A conservative columnist warned on Monday that her Republican colleagues just made a "tacit admission" about the 2026 midterms that could blow up in their face.

S.E. Cupp, a columnist for CNN, said during a segment on "The Source" with host Kaitlan Collins that Republicans have all but admitted that they don't stand a chance during the midterms with their push for mid-cycle redistricting. While those efforts seem to have paid off so far, Cupp warned that they could energize the Democratic base in a way that thwarts all the time Republicans spent trying to rig the election in their favor.

"Here's the thing that I think is important to point out if you care about democracy," Cupp said. "The republicans have done what they've done because they've been allowed to. But it's also a tacit admission that they know they cannot win without rigging it. They're out of ideas. They're not even attempting to win new voters or win back the voters that they've been losing since gaining them in 2024."

Several Republican states from Texas to Louisiana and Tennessee have adopted new election maps ahead of the midterms in an effort to preserve the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Cupp warned that voters can see through the Republicans' plans, and that may cause them to backfire in November.

"So this is the giddiness and the crowing I'm seeing from republicans about the state of the redistricting math and how it's helping Republicans," she said. "What they're not saying out loud is what I think a lot of voters can see, which is you had to rig it to make yourself competitive. And I don't even know if this will still make them competitive. They might actually be handing Democrats an advantage by really ginning up that base, firing them up to go and vote."

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board reviewed President Donald Trump's new package of ideas for reducing cost of living as voters call for blood over the issue in the midterms — and found serious problems with some of them.

Ultimately, the board concluded, some of the ideas have merit, like pausing tariffs on beef. But one other particular idea would be a massive dud.

"Mr. Trump is scavenging for ideas to reduce gasoline prices, which have climbed to a national average of $4.52 a gallon," wrote the board. "On Monday he resurrected the hoary idea of suspending the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal excise tax on gas. 'We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,' he told CBS News."

The problem, wrote the board, is that aside from the fact that "Mr. Trump doesn’t have the legal authority to pause the tax on his own, so he would need Congress to pass legislation," the issue is that "a temporary pause on the federal gas tax won’t appreciably reduce how much Americans pay at the pump. After the tax holiday ends, prices will increase. A suspension would cost the highway trust fund about $2.1 billion a month in revenue, which would have to be made up with general fund revenue."

The WSJ argued that if Trump is serious about reforming federal gas taxes, a better idea is to encourage states to bear more of the responsibility.

Ultimately, the board concluded, "the best and most immediate way Mr. Trump could reduce costs for Americans would be to drop his tariffs en toto. We know that won’t happen, but it would be a big political and economic winner."

A Nobel Prize-winning economist blasted President Donald Trump's hidden machine for ripping off American consumers in a new Substack essay on Monday.

Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on trade theory, argued in the essay that Trump has effectively hidden the disastrous impact of his tariff regime behind the headlines about the war in Iran. That has allowed him to continue taking money from American consumers and handing it to his billionaire buddies, even though several courts have ruled that his tariffs are illegal, Krugman argued.

"So we have created a machine which rips off consumers when the tariffs are imposed, then hands a bunch of money to corporations when the tariffs are ruled illegal," he wrote.

"So this is really not great stuff, and it’s pretty big. The Trump tariffs have been something like 1% of GDP, and most of them illegal and therefore a ripoff of consumers," he continued. "That’s a big deal. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars that were taken for no good reason."

Krugman also noted that Trump's tariffs have not benefited consumers as he once claimed. Trump previously claimed his tariffs would lead to a resurgence in manufacturing jobs and increase the standard of living for Americans.

"It almost seems beside the point to point out that the tariffs have also failed," Krugman wrote. "All of the things that they were supposed to do rebuild manufacturing — manufacturing employment is down — reduce the trade deficit — the trade deficit isn’t down — haven’t happened. So this was all a really large burden on the U.S. public, completely without any payoff."