coverage and pushing out a string of positive announcements about public safety, tax relief and affordable housing.

None of that was enough to help him navigate the bad news Monday, which culminated in a combative news conference in which his staff tried to cut off reporters as they asked questions about the pressing stories.

In denying Adams matching funds, the local board condemned him to another six months of fundraising ahead of next June’s Democratic primary, a significant setback for any incumbent — though it is one he can appeal.

The board partially based its decision on a five-count federal indictment alleging Adams participated in a bribery scheme involving the Turkish government. The mayor has pleaded not guilty and will face trial in April.

On top of that, with its decision Monday, the board hand-delivered a line of attack that’s sure to dog the mayor throughout his campaign.

“There is now even less of a shot of Mayor Adams winning reelection,” said Democratic strategist Trip Yang, an adviser to Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a potential Adams challenger. “He could raise more contributions, but it will require a lot of effort and time. And this adds to the litany of credibility arguments that could be used against him for the Trump-averse Democratic primary electorate.”

Adams noted at his press conference that while several of his potential competitors did not qualify for matching funds, the board could change its mind going forward. He did not, however, mention that his rivals were denied for different reasons.

“We’re going to continue to work with CFB to answer any questions that they have so we can continue to get the funding,” Adams said. “Even without the funding, we have out-raised substantially everyone else that’s in the race."

He also had to contend with pending troubles for Lewis-Martin, who abruptly resigned Sunday ahead of expected criminal charges this week. She has been Adams’ closest and most loyal adviser for decades — and is departing his ranks during one of the most tenuous chapters in his political career.

The mayor addressed the loss — which came as the two have been reportedly feuding — in deeply personal terms Monday.

"Whenever I walked on stage to do a State of the City, or go to a debate, no matter what I did, she would walk in the room, ask everyone to leave, and she would grab my hands and she would pray for me,” Adams said. “This morning I did it for her — I lifted her up in prayer.”

The mayor said she is “not only a friend but she’s my sister, and I love her so much, and I just really ask God to give her strength in the days to come.”

Lewis-Martin’s press conference at the office of her attorney, Arthur Aidala, was a reminder that investigations into Adams and his inner circle are still piling up. Aidala, a friend and donor to Adams, answered in the affirmative when asked if he believed that Manhattan prosecutors were trying to get his client to cooperate in a case against the mayor.

For Adams, those legal troubles may be alleviated by the incoming president.

The Republican has shown sympathy toward the Democratic mayor, and each insists Biden’s Department of Justice is targeting them to seek political retribution.

In Adams’ case, he publicly criticized Biden’s handling of the migrant crisis. And both Adams and Trump say that act spurred the DOJ to action.

“I said he’s going to be indicted,” Trump said Monday during a press briefing at Mar-a-Lago. “And a few months later he got indicted. So, I would certainly look into [a pardon].”

Adams referred questions about Trump’s remarks to his attorney and said he hopes the president-elect will make the DOJ less politicized.

"I think that what President-elect Trump has gone through is allowing him to see that if the Justice Department is doing what President Biden stated, such as being politicized, I believe he owes it to Americans to make sure that’s not the case,” Adams said.

A pardon from Trump would almost certainly be a political liability for Adams in a Democratic primary, in which left-of-center voters typically flock to the polls. In the last general election, Trump lost the city 68-30 — proving it remains an anti-Trump Democratic stronghold, even as he made significant gains statewide.

Whether any of Adams’ opponents can effectively wield that against him remains to be seen, but early signs show most of them are trying that line of attack — presuming voters will be turned off by any whiff of MAGA affiliation.

Adams had steered clear of criticizing Trump — or stumping for Kamala Harris — during the campaign. Since Election Day, he hosted the incoming border czar at his official residence of Gracie Mansion to discuss immigration policy, and has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk’s high-level role in the incoming White House.

“I should not have been charged,” Adams said at Monday’s press briefing. “God has a way of showing the irony of life: I’m just saying the same thing that President Biden said. President Biden stated his Justice Department has been politicized. President Trump stated that. I stated that.”

He was referring to Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, and the president’s subsequent statement alleging his own DOJ was engaging in politically motivated selective prosecution.

Adams’ no-good Monday came as things were starting to look up for the mayor.

