The U.S. Seized a Second Tanker from Venezuela | Sanctioned Oil in the Crosshairs
MASTERBAKER All things Politics thread
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New York Post
2h ·JUST IN...
Venezuelan opposition leader, 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado poised to take the place of Nicolas Maduro
Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, a 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, appears poised to take the place of ousted President Nicolas Maduro.
nypost.com
Things You Don't Know ·
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22h ·Nothing is left behind, literally.
Vladimir Putin is reportedly protected by an extraordinary security measure during foreign travel. His bodyguards are said to collect and transport his bodily waste back to Russia.
The goal is to prevent foreign intelligence services from analyzing biological material. In modern espionage, even health data is treated as strategic information.
Rockaway Primetime Reporting
10h ·BREAKING: Doctor Claims Trump, 79, Suffered Serious Medical Issue
Donald Trump suffered a stroke several months ago and has kept it from the public, a prominent medical expert has suggested.
Professor Bruce Davidson of Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine made the bombshell claim about the 79-year-old president’s health while laying out “lines of evidence supportive” that have also been reported on by the Daily Beast over the past year.
“I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body,” Davidson told biographer Sidney Blumenthal and Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on their podcast, The Court of History.
“I think the stroke was six months ago or more, earlier in 2025,” he continued. “There are videos of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we’d seen previously when he was striding on the golf course. We’ve seen him holding his right hand cradled in his left. Earlier in 2025, he was garbling words, which he hadn’t done before and which he’s improved upon more recently.”
Davidson also pointed to what he described as “marked episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness,” known medically as hypersomnolence, which he said is common among stroke patients. Trump is now routinely appearing to nod off in public appearances such as White House events.
He further suggested that footage showing Trump gingerly descending the steps of Air Force One while gripping the banister with his left hand, despite the president being right-handed, is “consistent with having had a stroke on the left side of the brain.”
Speculation about the mental and physical decline of Trump, who is on track to become the oldest president in U.S. history, has circulated for months.
The president has frequently appeared in public with large, visible bruises on his hands, which he desperately attempts to conceal with blotches of makeup.
Trump has also taken steps to hide from public view his swollen cankles, a symptom of the medical condition chronic venous insufficiency, which the White House admitted the president had in July 2024.
Additional concerns were raised after Trump appeared at an event commemorating the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks with his face drooping to one side. Multiple social media users speculated at the time that the appearance could be a sign of a stroke, though no diagnosis has been confirmed.
In a candid interview with The Wall Street Journal published this month, Trump acknowledged several health issues and treatments, including briefly wearing compression socks to help manage swelling in his legs.
He also made the startling admission that he takes more aspirin than his doctors recommend for “cardiac prevention.” Trump and the White House have repeatedly attributed the unsightly bruising on the 79-year-old’s hands to his daily aspirin use, combined with his frequently shaking people’s hands.
Elsewhere during his podcast appearance, Davidson suggested that Trump’s erratic and aggressive governing style during his second term could also be consistent with post-stroke behavioral changes.
“It’s a very serious, concerning, life-threatening, upsetting, scary event, and people react in different ways,” Davidson said. “Some people respond with humility and gratitude. Others become euphoric—‘I was at the cliff of death, and now I’m back.’ And some think, ‘That was my chance to die, and I didn’t—so now I’m going to do everything I wanted to do, because the next one may be fatal.’”
Carville predicts GOP ‘wipeout’ in 2026 midterms
Sophie Brams
Sat, January 17, 2026 at 2:57 PM EST
953
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville predicted Saturday that the 2026 midterm elections will be a “wipeout” for Republicans, with Democrats picking up 25 seats “at a minimum.”
“Frankly, it’s going to be a wipeout,” Carville told host Kayleigh McEnany on Fox News’s “Saturday in America.”
“Your viewers need to know that the Democrats are going to pick up at a minimum 25 seats, maybe as high as 45. In all likelihood, the Democrats will carry the Senate,” he added.
Carville was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by David Plouffe, a former senior advisor to former President Obama, in which Plouffe argued Democrats had “no credible path to sustained control of the Senate and the White House.”
“After the adjustments to the Electoral College map that look likely to come with the next census, the Democratic presidential nominee could win all the states won by Kamala Harris, plus the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win,” Plouffe wrote. “An already unforgiving map becomes more so.”
McEnany asked if Carville had “as dim of a view” on the path forward for Democrats as Plouffe, to which Carville responded that Plouffe’s outlook was more focused on 2028 and beyond than the upcoming midterms.
After calling Carville’s prediction “bold,” McEnany argued that an “economic revival” coming from the Trump administration could actually lead Republicans to overperform in November.
“Well, I guess anything is possible,” Carville replied, before blasting comments Trump made earlier in the week in an interview with Reuters, suggesting “we shouldn’t even have an election” because of how much he had accomplished.
“We might disagree on who’s going win, but I think you and I can agree we got to have the election, right? That’s the important thing, is to have it,” Carville said.
McEnany brushed off Trump’s remark as being “in jest,” echoing a similar defense made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a Friday press briefing.
“The president was simply joking. He was saying we’re doing such a great job. We’re doing everything the American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling, but he was facetiously,” Leavitt told reporters when asked about Trump’s election comment.
Trump has publicly worried that he could be impeached if Democrats regain control of the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.
In a sign of momentum for Democrats, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted 18 House races in the party’s favor this week, citing Trump’s unpopularity in polling and a recent streak of Democrat wins in special elections nationwide.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Brian Tyler Cohen
2h ·BREAKING: Trump just sent the following letter to the Prime Minister of Norway:
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Yes, this is real
Brian Tyler Cohen
Source (yes, it’s real): https://www.nytimes.com/.../trump-norway-greenland-nobel...
