The Friday Brief, February 6, 2026
Trump In Flames
Inside
Trump Is Destroying The GOP
ICE Is a Polling Disaster
Democrats Start To Get It
The Peace President
Cut That Crap Out, Texas Dems
Bitcoin Meltdown
Elon Does The Right Thing
Funeral for a Friend
The Redistricting Whoopsie
Kennedy Center Teardown
What I’m Reading
Scenes from the Home Front
The Big Picture
Trump In Flames
Trump is killing the GOP.
And they know it.
The 29 GOP retirements as of this writing are a blazing, burning sign on the wall. The trainwreck of polling on every front is leaving GOP consultants tearing their hair out. Trump’s recklessness isn’t 87-dimensional quantum string theory chess; it’s the twitching death spasm of political roadkill, a roadside possum that miscalculated how long it would take to cross the highway on a dark night.
Republicans keep insisting 2026 will be a “referendum on the Democrats.” Sure. And my Beechcraft is a B-21 stealth bomber.
The 2026 midterms are shaping up as something much simpler and much more brutal: a referendum on Donald Trump’s reckless second-term presidency, and the GOP candidates chained to his ankle like a cinder block.
Start with the one number every incumbent fears: approval. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll in late January pegged Trump at 38% approve / 56% disapprove, with Americans twice as likely to strongly disapprove as strongly approve. That’s not “polarizing.” That’s structural rot. And it’s the kind of rot that spreads down-ticket like black mold in the walls of the kind of roadside hotels Roger Stone is said to frequent.
