GOP is finally 'coming to understand' threat Trump poses — but may be 'too late': analysis

President Donald Trump has spent the last several weeks sparking chaos for Senate Republicans, who only now, according to New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, are “coming to understand” the threat the president poses, though the realization may be “a bit too late.”

Trump has aggressively pushed Senate Republicans to advance his controversial voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, despite Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s insistence that the bill lacks adequate support in the GOP caucus. Trump also derailed the Senate GOP’s entire agenda with a surprise cancellation of a Senate confirmation hearing, and caused further chaos by refusing to sign a bi-partisan bill on affordable housing.

With the midterm elections just months away, Senate Republicans, Bouie argued, are starting to wake up to the threat Trump poses for their own political survival.

“Trump does not identify himself with the Republican Party. He identifies himself with his own political standing. And so, if he feels he needs to do something to protect his standing that harms Republicans, he’ll do it without even thinking,” Bouie said in an episode of “The Opinions,” transcribed by The New York Times.

“And Senate Republicans in particular, who did not expect to be fighting for their majority this fall, are somehow only now coming to understand that, yes, if you are in his way, he is going to make life difficult for you, even if that costs you a Senate majority. And there’s a 50/50 chance, 60/40 chance that, yeah, it costs the Republicans their Senate majority.”

Amid Trump’s cratering favorability among Americans, the Senate may very well end up in Democratic Party control, an idea that analysts previously thought unthinkable. But Senate Republicans’ realization may have come too late, Bouie argued.

“Politically for them, it’s just like a bit too late, right?” Bouie said. “They already spent all of 2025 tying themselves incredibly tightly to the administration under, as I read it, irrational exuberance – this idea that kind of caught hold, I think, throughout a large part of American politics that Trump’s win represented some sort of MAGA sea change in American life.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's move to block the promotions of high-ranking service members is "even worse than it looks," according to political analyst and longtime federal trial attorney Sabrina Haake, who argues the real motive behind the blocked promotions is more dangerous than the racial and gender bias suggested by mainstream coverage.

Writing in her Substack newsletter, The Haake Take, Haake reported that Hegseth had blocked career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals — and contended that the secretary has no clear legal authority to do so.

Haake laid out the statutory problem in detail. Congress, she wrote, entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and the Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. While federal law gives the president removal authority, she noted that a longstanding executive order limits the defense secretary's removal authority to grades below colonel or captain — not the general and admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon's own regulations, she added, restrict the grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, "none of which were present in Hegseth's removals."

It's where Haake parts ways with the prevailing narrative that the "worse than it looks" argument comes into focus. While she acknowledged that a disproportionate number of the blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color, she warned that the focus on demographics may obscure something more alarming.

"While mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous—likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems 'ideologically incompatible' with how he and Trump plan to use the military," Haake wrote.

She pointed to Hegseth's own rhetoric, noting his frequent emphasis that "every officer serves at the pleasure of the president" and his argument that Trump's policy goals require removing commanders "tied to the culture" of previous administrations. Haake wrote that while Hegseth claims past promotions were based on race and gender rather than qualifications, military records refute those claims, and there is no evidence the blocked promotions were attributable to anything other than merit.

Haake, who has spent more than 25 years as a federal trial attorney specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense, was unsparing in her assessment of Hegseth's qualifications, describing the former Fox News host as a mid-level National Guard officer with no senior military leadership experience suited to overseeing three million personnel and an $800 billion budget.

She argued that what Hegseth is truly stripping away are legal protocols, in service of elevating "maximum lethality" for what she characterized as Trump's politically motivated aims.

"What he's really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate 'maximum lethality' in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump's," Haake wrote.

To underscore the stakes, Haake drew on history, surveying how authoritarian regimes — from Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union to Maoist China and Saddam Hussein's Iraq — sought to subordinate professional militaries to political loyalty, often purging capable officers in favor of those deemed reliably loyal. That approach, she argued, consistently produced militaries effective at internal repression but dysfunctional against external threats.

Haake tied that history directly to her central warning, contending that because Hegseth and Trump are both focused on domestic "enemies within," the blocked promotions are "less about demographics and more about fortifying top brass willing to break the law" by removing those unwilling to go along.

