By Ben Meiselas
As I watched the events of the past twenty-four hours unfold, from Donald Trump’s confused rally in a cramped Pennsylvania banquet hall to the frantic, closed-door meetings among MAGA lawmakers this morning, it became painfully clear that the Trump and his allies are running out of room to hide. They are scrambling, improvising, and blaming everyone but themselves as the consequences of their governance crash into reality.
At the center of the panic is Trump’s continuous off-script claim that “affordability is a hoax,” a message so profoundly out of touch with the lived experiences of Americans that even his most reliable surrogates struggled to spin it. So Republicans convened an urgent, secret meeting on Capitol Hill in hopes of finalizing a health care plan they have promised since Trump’s first term. After hours of posturing, they emerged with the same announcement they have delivered for years: no plan, no vote, no answers, only vague assurances that something “may emerge soon.” When? In two weeks?
While lawmakers scrambled, Trump turned to his preferred tactic when cornered: attack someone else. This morning, he declared that Mexico must address its “water and sewage problem immediately,” an assessment that not only lacked diplomatic seriousness but ignored the fact that Mexico’s president had been in Washington only days earlier. Trump could have engaged in real diplomacy. He chose instead to rant online like the little keyboard warrior he is.
His other post was even more revealing. In a message dripping with authoritarian menace and psychological projection, Trump wrote that anybody who talks about his health declining or his physical and mental slow-down is engaging in seditious and treason. I don’t know about you, but this only makes me question his health more. At the MeidasTouch Network, we’ve made Trump’s health a major focus of our coverage, and the more he threatens us with prosecution over it, the harder we will dig to uncover the truth.
Meanwhile, MAGA’s internal fractures were on full display. MAGA friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen revealed that Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to appear on his show until Republicans can produce a health care plan. Johnson instead held a brief and bizarre press conference to blame former President Biden for destroying the economy, despite every major economic indicator showing Trump inherited one of the strongest post-pandemic recoveries in the world. Falling inflation, record job creation, and durable consumer confidence were all handed to Trump like a turnkey operation. Trump chose to blow it up.
When Johnson was asked whether the long-promised Republican health care package would include new federal abortion restrictions, he all but confirmed it would. It was an admission that even after the national backlash to Dobbs, the Trump Johnson agenda is to take reproductive autonomy even further away from women.
Other MAGA stalwarts attempted to put a gloss on the chaos. Senator Joni Ernst claimed Trump was offering “a message of optimism,” a characterization hard to reconcile with his threats of treason charges and relentless culture-war attacks.
But voters are not buying it.
CNN’s analysis this morning showed a measurable shift of Latino voters back toward Democrats, driven by the reality of Trump’s mass detention plans and his administration’s increasingly explicit dehumanization of migrants. Miami’s mayoral race underscored the shift: Democrat Eileen Higgins became the first member of her party in thirty years to win the city’s top job. In 2017, fourteen of America’s fifty largest cities had Republican mayors. With Higgins’s victory, that number is now seven.
And in Georgia, Democrats flipped HD-121, a district Trump won by 12 in 2024 that was heavily gerrymandered to favor the Republican candidate.
Trump’s detachment from everyday economic pain was captured succinctly by Senator Bernie Sanders, who warned that if Trump’s “A+++++” economy grade were true, “God help us if we ever get to a B or C.” Across the country, families are receiving notices that their ACA premiums may double or triple. Grocery, housing, and education costs continue to rise. Nearly 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Trump can declare victory on social media, but people know what they feel in their wallets. And his spiking of the football is only adding insult to injury.
Instead of addressing these crises, the Trump administration is rolling out two new proposals: forcing all foreign tourists to submit five years of their social media history, a policy more aligned with authoritarian surveillance states than democratic norms (not even nation’s like China do this), and installing pull-up bars and “micro-workout stations” in airports. It is difficult to imagine policy ideas more divorced from the urgent needs of the public. And just think of the chaos this will create as the World Cup comes to Los Angeles next year.
And then came the most telling deflection of all. Rather than confront drivers of the housing affordability crisis, such as a lack of affordable housing or private equity firms buying up the nation’s housing stock, Trump’s HUD secretary blamed immigrants, claiming “illegal aliens” are responsible for rising rents. HUD even launched a “crime hotline” encouraging Americans to report “illegal aliens” in public housing, a tactic pulled directly from the playbooks of regimes that rely on neighbor-against-neighbor suspicion.
The global ramifications of Trump’s behavior are becoming impossible to ignore. When Pope Leo XIV was asked about Trump’s new “peace plan” for Ukraine, he issued a rare public rebuke, warning that Trump’s rhetoric appears aimed at “breaking apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance” between the United States and Europe.
That is the theme running through every development this morning: a President openly threatening critics, undermining alliances, scapegoating the vulnerable, and ignoring the economic distress of millions, while the American people grow increasingly unwilling to accept it.
Here are couple of other stories on my radar:
Trump and top White House officials are panicking over the prospect of being investigated by the International Criminal Court after Trump’s term, and are threatening sanctions against the Court unless they revise their founding document to explicitly say they won’t be prosecuted.
The Federal Reserve announced a 25bps cut to interest rates amid the slowing economy.
House Republicans are currently struggling on the rule vote that would allow them to bring the NDAA – the $900 billion defense policy bill – the floor. The party is in total disarray.
The U.S. seized a sanctioned oil tanker of the coast of Venezuela in a major escalation against the country.
The Danish Defense Intelligence Service has for the first time described the US as a potential security risk.
U.S. farmers are slamming the Trump administration over its $12 billion bailout plan, saying it isn’t nearly enough to cover the damage the administration has caused to their industry.
NYC Comptroller Brad Lander has entered the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th congressional district, challenging incumbent Democrat Dan Goldman.
VoteVets has endorsed MeidasTouch contributor Fred Wellman in the congressional race for Missouri’s 2nd district.
Thanks for watching (and reading) my mid-day recap. And thank you for your support of MeidasTouch and this Substack. Remember to like, share, subscribe, and continue to spread the word!