Earlier this month, City Council members approvedAdams’ signature housing plan. He joined a politically influential union to announce a populist state measure to provide tax relief to low-wage workers. And the NYPD helped catch the 26-year-old suspect in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO — with a hefty assist from a fast food worker in Pennsylvania.

Back in City Hall, Adams pushed out top advisers who were ensnared in local and federal probes at the behest of Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove him from office. That group of embattled aides — including the former police commissioner, schools chancellor and two deputy mayors — has been replaced by government veterans whom insiders generally regard as serious and competent.

Political and government insiders particularly lauded his appointmentof Maria Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor in October as a sign the administration would begin to focus on governing amid the probes and charges.

City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak Altus said overall crime numbers have come down since Adams took office, while job numbers have increased.

“As Mayor Adams says all the time: ‘Stay focused, no distractions, and grind,’” she said in a statement. “The best way to serve New Yorkers is to continue keeping our eyes on the goal of improving this city and let the results speak for themselves.”

© Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

Highlights from Trump's freewheeling Mar-a-Lago presser

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Joe Biden will leave the White House in January as only the second Catholic to occupy it. But a number of Catholics are expected to soon fill the ranks of Donald Trump's administration.

Trump, who was raised as a Presbyterian but now considers himself non-denominational, has nominated at least a dozen Catholics to top positions in his administration, including his own vice president JD Vance, a Catholic convert, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick for Health and Human Services Secretary. Their faith could play a direct role in shaping public policy, from pro-union policies and new tariffs to expanding the child tax credit and more tightly regulating the food and drug industries — and also help carve a new path forward for the Republican Party.

In interviews, several conservative practicing Catholic leaders said they see a close alignment between many of Trump’s second-term policy priorities and a conservative read of Catholic social teaching, which goes far beyond abortion. It’s also focused on promoting marriage and having children, giving parents wide discretion on everything from school content to health care and empowering non-governmental institutions like churches and nonprofit organizations for social support.

“No one’s walking into the administration ready to mount a crusade or anything,” said Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. But “there’s a very specific sort of Catholic paradigm that you may begin to see.”

It comes after decades of influence of a more individualistic evangelical Protestantism on the Republican Party that, among other things, strongly embraced individual liberty and free market capitalism.

“The market is not an end unto itself. The market has a purpose — and that is to create a free and flourishing society. If the family is not doing well, society is not doing well. We need to make sure our public policy is helping family to function,” Bovard added.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment.

In his nearly decade of political prominence, Trump has already dramatically reshaped the GOP, and it’s clear that the Republican Party's future likely won’t be found in Ronald Reagan’s three-legged stool of conservatism, which was fiscally conservative, socially conservative and hawkish.

Where Republicans have long been skeptical of government intervention, some in the party increasingly see the government as a tool to reshape social policy. Republicans who long embraced “pro-life” policies, like restricting abortion access and supporting crisis pregnancy centers, are now leaning into a broader set of what they call pro-family policies that range from tax policies encouraging people to get married and have children to restrictions on kids accessing online porn. They are also now starting to turn a skeptical eye toward big businesses, including Big Pharma, Big Ag and Big Tech.

“I think President Trump has put together a very pro-family platform that wants to return the family to the center of public policy again. Obviously, I think that’s very Catholic. I don’t think he’s trying to be very Catholic,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. “It just so happens to coincide with Catholic principles and Catholic teaching.”

This is, of course, not the progressive-leaning Catholicism of Biden, Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats, which has honed in on social justice, climate change and health care access among its top causes. Their definition of Catholicism would bristle at the idea of turning away migrants or curtailing Medicaid access.

Catholics are the largest group of Christians worldwide, and Catholics from both parties have long held prominent positions not only in the White House but across Washington. Six of them sit on the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court; they make up a quarter of Congress, where they are overrepresented compared to the American population; and Biden appointed a similarly sizable number of Catholics to his Cabinet.

But conservative Catholic leaders see in the GOP’s embrace of populism a turn toward what they call a common-good conservatism that is less focused on individual rights and more focused on families and the community. It trades a pro-business focus for a “pro-family” one. And it’s one they see non-Catholics leaning into. Trump, in a recent interview with TIME Magazine, declared that the GOP has “become the party of common sense.”

