Trump's Senate Hostages Bite Back. It's a clustertrump!
Posted by Sia on June 25, 2026, 11:21 am ADMIN
Sia: Like him or don't, but he certainly has a way with words and is absolutely right!
Trump's Senate Hostages Bite Back. It's a clustertrump!
by Rick Wilson - Jun 25
Yesterday, Donald Trump waddled his increasingly gravid frame into a closed-door Senate GOP luncheon for the first time in over a year, and the smart money in that room wasn’t on reconciliation and kumbaya. It was on Trump hearing from the men he’s betrayed, belittled, and attacked and learning about the terrain of their anger. It was about their growing, inchoate rage over his reckless stupidity, leaving them with the political bill that no amount of party loyalty can paper over.
The smart money, as ever, was right, and the sweeping damage from Trump’s own actions, both to his agenda and their political survival was the spoken and unspoken topic of the entire meltdown.
One lesson you should take from this, when reading the after-action comments, is to always multiply the downside by 10x. A “spirited disagreement” is code for near-fisticuffs.
This wasn’t a conference lunch in the normal sense of Washington folkways. It was a wake for a reeking corpse, and everyone in the room who later played Rashomon with the press was, if they were being honest, a mere attendee arguing over the cause of death.
The invitation itself tells the story. Rick Scott (R-Medicare Fraud) extended it without bothering to loop in Majority Leader John Thune (R-Collegial Nothingburger), who found out he was hosting the president of the United States from social media.
You think that shit would have happened when Mitch McConnell ran the place?
Scott’s play wasn’t a scheduling oversight. It was a public act of fealty, a courtier hurling himself at the Umber Menace’s feet while the rest of the conference sat there with their jaws clenched, and Scott knew precisely what he was doing. His hatred of Thune is legendary, and his ambition to replace him is ferocious.
The heat in that room was about Trump’s irrational demands for absolute obedience from the Senate Republicans on the Iran deal from hell, and his ludicrous Millerite fetishization of the so-called SAVE America Act, his promise to kill the housing bill, he demands for everything everywhere all the time.
The fracture isn’t about any single issue. It’s about a structural reality about Trump most of the Senators in his own party have never understood and never will, because grasping it would require them to admit their capitulation and the abandonment of their actual oath of office. A functioning Senate conference’s loyalty (R or D) runs sideways, to each other, not upward to the president.
Thune answers to fifty-two colleagues, most of whom have to face actual voters in November. By now, even the slower Members of the caucus (looking at you, Cindy Hyde Smith (R-Drool Bucket) have come to know that Trump does not care whether Thune keeps the majority, except in the narrowest, most self-referential, what-have-you-done-for-me-in-the-last-eleven-minutes sense.
Trump answers to no one and never has, not to an ideology, not to a party, not to God, not to gravity, not to the federal sentencing guidelines. Those two facts cannot coexist, and today we watched them collide in real time, at lunch, over rubber chicken and a steaming side of grievance that one member described to Burgess Everett as “A total clusterfuck.”
Look at the pileup he built at the exact moment Senate Republicans are on their knees begging for an affordability message, for something, anything to run on.
Hours before the lunch, he torpedoed his own signing of a bipartisan housing affordability bill, the single most on-message thing his party had going, the one piece of legislation that let them take a victory lap in front of voters drowning in rent, purely to hold it hostage to a voting bill that’s already a five-time floor loser.
That isn’t a strategy. Trump is a man burning down his own house just to prove he can, then demanding the victims applaud the show. And the punchline writes itself: the housing bill becomes law in ten days whether he signs it or not. He held a hostage that was already free, fired the gun in the air, and called it leverage. “No one gives a fuck about housing,” was Trump’s quote, and the fodder for a thousand television ads to come.
Trump’s demand that Thune nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, that weird obsession of the MAGA election-cheating goon squat that has face-planted on the floor five separate times, and that Thune has told him, flatly and repeatedly, doesn’t have the votes.
I mean…it’s not even close to having the votes: not the sixty to break a Democratic filibuster. Not even the fifty to change the rules. Four of his own senators, Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and Tillis, have already crossed the aisle to kill it. Cornyn and Cassidy, marinating in fresh contempt, make six more who can return some of the pain and humiliation Trump has caused them.
The math isn’t close, and every adult in that room knows it except the one man who keeps pounding the table demanding that vote count math surrender to him the way everything else in his life has.
Thune walked out and described it as a “robust conversation,” which is Senate Methodist for the president bellowed like a cut hog, we yelled at him, and everyone was relieved it was over, like Melania when Trump rolls off her after a robust 15 seconds.
Then he added the epitaph to the SAVE Act, saying that passing it was, “…just not realistic.”
Translation: he didn’t listen, he never does, and we are so tired.
Then there’s the rest of the wreckage. He blocked confirmation of his own DNI nominee, Jay Clayton, so Bill Pulte, his unpopular acting hatchet man, could keep gutting the intelligence community for sport. It’s going swimmingly, I’m told.
He strong-armed senators to fund a White House ballroom while they’re out there trying to convince voters the GOP isn’t a gold-leafed shrine to one man’s vanity. They torched a $1.8 billion slush fund for his cronies that produced what one senior aide called a true unified front, all fifty-three Republicans, furious and frustrated.