The conservative New York Post was mobbed by critics on Sunday for its critical report on a rising star within the Democratic Party, the headline of which was labeled by some as perhaps the “most ridiculous” smear of a Democratic figure “of all time.”

Published on Saturday, the report in question was about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who the tabloid newspaper had covered negatively for months, including with an editorial titled “20 reasons to vote against Mamdani” published last year in the lead up to the New York City mayoral election.

The report documents Mamdani’s kick-off of New York City’s summer pool season, which he celebrated with an event that saw him jump into an East Harlem public pool wearing a full suit and tie. What the Post highlighted, however, was how Mamdani had violated the city’s public pool dress code, noting that he “even kept his black socks on as he made his half-hearted cannonball.”

Responding to the Post’s report, Irish comedian Tadhg Hickey declared the newspaper to be “the most ridiculous news outlet of all time.” Prominent progressive political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen said he was “actually a big fan” of the Post’s report “because it shows that they’ve got absolutely nothing” negative to report on Mamdani.

“This is what conservatives are reduced to when trying to own Zohran,” quipped prominent progressive commentator and podcast host Kyle Kulinski.

Zoey Sinn, a social media personality and Twitch streamer, concurred with Kulinski's observation.

“I'm sobbing over this headline,” Sinn wrote in a social media post on X. “They have NOTHING on him.”

Mamdani himself also responded directly to the Post’s reporting in a tongue-in-cheek social media post.

“When they said, 'wear a suit,' I just assumed…” Mamdani wrote.

The Trump White House waged a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign on the obscure federal board responsible for shielding government workers from unfair firings, ultimately securing a ruling that could hand the president sweeping power to purge the civil service and install loyalists throughout the government, according to a New York Times investigation.

The report centers on the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency whose job is to act as a neutral arbiter between federal agencies and dismissed workers. In a March ruling the Times described as landing "like a thunderbolt" in legal circles, the board broke with decades of precedent and embraced the White House's argument that Article II of the Constitution gives President Donald Trump the power to fire officials without due process.

According to the Times, the decision came after a concerted pressure campaign waged both publicly and privately — an effort the paper likened to "calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule." That private push, the report said, was led by James Sherk, a special assistant to the president who has spent years focused on making it easier to quickly fire federal workers.

At the center of the account is a late-November meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, after which the board's acting chair, Henry Kerner, gathered a small group of staff and appeared "shaken and unsure how to proceed," per the Times. Kerner reportedly recounted that administration officials had conveyed their belief that the board was bound to follow the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel opinion on the Article II cases.

The White House disputed that characterization. Officials said the meeting's primary purpose was to interview Kerner for a possible nomination as permanent chair and insisted he was not told how to rule — which a White House official said showed the idea of a pressure campaign was "categorically false."

A White House spokeswoman, Allison Schuster, defended the underlying philosophy in stark terms.

"There can constitutionally be no independent executive branch agencies because independence from the president would mean independence from the voters who elected him," Schuster told the Times.

Legal experts saw the ruling very differently. Nicholas Bednar, a University of Minnesota law professor who studies the federal civil service, said the revelation of White House involvement undermines the decision's legitimacy.

"Knowing that it was made with influence from the White House means the decision was not based on positions of law," Bednar told the Times, adding that it "reflects the same ideological considerations that is driving the evisceration of the federal civil service."

The Times noted the striking internal logic of the ruling: for the first time in its history, the board embraced a constitutional argument that, taken to its conclusion, would invalidate its own existence — since the board itself is a product of the same Civil Service Reform Act that Article II theory would override.

Former board members underscored the magnitude. Raymond Limon, who left the board in February of last year, called it "a monumental decision, reversing years of board law and determining who and who does not get board protections." He added: "It is seismic."

Some federal employment specialists, the Times reported, equated the ruling to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The full Federal Circuit has since agreed to review the case, an unusual step that highlights its significance.

The report closed on a telling scene from this month, when Sherk stood in the Oval Office as Trump signed an executive order stripping job protections from nearly 8,000 workers in policy-making roles. Told the order was Sherk's idea, Trump summoned him to the Resolute Desk.

Sherk explained that the order treated policymakers like private-sector workers: "If they're messing up, they can be removed quickly."

"That's great," Trump replied, according to the Times. "And you were very much involved in this?"

"I was, sir," Sherk said, according to the reporting.