The Friday Brief, January 30, 2026

This free edition of the Friday Brief is sponsored by Ground News.



Inside:
Trump and MAGA Lose Their Best Issues
Rats In A Bucket
MAGA Owns The Mainstream Media
What Fresh Aviation Hell Is This?
Palantir Invades Britain’s Government
Dario Amodei’s AI Insight
The Farm Crisis Is A Political Crisis
The Internet Doesn’t Have To Be Awful
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

The Big Picture

Trump and MAGA Lose Their Best Issues

Everything Trump touches dies. It’s an iron law of political physics, as reliable as gravity and twice as cruel. As we careen into the 2026 midterms, the Republican Party is discovering that immigration and inflation, the twin pillars of their 2024 victory, weren’t pillars at all. They were load-bearing illusions. And now the roof is collapsing on GOP House and Senate candidates from Maine to Modesto.

In 2024, the strategy was beautifully, cynically simple: red meat and cheap eggs. The GOP fed its Fox-addled base a steady diet of border-apocalypse B-roll, receipt-stretching grocery horror stories, and a garnish of trans panic. They promised that the return of the Orange God-King would magically teleport millions of “invaders” out of the country, reset egg prices to 1994, and vanquish the nine or so trans athletes who apparently threatened Western civilization.

It worked. Independents and working-class voters, irked by watching their wallets get hollowed out, bought in. Immigration became a cultural security blanket. Inflation became a visceral competence test. The trans panic worked on a narrow but meaningful slice of the electorate. The GOP won the mandate, took the keys, and then did what it always does: drove the car straight into a ditch.

Fast forward to January 2026. The receipt has arrived.

The Big Bad Bill turned out to be a massive cost-shift to the states, while Trump’s promised tax cuts were swallowed whole by the inflationary reality of his tariff-obsessed trade wars. The global market is turning its back on American goods and services in real time.

You can tell a voter that a 50% tariff is “making China pay,” but when that same voter watches their grocery bill climb another 5 or 10 percent as supply chains scream in agony, the competence brand evaporates. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation now sits at a brutal 65 percent. For a party that staked its identity on ushering in a new Golden Age, that’s not a dip—it’s a death rattle.

The immigration advantage is bleeding out, too. It turns out that mass deportations, ICE overreach, and the killing of American citizens make great Newsmax B-roll, but they create a moral and logistical nightmare that even middle-of-the-road voters find repellent. With disapproval hovering around 58 percent, the “invasion” narrative has curdled into a “police-state” narrative.

For Republicans running with an “R” next to their names, the situation is catastrophic. They’re lashed to a sinking orange anchor. Four dynamics define the battlefield now—and the list will grow.

The Party Is Trump, Trump Is the Party. Trump’s numbers are collapsing on inflation, immigration, and nearly everything else. MAGA demands absolute loyalty, so candidates can’t distance themselves from the man or the mess. He’s a political boat anchor, and they’re drowning with him.

Democrats hold a 33-point lead among independents. In swing districts, that’s not a gap; it’s a canyon. Independents are now two to two-and-a-half times more likely to oppose Trump and the GOP across the board.

You can’t cosplay as a reformer when you control the House, the Senate, the White House, the courts, the media ecosystem, and the corporate power structure. When groceries spike, housing stalls, confidence collapses, and ICE is killing people in the streets, there’s no one left to blame but the guy in the mirror.

Republicans are staring down a double-digit generic ballot deficit. “Owning the libs,” it turns out, doesn’t pay the governing bills.

Can they reverse it in time to save 2026?

In a word: no.

Fixing inflation would require Trump to admit his tariffs were a mistake—an act of humility and self-awareness that is temperamentally, and perhaps biologically, impossible. Fixing immigration would require the GOP to pivot from performative cruelty to actual governance, an instant death sentence in MAGA primaries.

The party is trapped in a feedback loop of its own making. They sold a fantasy, and now reality is torching the house.

For every Republican staring at their internal polling and wondering whether to dust off LinkedIn, here’s the truth: you bought the ticket, you took the ride, and now the Hindenburg is docking.

Everything Trump touches dies.

And in 2026, he’s touching the GOP’s congressional majority with the same reckless abandon he once reserved for nights with his old running buddy, Jeffrey Epstein.

Intel and Observations

Rats In A Bucket

There’s an odor in the West Wing.

