Opinion

Every once in a while, someone comes along who explains the Trump phenomenon better than a thousand polls, focus groups and New York Times diner interviews ever could.

Meet Eric Deters.

Deters is a Kentucky attorney, former congressional candidate and longtime Trump donor who has apparently reached the conclusion that Kimberly Guilfoyle — Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée and Trump’s ambassador to Greece, who was publicly ordered to resign Tuesday — is, to use his own description, a “wicked, evil person.”...

I was days from turning 23 when I got the call that changed my life. My congressman's press secretary had passed out in his car at lunch, and he was fired on the spot. I was yanked from our district office in southwestern Pennsylvania and dropped onto Capitol Hill to take his job the next day.

The timing could not have been worse. My boss was about to become the first member of the House reprimanded in a decade, and the press was circling with excitement. One day I was in a district office. The next, I was a press secretary. I had once told the congressman during a drive through our district that someday I wanted to be his press secretary. I didn’t expect it to happen as fast as it did. And I was scared.

Because I had no idea what a press secretary actually did. It was the proverbial metaphor of being thrown into the deep end of the pool and learning how to swim....

Throughout his life of public vulgarity, chauvinistic misogynist and sexual abuser Donald Trump has always been unusually — and often inappropriately — fixated on beautiful blonde women.

Trump cheated on his first blonde wife, Ivana, with his second blonde wife, Marla, then cheated on his third (naturally brunette) wife, Melania, with blonde adult film star Stormy Daniels. Maybe that’s why Melania got her hair did to seem blonder?

Each of Trump’s blonde wives gave him a blonde daughter, but he’s always openly preferred First Daughter Ivanka to Second Best Daughter, the often-forgotten Tiffany....

Just when you think the Trump regime can’t go any lower, they immediately drag our country down even further into fascism. MAGA loves to call Democrats “the party of violence” based on absolutely nothing, all while Trump carries out crimes against humanity every single day.

During the same week that saw Trump bait Iran into bombing American cities during a campaign rally in Nebraska, his personally appointed Pentagon pet, “Punch-Drunk” Pete Hegseth, gleefully announced the first public execution on American soil since 1936. We’ll circle back to this new Circle of Hell in a moment.

Trump is also now bringing sanctions against the International Criminal Court because *checks notes and then primal screams into the abyss* a former ICC judge won the Nobel Peace Prize instead of him. And to make it even more humiliating, he lost to a WOMAN OF COLOR who joked about sharing the prize with Trump if her co-workers would “clap harder.”...

The White House Communications Department always stretched the truth — it's been caught in a lie many more times than once.

But there was a period in which official White House communications came with a particular seriousness, gravitas, perfection in wording, and more often than not, the position of a president representing every American. Donald J. Trump blew up any notion of the American presidency acting as such, but it took Steve Cheung — one of the most important and dangerous officials that the average American has never heard of — to eviscerate trust built up over generations in official White House communications.

And we don't yet know the full impact, only that it's horrific and could get much worse, and sooner rather than later....

I’m allowing myself to believe that sane people may be in charge of Congress starting next January 20. I know, I know: Polls have gotten our hopes up before only to have them dashed on the rocky shores of political reality.

But this time it does seem as if congressional Republicans will finally get their comeuppance for their blind loyalty to Trump.

The sense of relief in the land is palpable....

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) bragged about a road salt win at a Maine Senate debate, and her challenger's comeback had observers cheering.

On Tuesday, Collins faced Democratic challenger Troy Jackson in a debate weeks before the midterms. Asked what she would do about President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada, Collins pointed to a specific victory.

"I was successful at getting road salt removed from the tariff list," Collins said. Jackson responded by pouncing on the answer....

Former MLB superstar Roger Clemens fact-checked President Donald Trump during his Texas rally Wednesday night.

Trump traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to stump for Republicans like Tano Tijerina in his race against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), whom Trump attacked for what he considered to be a "disloyal act" by not becoming a Republican after Trump pardoned him. At the rally, Trump invited Clemens on stage to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, because Clemens had not yet been elected to the Hall of Fame.

In typical Trump fashion, the president also rattled off a fact about Clemens that the former big league pitcher was quick to correct. ...

Former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen said he could not believe what he was reading in Kimberly Guilfoyle's newly revealed text messages.

Eisen, who served in the Obama White House and later as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, appeared on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" on Wednesday to discuss a Wall Street Journal report on Guilfoyle's Signal messages, which The Journal reports show her asking Trump donor Eric Deters to send her $100,000 to pay off her American Express debt. Guilfoyle is the U.S. ambassador to Greece.

"It's one of the worst things that I have ever seen with respect to a U.S. ambassador," Eisen told Cooper. "It stinks to high heaven."...