“What does Catholic social teaching say about these things? Well, it says the aim of politics is the common good,” said Brian Burch, president of the conservative Catholic Vote. “And right now we have a huge swath of our population, especially families, that are not flourishing.”

Trump's performance with Catholics is only getting better — likely due in part to his dramatic improvement among Latino voters. This year, he won 59 percent of the Catholic vote, a group he carried with 50 percent support in 2016 and that Biden won with 52 percent in 2020, according to CNN exit polling.

Some conservative Catholics are particularly intrigued by Kennedy, whose uncle, John F. Kennedy, was the nation’s first Catholic president. While Kennedy comes from a storied Democratic family, and himself was a registered Democrat until 2023, some of them see his concerns that food and drug companies are profiting off of sick people aligning with Catholic social teaching’s concerns around human dignity and respect, even as some of them have concerns about his shifting views on abortion.

“Bobby has talked about the commoditization of the human person, whether it’s their sickness and their health — it’s just another vaccine away from managing. Or Big Food and Big Government and Big Pharma have colluded in a way to manage people as commodities, and they’re kind of cogs in a globalist machine that we just need to manage with medicine, technology and science,” said Burch, who is close to Kennedy. “And for Catholics, we say, well, wait, no there’s something much richer and deeper and more profound about what it means to be human that we need to recapture.”

Other Catholics that Trump has nominated to his Cabinet include Marco Rubio as secretary of State, Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor secretary, Sean Duffy as Transportation secretary, Linda McMahon as Education secretary, Elise Stefanik as United Nations ambassador, Kelly Loeffler as SBA administrator and John Ratcliffe as CIA director.

The party’s lean toward these parts of Catholicism comes as the country grapples with high rates of income inequality, and two generations confront the reality that middle-class goals like buying a house and having kids feel increasingly out of reach. It also comes amid a growing societal discussion over gender roles, stagnating birth rates and the ubiquity of technology, social media and artificial intelligence in people, and particularly kids’, everyday lives.

Leading the charge is Vance, whose conversion as an adult to a postliberal strain of Catholicism underpins his approach to policy making. While the George W. Bush era saw an attempt to marry conservatism to certain kinds of Catholic social teaching — government intervention to meet the needs of the poor, and support for human rights abroad — it fell by the wayside as the Tea Party wave took over the Party.

Now, “in Vance, you have a figure who is trying to apply Catholic social teaching in a deeper, different way than we've seen before,” said Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s just a general kind of attempt to reorient Republican economics toward families and a little bit less toward business.”

This conservative view of Catholic social teaching lines up in many ways with the party’s shifting views on a number of issues, like labor unions and trade policy. Vance, who joined a United Auto Workers picket line last year, has voiced familiarity with Pope Leo XIII’s 1901 encyclical on Christian democracy, in which he wrote that “it is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich.” Rubio has previously referenced the text in his own argument in support of labor unions, as has Robert Lighthizer, who was Trump’s trade chief during the first administration, in his arguments against “the orthodoxies of free trade religion.” (Lighthizer is unlikely to return to a Trump administration, but his close aide was chosen to be the U.S. trade representative.)

It also speaks to an increasing interest within the GOP in using the government to incentivize family creation, as countries in Europe, like Italy, Greece, Hungary and Russia, have tried to do, though so far with little success. Trump has said he wants a “significant” expansion of the child tax credit — Vance has suggested increasing it to $5,000 per child — and also promised to make in vitro fertilization available to Americans free of charge. (That policy does, however, conflict with the official Catholic Church’s position against IVF, which opposes it.)

It’s a push that comes also as there is growing movement within the anti-abortion movement to focus on these and other “pro-family” policies instead of new abortion restrictions, as much of the country remains broadly supportive of some level of abortion access.

“We’re going to be talking about [IVF],” Trump recently told NBC News’ Kristen Welker. “We’ll be submitting in either the first or second package to Congress the extension of the tax cuts. So that might very well be in there, or it’ll come sometime after that.”

Still, progressive Catholics are skeptical about the extent to which the GOP will actually prioritize these policies, when Trump has promised in his first 100 days to focus on extending tax cuts, taking action on the border, and addressing crime in cities. And it's unlikely big business, long allied with the Republican Party, will roll over easily.

