Boondoggles, Bourbon and Ballrooms

Trump and his cabinet keep making it harder for the GOP to hang on to its congressional majority.

Image courtesy of Spectrum News

Events this week captured the essential character of the Trump regime: extravagant self-interest, contempt for accountability and a stunning indifference to how any of it lands with ordinary citizens.

Four stories stood out, not just because they’re objectively embarrassing, but because they carry real political consequences heading into the midterms.

“Not even a little bit”

Tuesday morning, before boarding a plane to the Beijing summit with his new best friend Xi Jinping, Donald Trump took questions on the White House lawn about the Iran war. It’s now in its eleventh week, and it’s costing ordinary Americans at the pump.

A reporter asked how much Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. His answer was blunt to the point of brutality: “Not even a little bit. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

ABC’s Karen Travers pressed him on this stunning response, typical of an increasingly unfiltered Trump. He doubled down and added, for good measure, that when the war ends, “oil is gonna drop, the stock market’s gonna go through the roof.”

This is the same man who floated a gas tax holiday the day before as a gesture toward the very economic pain he now says he doesn’t think about.

The political damage was immediate. Trump’s usual escape hatch—dismissing a bad gaffe as a joke—was unavailable. It was on tape and delivered with emphatic intent.

A PBS/NPR/Marist poll last week found 63 percent of Americans already blame Trump for high gas prices. Now he’s handed Democrats an ad clip for the ages, which they’re sure to use in the upcoming midterms.

Road Rules Redux

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—former MTV The Real World cast member and current top regulator of America’s airline and automotive industries—just spent seven months crisscrossing the country with his wife, Fox and Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children. He was filming a five-part YouTube docuseries called “The Great American Road Trip.” Duffy described it “wholesome,” “patriotic” and a “civic experience,” while Fox News put its best gloss on the boondoggle.

We’re all old enough to remember the right-wing media machine blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for taking paternity leave to be with his premature infant twins.

The hypocrisy wasn’t the worst of it. There’s also the headspinning corporate sponsorship. The trip was funded by Toyota, United Airlines, Boeing and Shell—all regulated by Duffy’s own department. The nonprofit behind the production is run by a former lobbyist for the US Travel Association who previously worked in government relations at General Motors. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with the DOT Inspector General this week, alleging the arrangement may have violated federal gift and travel rules, which bar executive branch officers from accepting anything of value from entities their agency oversees.

Then there’s the tone deaf timing. While Duffy filmed his family filling up their car’s gas tank on the public dime, TSA agents went without paychecks. United Airlines, one of the sponsors, has since raised checked baggage fees and warned of a 20 percent spike in summer fares. Duffy dismissed his critics as “the radical, miserable left.” But really, it’s everyone who isn’t in the MAGA cult.

Patel crashes out on the Hill

I’ve covered Kash Patel’s bourbon saga in a previous piece, so I’ll spare you the rerun. What happened Tuesday at the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee was icing on a rum cake.

Patel had ostensibly come to Capitol Hill to defend the FBI’s $12 billion budget request. What he delivered instead was a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration of why he shouldn’t be running the bureau, or any organization.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) pressed him on The Atlantic’s reporting about his drinking—reporting that described him as “conspicuously inebriated” with “unexplained absences.” Patel called it “unequivocally, categorically false” and launched a counterattack. He yelled that “the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you”—a reference to Van Hollen’s April 2025 trip to perform a safety check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man DHS had illegally deported to a brutal Salvadoran mega-prison.

Let’s set the record straight. Nearly every word of Patel’s claim is false. Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of any crime or proven to be a gang member. He is not a convicted rapist. He is currently under home confinement while fighting dubious “human smuggling” charges to which he has pleaded not guilty. The “margaritas” in the famous photo were placed on the table by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s staff as a propaganda prop. Van Hollen said at the time that neither of them touched the drinks, with the salt rim visibly undisturbed. Patel then posted what he claimed was a $7,128 bar tab run up by Van Hollen on the taxpayer’s dime—which turned out to be a catering bill for a staff holiday party.