No, not Trump’s notorious eau de Depends, but something sharper: metallic, sour, unmistakable.

Fear.

The smell of a frightened crew on a ship taking on water, while the officers on the bridge quietly eye each other’s life jackets.

We’ve seen this movie before, back in the first Trump term. But the 2026 reboot: Rats in a Bucket: The ICE Edition, has reached a fever pitch even hardened cynics didn’t quite expect.

Donald Trump is panicking.

And when Orange Cthulhu panics, the MAGA rats inside the White House bucket start turning on one another, scratching, biting, desperate to prove loyalty, clawing for the rim no matter the cost to truth or dignity.

For years, the MAGA apparatus has run on a simple, brutal loop: do something horrific, lie about it, scream “fake news” at anyone who notices, and barrel ahead. It worked with chilling consistency.

Until Minneapolis.

Until the public executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti jammed the machinery.

Pretti wasn’t a “domestic terrorist” or a “foreign infiltrator.” He wasn’t an Antifa fever dream or a communist illegal alien. He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse. A VA nurse. A man with a legal carry permit who, according to eyewitnesses and video alike, was protecting a woman when federal agents decided to cosplay Call of Duty: Minneapolis in the streets of a major American city.

Stephen Miller and his dead-eyed acolytes reached reflexively for the old script. Within hours, Pretti was labeled an “assassin.” A threat. A monster.

But the video was too clear. The facts are too stubborn. And the victim, fatally for the propaganda machine, was too achingly normal.

Midwestern normal. Human. Real. Furious at watching his city being turned into an armed camp.

The backlash didn’t stay confined to activists or cable panels. It radiated outward into Senate offices, governors’ mansions, and even pro-Trump corporate boardrooms. When Target’s CEO is privately calling your people and asking what the hell is happening, you don’t have a messaging problem. You have a crisis.

“Operation Metro Surge” didn’t just go sideways.

It created martyrs Trump couldn’t smear away.

Which brings us to the knife fight inside the bucket: Kristi Noem versus Stephen Miller.

For months, Noem played her role flawlessly, the loyal DHS executioner, smiling beneath the glam-squad polish while the machinery chewed forward. But when the Trump Bus starts revving in search of a sacrifice, priorities clarify fast. The Pretti case is starting to look less like a PR problem and more like a legal radiological spill.

Suddenly, Kristi Noem has discovered a survival instinct.

Word circulating through the West Wing is that Noem has gone Full Nuremberg, shopping a familiar and pitiful defense: I was just following orders.

In her telling, she’s the humble Cabinet secretary; bullied, overridden, steamrolled by the administration’s resident gargoyle, Stephen Miller. Minnesota wasn’t her idea. The aggression wasn’t her call. The blood, regrettable as it is, belongs to Stephen.

You never go full Nuremberg defense.

Watching Noem try to pin this on Miller is like watching a leopard solemnly explain that the spots were a gift from a friend. But in the bucket, reality matters less than proximity to the exit.

Miller, meanwhile, is doing what he always does: slipping back into the shadows, sharpening knives, preparing a counterstrike. In MAGAland, there is no loyalty, only the feral, frantic calculus of making sure someone else gets eaten first.

Then there’s Gregory Bovino.

The erstwhile “Commander at Large,” with the Gestapo-chic greatcoat and low-rent warlord swagger, has been “reassigned” back to El Centro. If you think this fixes anything, you haven’t been paying attention.

Bovino wasn’t a rogue. He was a perfect avatar of the administration’s vision for domestic law enforcement. His removal isn’t reform; it’s cosmetic surgery on Stage IV cancer.

And Trump has already replaced him with someone far more dangerous: Tom Homan.

If Bovino was a Miller fever dream, a blunt instrument designed to terrify, Homan is something else entirely. A corrupt, shameless bureaucratic knife-fighter. A man who understands that power doesn’t need spectacle if it has infrastructure.

Bovino wanted you to see him coming.

Homan wants you to wake up and realize everyone in your apartment building is already gone.

This isn’t the end of Metro Surge. It’s Metro Surge 2.0: quieter, colder, and far more efficient.

Finally, we arrive at the so-called “de-escalation” in Minnesota.

Trump is suddenly playing the Great Conciliator, calling Governor Tim Walz, murmuring about restraint, promising to dial things back. This isn’t a change of heart. It’s a tactical feint.