“When you look at what the Republicans are talking about, they’re talking a whole lot more about cutting social provision than they are expanding it,” said E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has focused on Catholic engagement in the political arena. “The dominant strain in the party is still far more pro-business, anti-government, libertarian."

And progressive and some conservative Catholics agree that the administration’s hardline approach to immigration is likely to rankle U.S. bishops, who are already wary of Trump’s “mass deportation” proposal.

“When you’re looking at their first priority,” Dionne added, “it’s not family policy.”

© Francis Chung/POLITICO

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday announced that former Ambassador to Germany and top loyalist Richard Grenell will serve as a presidential envoy for “special missions,” ending weeks of speculation about the bombastic ally’s role in the second Trump administration.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said that his former acting director of national intelligence and special envoy for dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo “will work in some of the hottest spots around the World, including Venezuela and North Korea.”

The scope of the newly created position is unclear and the Trump transition team did not respond to a request for further details. Given the apparent focus on global flashpoints, It is possible Grenell’s portfolio could include Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Haiti or any number of other crises.

The announcement solves the mystery of the role Grenell would occupy in the second Trump administration, after Grenell’s name was conspicuously absent for the torrent of early senior administration and cabinet roles. Grenell had pushed to be named secretary of State, but lost out to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, frustrating more right-leaning foreign policy voices. He also turned down the role of director of national intelligence.

Speculation had then turned to the question of whether Grenell would be appointed to be a special envoy for Iran or the Russia-Ukraine crisis, or receive a high-profile ambassadorship.

In recent days, Trump had signaled the loyalist would end up with an important post. Trump on Wednesday night posted on Truth Social that: “Richard Grenell is a fabulous person, A STAR. He will be someplace, high up!”

Grenell’s position could set him up for conflict with Rubio and it was not clear from the announcement how Grenell’s role will interact with the State Department.

Trump’s post did not specify whether Grenell would face a confirmation process. Special envoys, by law, must receive Senate confirmation, but the Biden administration has at times gotten around that by tweaking job descriptions. Grenell, a pugilistic defender of the president-elect, could face some criticism from lawmakers, but is still likely to be confirmed if he faces a Senate confirmation process.

© J. Scott Applewhite/AP

President-elect Donald Trump descended Saturday on Washington’s hometown stadium for the annual Army-Navy football game, bringing with him key allies who have been selected to join his inner circle as he returns to the White House next month.

Trump was joined in his box seats by Vice President-elect JD Vance, as well as his picks for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth; and national security adviser, Mike Waltz. Elon Musk, who Trump has tapped to set up a so-called Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, also made an appearance.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a Trump foe-turned-ally whom Trump reportedly considered as a backup for defense secretary if Hegseth fails his Senate confirmation — was also at the game.

So was Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran who was acquitted last week of homicide after fatally choking a subway rider named Jordan Neely. Penny came at Vance’s invitation.

Trump attended the iconic yearly showdown between West Point’s Black Knights and Annapolis’ Midshipmen when he was president-elect in 2016 and throughout his first term in the White House.

Although Trump has drawn backlash for a series of controversial comments made about service members, veterans and their families, the military has historically leaned more conservative, and veterans backed Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 by a wide margin, according to Pew Research.

Earlier Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration banned drones around the stadium after a series of drone sightings across the Northeast prompted unsubstantiated claims that the drones were from an “Iranian mothership” — which the Pentagon has denied. On Friday, Trump suggested the drones should be shot down.

Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing contributed to this report. 

© Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday tapped Devin Nunes, the CEO of his social media platform Truth Social, to lead the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent group within the Executive Office that oversees the U.S. intelligence community’s compliance with the Constitution.

Nunes will continue leading Trump Media & Technology Group, a public company with a nearly $8 billion market cap. Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, with nearly 115 million shares that are currently worth about $4.2 billion.

Nunes previously served as a Republican lawmaker from California and was chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

“Devin will draw on his experience … and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump said Saturday in a Truth Social post.

The board “has access to all information necessary to perform its functions,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as direct access to the president.