This wasn’t a heat of the moment punch. It was planned. CNN noted that Patel repeated the same false claim later in his testimony, saying Van Hollen had been “drinking margaritas with felons.”

When Van Hollen asked him directly whether he knew lying to Congress was a crime, Patel replied: “I do not lie to Congress.” That, ironically, is itself a lie.

Patel also brandished a large black placard of FBI statistics at the hearing, claiming the bureau had nearly doubled its arrests under his tenure. MS NOW published reporting, however, from a half-dozen law enforcement sources explaining why those numbers are cooked. Under Patel’s direction, FBI field offices were instructed to count as “FBI arrests” any suspects detained when agents were simply present or assisting, even when another agency led the investigation and made the actual arrest. That double-counting inflated numbers dramatically during ICE surge operations in cities like Minneapolis. “Kash is definitely engineering things to pad his stats,” a former FBI official said flatly. An MS NOW review also found that Patel’s celebrated Ten Most Wanted capture numbers were juiced by placing fugitives on the list hours or even minutes before their arrest.

Meanwhile, the FBI has lost 2,800 agents under Patel’s tenure and is struggling to recruit replacements. He fired agents with Iranian expertise just as the U.S. entered a war with Iran. He is polygraphing his own staff over a missing bourbon bottle. He is in the middle of a $250 million defamation suit against the journalist and the outlet covering all of it.

Van Hollen’s verdict afterwards was measured but spot on: “He’s a disgrace to the office he holds.”

Dancing around Trump’s ballroom

Then there’s the ballroom. We know the basic facts: Trump has torn down the East Wing and is replacing it with a 90,000-square-foot gilded event space. The cost has ballooned, the design is gaudy and the scale is grossly mismatched.

But it’s the symbolism, at a moment when families are canceling vacations and rationing groceries, that is becoming Trump-sized liability for the GOP.

CNN called the ballroom “a political albatross for the GOP” that has been hanging around the party’s neck for six months. In a normal midterm year, with a president whose approval has sunk into the mid-30s, you’d see lawmakers scrambling to create distance. Instead, Republicans this week did the opposite: they embraced it.

Congress is now being asked to authorize up to $1 billion for ballroom construction and security as part of a broader immigration enforcement bill. This follows Trump’s convenient reframing of the project as a security necessity following a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

But GOP strategists are worried. Brian Darling urged Republicans to “pump the brakes,” telling The Hill, “The fact that it’s linked to the ballroom makes it controversial.” He added, “If you’re spending all this money to fortify the White House, nobody bats an eye. If it’s a billion-dollar ballroom, that creates huge problems.”

Some Republicans are trying to waltz around the issue, arguing they’re voting for security upgrades, not Trump’s decorating choices. But ever-concerned Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she’s not sold, wanting to hear the case for why the funding is “necessary.” Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia said he’d look at it “very carefully.”

The rebranding to “security” faces a practical problem: the ballroom is already in the bill, and Democrats have already written the ad. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was succinct: “Ballroom Republicans are fighting for Trump. Democrats are fighting for you.”

The political trap is now clear. Republicans who vote yes on the funding will hand Democrats a perfect symbol of misplaced priorities. Republicans who vote no face Trump’s wrath—and he has already demonstrated this cycle that he will come after members of his own party who cross him, including the Indiana state senators he successfully targeted for rejecting his redistricting maps.

More than a dozen GOP strategists and lawmakers told MS NOW they remain cautiously optimistic about the midterms, but only if the Iran war ends soon and its economic aftershocks fade quickly. Good luck with either. As put by one House Republican in a swing district, who apparently declined to give their name, Trump’s habit of naming things after himself and picking fights with the pope fires up “the people that want to put a check on his power, instead of taking his energy and focusing on stuff that makes their lives better at home.”