The White House knows the pressure points. Chuck Schumer is threatening (and as of this writing, succeeding) to block DHS funding. Democrats, battered and exhausted, are desperate for any scrap of normalcy they can point to as proof the system still works, and for once, are holding the line.

So the play unfolds:

First, the sacrificial lamb. Quiet assurances. Bovino was sent packing.

Next, “responsible” Democrats praise a “shift in tone” and eventually green-light DHS funding with a few cosmetic guardrails.

Once the check clears, Homan moves the operation off the streets and into the databases.

The surge doesn’t end.

It goes dark.

I’ve seen this movie too many times.

Even if Trump scores a short-porch victory here, the world ICE built is cracking around him. The truth of the past week is simple: MAGA is beginning to choke on its own excesses. When you build a government on cruelty and contempt for the rule of law, eventually you run out of “others” to brutalize…and you start turning on American citizens.

The narrative bubble is collapsing. DHS placing the killers of Alex Pretti on administrative leave, a once unthinkable move, tells you everything.

Kristi Noem knows the ice beneath her is thinning.

Stephen Miller knows he’s the most despised man in the building.

And Donald Trump knows that, for the first time in a long while, he’s losing control of the story.

The rats are fighting.

The bucket is shaking.

They’re not stopping.

They’re just waiting for the smoke to clear so they can see their targets better.

It’s harder than ever to pick out truth from fiction, information from disinformation, and news from spin. In this era, the media landscape needs an objective, clear source where you can do just that.

One reason I’m delighted to have Ground News as a sponsor of Against All Enemies is that in an era of media bias - right, left, and all points in between - Ground News is an app and a website that shows you a source’s political bias, ownership, and most importantly, how factual they are. This gives folks like us who care about the facts a set of tools to analyze the truthfulness, the data, and the biases in the media.

Here’s a perfect example: I was stunned to learn that DHS had placed the ICE agents in the Pritti shooting on leave. It was completely off-axis for the “never admit, never apologize” style. Ground News helped me spot the story, analyze the coverage, and spot the way both sides were reporting it:

Ground News also has a set of tools I know you’ll find as helpful as I do when it comes to decluttering media: it helps you see how different outlets frame the news:

For instance, Ground News has this headline from the far-right Conservative Firing Line mocking the Pretti shooting:

Ground News also tells me we should take Conservative Firing Line with a grain of salt; they’re rated as a “very low factuality” site.

Not every site on the right was as biased. Reason’s headline and coverage on the story was more objective, which fits with their reputation for high factual accuracy.

On the left, HuffPost is rated highly for factual accuracy and covers the story without mockery.

Also on the left, Le Monde (rated as very high factuality), covers both the story and the political implications.

I’ve found Ground News to be a remarkable app and website. I hope you’ll give Ground News a try!

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For a limited time, you can sign up for their Vantage Plan - the same one I use - with a special 40% discount for Against All Enemies readers when you use my special Ground News link!

This free edition of the Friday Brief is sponsored by Ground News.

MAGA Owns The Mainstream Media

One of the core articles of faith of the lib-owning wing of MAGA (long, long before Trump ever rode down the escalator) has been that the “mainstream media” is an irredeemable swamp of far-left indoctrination and communist propaganda. In this telling, the press’s hypnotic reach is so total, so omnipresent, that it can bend an entire society to a Maoist agenda unless it is smashed, regulated, or placed under political supervision.

Give me a break.

The reality is that Trump and his allies now own, dominate, or effectively control more media outlets (and command more eyeballs) than any of the supposed liberal demons the right has been screaming about for decades. CNN, now the Bothsides Network in all but name, contorts itself daily to platform and normalize the administration’s endless torrent of lies. CBS News has drifted into Fox Lite, carefully sanding off anything that might offend the White House. 60 Minutes is increasingly indistinguishable from a celebrity profile factory. And The Washington Post continues its steady slide into hushed irrelevance as Jeff Bezos works overtime to avoid becoming Trump’s next target.

This isn’t a left-wing media ecosystem. It’s a timid, commercial, risk-averse one, terrified of power, addicted to access, and structurally incapable of confronting an authoritarian movement that punishes dissent.

Liberal billionaires ask me all the time what needs to be done to “counter Fox.” My answer never changes: sustained, serious investment in competing mainstream media over time…not a liberal mirror image of Fox, not a rage-bait echo chamber, but institutions with reach, credibility, and the spine to tell the truth even when it costs them something.