Nunes has led Trump Media since late 2021. His selection to lead the Intelligence Advisory Board further ties the company to the incoming Trump administration. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, and Kash Patel, who has been tapped to become FBI director, both sit on Trump Media’s board alongside the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr.

© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday tapped businessperson and major political donor Bill White to serve as U.S. ambassador to Belgium.

White is the founder and CEO of Constellations Group, a Manhattan-based consulting firm, and previously served as president of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York.

“Bill has worked tirelessly to support Great American Patriots who have given everything for our Country by raising over $1.5 Billion Dollars for our fallen heroes, catastrophically wounded, and severely burned Service Members,” Trump said Saturday in a post on Truth Social. “He is a twice recipient of the Meritorious Public Service Award for extraordinary service from the U.S. Coast Guard, and for outstanding support from the U.S. Navy.”

White abruptly stepped down from his post leading the Intrepid in 2010 amid a probe launched by New York’s then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo into a state pension scandal. White allegedly acted as a middleman for investment companies hoping to win deals with the state fund, and “secretly” amassed fees from those deals — or as Cuomo put it, “used his access to fill his pockets.” White ultimately agreed to pay a $1 million settlement.

White was a major Trump donor and surrogate to his 2024 campaign, though the millionaire investor backed President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both Democrats, in past races. During the 2012 presidential election, White, who is openly gay, publically withdrew his support for Mitt Romney for being “on the wrong side of history” for his stance on marriage equality.

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© Kathy Willens/AP

Donald Trump’s team is crafting an executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, a monumental move the president-elect’s allies say is a key step in their long-term strategy: getting the issue before the Supreme Court.

The effect of Trump’s order would be to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants and short-term visitors to the U.S. from the right to citizenship by birth that is established under the 14th Amendment. And while there are few details on what exactly he would do and how sweeping the action would be, immigration restrictionists say Trump could do several things, including directing the State Department to refuse to issue passports to children without proof of the parents’ immigration status or the Social Security Administration to withhold Social Security numbers.

He could also direct agencies providing welfare and public benefits to U.S. citizens to deny these benefits to those claiming birthright citizenship, whose parents are in the country illegally. Details of the plan remain unclear, but it would deliver on a promise Trump has made over his entire political career: to restrict birthright citizenship.

Implementation would be no easy feat, but the Trump administration likely wouldn’t get far anyway — at least at first. Any move Trump makes to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents will be immediately challenged by pro-immigration groups and civil rights organizations. And conservative immigration groups are optimistic that the issue could eventually wind up before the nation’s highest court, which they hope will rule in their favor.

“What will happen is, the government will get sued, and it’ll go up to the Supreme Court, and we’ll finally get a final decision on this issue,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal and judicial studies fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The last case on this was 1898, so it’s a very long time ago. And I actually think when the Supreme Court looks at this, they will realize and uphold what Trump does.”

Already, Trump’s talk of ending birthright citizenship is setting the stage for one of the first major legal battles of his second term. And his effort could be one of his first major actions to drastically reshape the immigration system upon returning to office.

When asked about the plans, Trump’s transition team referred POLITICO to the president-elect’s comments during his interview with NBC News last weekend.

The president-elect has repeatedly said he plans to end birthright citizenship in the U.S. on Day One — reiterating this promise during the interview that aired Sunday — while providing no details about how he would get around the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Birthright citizenship stems from the year after the Civil War ended when Congress wanted to ensure that children of formerly enslaved people were granted U.S. citizenship. The amendment reads that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The accepted interpretation today, backed by a multitude of legal scholars on both sides of the political aisle, is that a child born in the United States is automatically a citizen, even if the parents do not have legal status (this excludes foreign diplomats working in the country).

But conservative immigration groups have argued that this should not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants because of the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language, which they argue has been misinterpreted.

The Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the question, but that could change if the high court takes up any potential legal challenges. The last time justices examined the issue was during an 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, when the court ruled that a man born in San Francisco to parents from China — who were lawfully admitted into the country — was a U.S. citizen. Restrictionists interpret this ruling to mean that only those residing in the U.S. with permission meet the 14th Amendment requirement of being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Immigration to the U.S. has surged in recent years, with DHS estimating that 11 million people are in the U.S. without legal authorization. Trump used fears over illegal immigration throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, both with his base and voters overall, and both Democratic and Republican state leaders have struggled to manage the influx of migrants coming to their states. When Trump said his administration may seek to end birthright citizenship in 2018, a Pew Research Center analysis of government data found that about 250,000 babies were born to undocumented immigrants in 2016, a decline from the early 2000s.