The Justice Department had to abandon it in broad daylight, though Acting Attorney General and Pedophile Protector-in-Chief Todd Blanche is no doubt already sketching the resurrection on the back of a cocktail napkin and Trump will be back to demand it shortly.
And he’s forcing them to defend an Iran deal they universally consider a strategic surrender of the most calamitous order. We don’t have to guess how the Iran debacle landed, because it detonated inside the room.
Bill Cassidy, already cashiered by a Trump-blessed primary challenger and therefore gloriously, beautifully immune to the only real political threat Trump has ever owned, stood up and went after the president over the Iran memorandum of understanding, calling the whole foreign-policy adventure exactly the blunder it is.
The two men went at it while colleagues squirmed. At one point, Cassidy stopped calling him “Mr. President” and started calling him “brother,” which is the Southern male equivalent of “bless your heart.”
Trump, naturally, reached for the only weapon in the arsenal and threw Cassidy’s primary loss in his face, because of course he did. Cassidy, to his credit, copped to losing his temper afterward, chalked it up to “the Irish in me,” then strolled out and told reporters the meeting went “swimmingly,” a word so dry you could cure meat with it.
John Kennedy, performing his nightly one-man show of Foghorn Leghorn Defends the Indefensible, pronounced the president “mad as a murder hornet.” Ted Cruz, ever the human mood ring, called the bloodletting “spirited” and “lively,” the two adjectives you reach for when “humiliating” won’t clear the comms team.
And Jim Justice, a man not historically burdened by introspection, summed up the entire Republican Party in 2026 in seven words: “They harbor bad feelings. Maybe that’s fair.”
“Maybe that’s fair.”
It got dumber.
Trump also lit into David McCormick for missing the war powers vote, a vote McCormick missed because he was physically standing next to Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania at the time, and a vote that passed anyway whether he showed or not. The President of the United States got angry at a man for the crime of being at the President’s own event.
There is no strategist alive who can fix this, because the problem isn’t strategy.
The problem is the wiring of Trump’s febrile bone dome and his crashing, abyssal polling numbers.
Trump has fewer loyal Senate votes than he had a year ago for one stupid, gloriously self-inflicted reason: he shot them himself. He primaried Bill Cassidy out of pure vengeance for a five-year-old impeachment vote. He torched John Cornyn in Texas by anointing Ken Paxton, a walking grand-jury exhibit his own colleagues begged him not to nominate.
Both incumbents are on their way out, and both have discovered, in the twilight of their careers, a sudden and luxurious gift for honesty. Cornyn said it flat before walking in: we’re not on the same page now, and that’s dangerous. Cornyn isn’t a stupid man, and he may well take his vengeance against Trump slowly, painfully, and deliberately.
Every scalp Trump took this spring was a vote he will never get back, traded for the moronic dopamine hit of the rabid Truth Social monkeys throwing their feces on social media and screeching “OWNED!”
He built the gallows, hanged a bunch of party loyalists, and is now baffled that the ghosts won’t stop talking back. A man who understood the Senate would have seen it coming a mile out. A man who understands only dominance walks into the same rake every single time.
After his tantrum, Trump waddled out to the cameras and declared it a “really great meeting” with a “really well unified” party, before adding, without apparent awareness that he was contradicting himself inside the same breath, “I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay, I think you know who they are.”
Rand Paul, slithering past on his way out, delivered the line of the day with the deadpan of a man who has waited years for it: “Lots of unity, lots of Republican love on Republican love.” Then the President of the United States, the self-described greatest dealmaker in the history of the Republic, fled the Capitol, leaving yet another unspinnable shitshow of his own making in his fetid wake.
The question was never whether the meeting would go well. It’s that we’ve reached the point where a sitting president and his own Senate majority require a chaperoned sit-down to remember they’re nominally on the same team, and the chaperoned sit-down ended with grown men bellowing at each other and the president gurning and spitting with rage at his “allies.”
Roger Wicker called it a “good family discussion among friends.”
Sure it was, Roger.
So is the last act of any given Christopher Marlow play, right up until the stage filled with bodies and tragedy is spread to the guilty and innocent alike.
This isn’t a party. It’s a hostage drama with catering, and today, less than six months out from an election, the hostages realized the kidnapper has no intent of letting a single one of them get out of his mess alive.
They helped draft an MoU the felon would embrace because it was crafted to appear with concessions that played to his ego. They acted with an understanding the felon would not know a good deal if it bit him on the ass. He sank to expectations proving that true.
People who read... who CAN read and read the MoU learned and know better. Even some MAGA realized what a stupid looking and acting dumbass the felon is.'
Yesterday at a rally, when he started telling them what a horrible economy he was given, and how he totally fixed it, they began leaving. Not just a few. Masses of people slowly walking away, clearly hearing him for the first HONEST time.
Did you see Jon Ossoff's address at Beulah Baptist Church, Sunday? I sent it to every MAGA I know.
This is the most powerful address I ever saw, You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
Even if he had help writing it, it's very strong, not in the mafia tough guy style of the fake tough guy in the WH, but strong like Biden and Obama - real men.No more letting the DNC choose our candidates for public office. They're not good at it.
Great speech!! He really is a powerful, sincere speaker!
on June 25, 2026, 11:21 am