You don’t beat propaganda with propaganda.

You beat it by building media that actually deserves the public’s trust and then funding it like democracy depends on it.

What Fresh Aviation Hell Is This?

He’s insane, you know. “CRJ” ring a bell, Donald?

Palantir Infiltrates Britain’s Government

This Carole Cadwallader piece should chill you. Palantir’s deals with governments are a kind of vicious cycle; they need sensitive data, they get more sensitive data, they build tools to exploit that sensitive data, then claim they need more access to sensitive data…and the end result is giving both Palantir and their government clients here and abroad untrammeled power over the lives of citizens.

But by all means, give Peter Thiel’s company deep control over UK nuclear weapons data systems. What could possibly go wrong?

Dario Amodei’s AI Insight

I found this piece quite thoughtful about how we might be training AI to be evil, because our fictional image of AI is… well, evil. We’re thinking Skynet, and as we train AI, it consumes our vision of Skynet.

Recursive? Sure. Persuasive? Absolutely.

The Farm Crisis Is A Political Crisis

Welcome to the “Find Out” phase of the most expensive political experiment in American history. As we enter 2026, rural America is learning a hard truth: you can’t eat “owning the libs,” and you can’t pay a mortgage with Facebook memes.

In 2024, rural America didn’t just vote for Donald Trump—it formed a suicide pact with him. In the nation’s 444 farming-dependent counties, Trump pulled in nearly 78% of the vote. Those same counties are now watching multi-generational family farms get fed into the woodchipper of MAGA-nomics. It’s the purest Leopards Eating People’s Faces moment yet, and the leopards are ordering seconds.

The first blow came from Trump’s trade-war obsession. By early 2025, the administration invoked emergency powers to slap double-digit tariffs on everyone from Beijing to Berlin, driving the highest effective tariff rate since 1946. For farmers, this wasn’t “winning”—it was a state-sponsored execution. China, once the buyer of half of all U.S. soybean exports, walked away entirely. By 2026, major crops were bleeding red ink: corn down $169 an acre, soybeans $114, cotton nearly $400.

Net farm income is projected to collapse by $41 billion this year—a 23% drop and one of the sharpest declines in decades. Farmers aren’t tightening belts; they’re checking whether the barn rafters will hold.

If tariffs were the heart attack, immigration policy was the stroke. MAGA demanded mass deportations and got them—only to discover that Stephen Miller’s raids didn’t inspire local teenagers to pick blueberries in 100-degree heat. With roughly 70% of farmworkers foreign-born, the labor force vanished. In New Jersey and California, fruit rotted in the fields; one grower alone lost $5 million simply because no one was left to harvest.

The administration’s answer was a temporary suspension of farm visas during a shutdown and vague talk of automation. Meanwhile, dairy farmers sold off herds, labor costs jumped nearly 50% since 2021, and farm bankruptcies surged 55% in a single year. One in four farms is now projected to be insolvent or gone by the end of 2026.

Panicking over the electoral fallout, the White House rolled out a $12 billion “Farmer Bridge Assistance” program—classic Trump math. Break someone’s legs, hand them crutches, and demand gratitude. A $12 billion bandage won’t stop a $50 billion bleed.

For Republicans running in 2026, this is a slow-motion catastrophe. They’re chained to an incumbent who is bankrupting his most loyal voters.

The tragedy isn’t that experts warned this would happen. It’s the people paying the price who built Trump’s pedestal. They voted for the trade war, ICE, and the chaos.

Now the bill is due.

And in 2026, the GOP won’t just be losing the farm—they’ll be losing the ground beneath their feet.

The Internet Doesn’t Have To Be Awful

But we have to choose not to make it so.

What I’m Reading

By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London by Adrian Tinniswood.

Scenes From The Home Front

I’m hard at work on the second draft of the new book. We’re in the dead of winter for Florida, which means it’s in the 20s at night, and down into the teens this weekend.

Renee and I have both been moving a million miles an hour this week, busy as beavers…and speaking of which, we’ve got beavers in the pond, and they’ve dug a 60-foot tunnel under the meadow.

Oh, joy.

We appreciate you all!

Thanks again to Ground News for sponsoring this edition of the Friday Brief! Click here to get a limited-time 40% discount on their Vantage plan.