“It’ll be good to get it back in front of the Supreme Court, have it relitigated,” said Michael Hough, director of federal relations at NumbersUSA, a group that works to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. “The intention wasn’t for the system we have now, and the urgency to is that, whatever number you accept — 10 million, 15 million illegal immigrants come across — well, all the children that they’re having are going to become citizens of the United States.”

While there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will back restrictionists’ interpretation of the 14th Amendment, conservatives hope the bench, filled with three Trump-appointed justices, would restore what they view as the intended meaning. And they’re bracing for a potentially yearslong battle in the courts to get that answer.

“In the end, this is going to be a long-term process. It’s probably one that will have to extend into the [JD] Vance administration,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a restrictionist group. “I mean, this is not going to be all resolved in the first 100 days.”

During Trump’s interview Sunday — in the same breath as vowing to end birthright citizenship — the president-elect also suggested he’d look for ways to allow people brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the country. He tried to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protecting them from deportation during his first term, but the Supreme Court blocked that effort.

Immigration advocates say the interview shows how the incoming president’s stance on immigration is riddled with contradictions. Over the last year, pro-immigration groups have been preparing for a second Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, analyzing Trump’s proposals, drafting legal briefs, coordinating messages and organizing aid for immigrants and asylum-seekers — and they don’t buy the idea that Trump is looking for compromise.

“We take Trump at his word and his track record,” said Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub. “We recognize this set-up: It’s Lucy and the football where citizenship for Dreamers is a possibility if Democrats are willing to change the Constitution to end birthright citizenship and deport the parents of Dreamers and millions of other undocumented people. That’s not a compromise; that’s a ransom letter.”

© Pool photo by Brandon Bell

A pollster to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials on Friday that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term, urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.

The speech by Molly Murphy, which was delivered during one of the Democratic National Committee’s first post-election meetings of its leadership, amounted to a quiet indictment of much of the party’s long-standing approach to Trump. It also marked one of the most candid conversations that top party officials have aired publicly since Trump won.

“The 2025 playbook cannot be the 2017 playbook,” she said.

Speaking at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington D.C. to the DNC’s executive committee, she said that most Americans support Trump’s transition and that voters “don't care about who he's putting in Cabinet positions.”

She said that Trump will take office more popular than he was when he started his first term, though not as well-liked as President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama were when inaugurated. She stressed that Trump’s strength for years has been that voters approve of his handling of the economy, and that Democrats should aim in his second term to change that.

“These voters are saying, ‘I will give him a pass on the outrageous if my costs come down,’” she said.

She pointed out that key parts of the party’s base, including young people, Latinos and Black voters, drifted away from Democrats this election. And while she said that was driven by high prices, Murphy argued that working-class voters have been steadily moving away from Democrats for several election cycles, suggesting it wasn't just inflation that was to blame.

She made the case that Democrats have been focused on the wrong issues. For young people and voters of color, she said, “institutions have failed them” and “they may not embrace Trump for wanting to dismantle these institutions, but they certainly don't hold it against him.”

She likewise warned Democrats to be “cautious” while attacking Trump for violating norms, arguing that though Democratic donors and the primary electorate care about those issues, the voters the party lost in November do not.

“Norms have not worked for them, and so we certainly shouldn’t ask them to clutch their pearls,” she said. “We risk sounding like the hall monitors.”

Murphy’s talk also underscored that Democrats are making a bet that Trump will not keep his promises to quickly get down costs and that this could help them regain power. She said Democrats should reorient their messaging around Trump’s plans to cut taxes for the wealthy, implement broad-based tariffs that could result in higher costs for consumers, and provide “giveaways” to big corporations.

Murphy’s presentation is the latest sign that many Democrats across the party, from strategists to elected officials, are planning a new approach to Trump than they used when he first took office and the “resistance” took bloom.

© Ted Shaffrey/AP