MeidasTouch
·JUST IN: The Canadian Armed Forces have modelled a hypothetical U.S. invasion of Canada and how Canadians might respond if the unthinkable ever happened. This is new reporting from from the Globe and Mail and the CBC. This isn’t a military plan, but a conceptual exercise, and the first time in a century Canada has even considered such a scenario involving the United States.
Trump has repeatedly talked about Canada becoming the “51st state,” threatened allies over Greenland, and attacked NATO partners. Canadian officials say an invasion is unlikely, but they’re now forced to assess it anyway in case it comes to fruition. Trump posted an image just last night depicting Canada as part of the United States.
The model reportedly assumes the U.S. military could overwhelm Canada quickly in a conventional fight. Canada’s response would rely on unconventional resistance: small units, sabotage, drone warfare, and hit-and-run tactics — the same kinds of insurgency strategies used in Afghanistan and Ukraine.
This is real. One of America’s closest allies is quietly planning how it would resist an American occupation.
Trump Is Not My President
United Against Trumpism Network ·5h ·Europe went to Davos for cooperation.
Trump showed up threatening tariffs, floating territorial grabs, and lecturing allies like a mob boss at a board meeting.
Europeans didn’t applaud ,they pucked.
“America First” looks a lot like America Alone on the world stage.
PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton ·
The racist video President Trump shared depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was vile and indefensible.Even Republicans condemned it. Blaming a nameless staffer is an insult.
Accountability won’t come from Trump — it will come from voters at the ballot box this November.
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Rockaway Primetime Reporting
1h ·Never Trump Republicans Are Still Issuing Dire Warnings. Is anyone listening?
Rock
Over and over, the Republicans and former Republicans who gathered just outside Washington this weekend warned that President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress are tearing at the very fabric of American democracy.
A former congressman described the president’s party as an “authoritarian-embracing cult.” A prominent conservative writer said Trumpism is an “existential threat.” And a retired Army general, his voice shaking with emotion, cited post-Nazi Germany as a roadmap for the nation’s post-Trump recovery.
It’s unclear how many people are listening.
The main convention hall at the sixth annual Principles First summit on Saturday and Sunday was half empty.
About 750 chairs were set up in a room that could have fit thousands, and many were unfilled. Not a single current Republican elected official participated in the two-day program.
This is what remains of the Grand Old Party’s Never Trump movement, a coalition of Republicans, former Republicans and independents who banded together as Trump consolidated power. They largely remain political exiles — not quite at home among Democrats yet disgusted by how the president has abandoned Republicans’ longstanding commitments to free trade and limited government.
John McDowell, 69, who was a lifelong Republican before Trump’s emergence, acknowledged that the diminished group had virtually “zero” political clout within his former party.
“It’s just a fact. We’re losing good people,” said McDowell, a former Capitol Hill staffer and county Republican official from San Carlos, California. “The party is becoming more and more MAGA-fied.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed all the criticism from what she called “a bunch of deranged has-been politicians.”
“The only people who will pay attention to this event are the journalists who are forced to cover it,” she said.
Virtually everyone who gathered at the hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, said they are rooting for Democratic victories in this fall’s midterm elections. One of the only Democrats there was Conor Lamb, a former congressman from Pennsylvania who lost his party’s primary to John Fetterman four years ago.
Despite dire concerns, there was a slight sense of optimism among the half-empty convention hall and quiet hotel hallways.
Several people cheered last week’s Supreme Court decision to strike down Trump’s tariffs, the economic tool he has wielded without congressional approval in his attempt to force friends and foes around the globe to bend to his will. Trump insisted he would implement a new round of tariffs despite the ruling.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former Trump adviser, highlighted recent AP-NORC polling showing that 1 in 4 Republicans nationwide do not approve of Trump’s job performance.
“It’s like any show that’s on TV for a long time — the ratings start to go down. And the ratings are going down,” Christie said. “I am willing to bet you that by next February, this room is going to be twice the size of what it is now. After the midterms, you watch.”
Ex-MAGA diehard Rich Logis, wearing a red “I left MAGA hat,” hopes to see “an electoral revolt against MAGA” in the midterms.
“I think there’s a shift in our country right now,” he said. “It happens slowly.”
Logis was promoting support groups for friends and family of Trump loyalists at a table outside the convention hall. Nearby, someone was selling books about how to escape cults.
At the podium, former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh implored Trump’s critics not to downplay the seriousness of the threat the president poses to the nation.
“He’s everything our founders feared. Say it. Believe it,” Walsh said. He said his former party is “an authoritarian-embracing cult” and “a threat to everything I love.”
Retired Gen. Mark Hertling, who once commanded the U.S. Army’s European forces, said he’s “haunted” by allies who ask him “whether American institutions ever can be trusted again.”
“Our nation’s institutions have been shaken. Our alliances have been strained. Our credibility has been damaged. And our nation’s values have been cast aside,” Hertling said. He suggested the U.S. should look to the reconstruction of Germany after the defeat of Nazism if it hoped to to restore the damage caused by Trump and his allies.
The nation’s recovery, he said as his voiced cracked, would be something people have to earn over many years.
Bill Kristol, who worked in previous Republican administrations and helped found the Weekly Standard magazine, described Trump and his Republican supporters in Congress as “an existential threat” to the nation. But he was also optimistic about the upcoming midterm elections.
Kristol said Democrats are “almost certain to win the House,” “could possibly win the Senate,” and have “a good chance to win the presidency” in 2028.
Brittany Martinez, executive director of the host organization Principles First, also tried to cast an optimistic tone, even after describing the many reasons why she couldn’t bear to continue her career as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.
“I hope that Republicans continue to wake up,” she said. “I do think that those folks exist. And I hope that they exist in greater numbers.”
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