A journalist and historian warned Saturday that Republicans have a "fear that places them in a terrible tightening vise" — as they're poised to pay the "butcher's bill" for President Donald Trump's decisions.

Sidney Blumenthal, whose career includes political journalism and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, wrote for The Guardian that Republicans have largely allowed the president to avoid accountability — and that's going to cost them.

"The Republicans in Congress now have another fear that places them in a terrible tightening vise. They have allowed Trump to avoid accountability and in next year’s midterms – of which these elections are an augury – they will be held mercilessly to account in his stead. Trump is the cause for which they will suffer the effect. He will not be on the ballot. Only they will pay the butcher’s bill," warned Blumenthal.

To boot, he said the GOP's hands are tied. By giving the president free rein to do as he pleases, regardless of how popular, they've damaged their relationships with their own voters. This is never more evident, he said, than at GOP town halls, or lack thereof.

"Through their abject obedience to him they have permitted Trump to sever their organic connection to their voters. None dare venture any longer to town halls in their districts. They cower before their constituents’ wrath over Trump."

The numbers may spell out why. A Marist-NPR poll this week reverberated through political circles, showing Democrats with a massive 14-point advantage. A university poll similarly found an 11-point advantage, Blumenthal noted. Contrast that to 2018, when Democrats held a lead of about 8 points — and gained a whopping 40 seats.

"The latest numbers might project roughly 60 seats. The supposedly dead Democrats would easily carry a large majority. With those margins, they would also likely take the Senate," he noted.

President Donald Trump reversed course this week after excluding certain Brazilian goods from his so-called reciprocal tariffs, a reversal that left one economist stunned on Saturday over what he called a “remarkable admission.”

“‘'I tried a policy, and oh, everyone tells me I want the cost of living to be lower, let me reverse it,’” said economist Justin Wolfers, appearing on CNN’s “Table for Five” on Saturday. “The only implication is that he's learned what [we] learned in Econ 101: tariffs raise prices!”

Trump had initially levied high tariffs on Brazil in part over its prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has since been sentenced to nearly three decades in prison over his role in an attempted coup after his election loss in 2023. Bolsonaro has long been an ally to Trump, and his arrest was met poorly in the White House.

And, with Trump’s reversal on tariffs, the president had also delivered a major “political victory” to Brazil’s current left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“Trump’s decision to remove many tariffs on Brazilian products is a significant political victory for the Lula administration ahead of next year’s presidential elections – and a vindication of Brazil’s choice to pursue a calm and pragmatic negotiation strategy vis-à-vis Trump,” wrote Brazilian professor Iliver Stuenkel in a social media post this week on X.

Donald Trump and adviser Stephen Miller’s grand plan to ramp up the war on drugs by blowing up alleged “narcoterrorists” in attacks from above did not pass legal muster with the lawyers at the CIA.

So they ran to a more compliant Pentagon.

According to a report from the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Horton, Donald Trump’s CIA director John Ratcliffe busily began planning the attacks via a variety of methods but then butted heads with lawyers in his department who questioned the legality of the unprovoked killing of foreign citizens.

The Post is reporting, “... early on, according to two people familiar with the matter, the administration proposed having the CIA use its unique covert authorities to conduct the lethal strikes on drug traffickers that Trump and Stephen Miller, his powerful homeland security adviser, wanted,” however, “Lawyers at the spy agency and elsewhere in the government were skeptical. Was killing civilian drug traffickers defensible under domestic law, they asked, if the cartels do not actually seek to attack Americans, even if the product they smuggle might lead to deaths in the United States?”

According to one official who wished to remain anonymous, “There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.”

The report notes that Trump and Miller faced “pushback” from CIA attorneys forcing them to revisit a back-up plan using the Pentagon, headed by former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, with Post adding the caveat, “And it came up with a legal justification that national security law experts inside and out of government have said does not stand up to facts: that the country was in a ‘non-international’ armed conflict with ‘designated terrorist organizations.’.”

“In the ongoing mission the Pentagon recently dubbed Operation Southern Spear, U.S. military forces have killed more than 80 people in 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific,” after Trump gave the go-ahead with the Post reporting, “The details of the finding that Trump signed in October are classified. But several people familiar with it have said it is broadly scoped, aggressive and aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force.”

“Many of the lawyers and other career officials at the White House National Security Council, Pentagon and Justice Department who had over the preceding months raised concerns about using lethal force against narcotraffickers had either left government or were reassigned or removed,” the Post is reporting.

You can read more here.