The Friday Brief

February 28, 2025

Inside: Townhall Trouble. Cabinet Kabuki. Yes, Trump Is Losing It. The Epstein Files. Plague Fans. That Gaza Video. Golden Era? The Russians of Brickell. Substack Finds, Ad of the Week, What I’m Reading, Scenes From The Home Front.

The Big Picture

Townhall Trouble

You don’t need a political Ouija board to know when the electorate is fed up and ready to toss the ruling party into the political dumpster. All you need to do is look at how your friendly neighborhood congressman is sweating bullets at the local VFW hall or high school gymnasium during his latest town hall meeting.

In politics, rough town halls for incumbents are often the early tremors before the big quake. Case in point: 1994, 2006, 2010, and 2018—four midterm waves that swallowed the majority like a hungry alligator at feeding time.

Sure, there’s the general pattern of the President’s party taking a hit in the first midterm of their term (first or second term), but there is a more defined pattern of the President’s party doing it to themselves.

2026 has all the elements: a President with declining approval numbers, a series of unpopular and messy policy decisions, a sense that they’re corrupt, and other elements. See how many you recognize for today’s Voyage of the Electorally damned:

In 1994, Bill Clinton and his Democratic Congress got cozy with big, complicated healthcare proposals (e.g., “Hillarycare”), unpopular gun control measures, and a tax hike. The Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives since velociraptors roamed the primordial swamps of Washington, D.C., and they were beset by dumb, small-ball corruption scandals of their own making. The House Bank and Post Office scandals seemed like idiotic small-ball to Washington insiders but were radioactive exemplars of corruption to average voters.