The Low-Energy Response to the GOP’s ‘High-T’ Politics 

Talking About Soy Boys All the Time Is Weird, Actually

The barrage of testosterone-based attacks on Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico don’t seem to have done much. A new poll out this week from Slingshot Strategies shows Talarico up five points over Republican opponent Ken Paxton, and he’s been even or ahead in four of the seven polls conducted since Paxton secured the nomination in May and launched a general election ad accusing Talarico of being too “low-T for Texas.” 

At the time, there was a multi-pronged, coordinated effort from state and national Republicans to paint Talarico as effeminate and, bizarrely, transgender. RNC chair Joe Gruters: “Tala-freako is a creep. He’s a vegan. He thinks God is nonbinary. He wants to mutilate children.” White House adviser and Famously Normal Guy Stephen Miller called him the Democrats’ “first transgender senate candidate” and told Fox News his blood was made of soy milk. President Trump himself referred to him as “this transgender, this guy running in Texas” who “wears a mask all the time.” 

Interestingly, Republicans don’t really seem to have duplicated this messaging in other midterms races. Instead, they’ve used the electoral victories of several progressives and democratic socialists as an opportunity to wield the “Democrats are communists” cudgel. That’s the line Trump and co. have trotted out in swing states and against other high-profile Democratic candidates like Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA).

If all of this feels a bit desperate, that’s because it is. But voters don’t really seem to be buying it. Trump’s approval rating is at a record low. Ossoff is polling ahead in Georgia, while his Republican opponent Mike Collins and Paxton, both of whom likely owe their nominations to last-minute Trump endorsements, are mired in new scandals. Voters are angry about corruption, inflation, and the Iran War, and the Trump administration simply seems to be messing up on too many levels for voters to be distracted by the usual culture war red meat. Calling the libs “soy boys” and communists may get you a hit on Fox News, but it doesn’t necessarily resonate with regular people.

“People are catching onto the fact that these corny nicknames don’t lower the cost of groceries, don’t lower the cost of prescription drugs, don’t lower the price of gas,” as Talarico recently put it on MS Now. Not a bad line, nor was this: “When I first heard this low-T thing, I had to look it up. Guys my age aren’t really worried about that kind of thing.”

During the 2024 campaign, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went viral for calling out Republicans’ “weird” obsession with policing people’s bodies. Zohran Mamdani relentlessly focused on his proposals to make New York City more affordable when he was asked about Israel every five minutes during last year’s mayoral campaign. 

It seems like a good 2026 strategy for Democrats might just be leading with charisma, kindness and a focus on policies that actually benefit peoples’ lives, while letting Republicans obsess over Communist takeovers and testosterone levels. 

Schumer’s Big Idea for Battling Anti-Trump Corruption

U.S. diplomats have long offered foreign countries that face rampant, elite corruption and impunity a solution: create a new, independent prosecutor’s office dedicated to going after large-scale graft. 

In these countries, corruption had become so endemic that the institutions normally trusted to prosecute and try graft could no longer be trusted. Judges might be on the take; prosecutors too. Politicians might be accountable to businessmen; companies might be lavishing favors on judges for beneficial rulings. It all turns into one very fragile house of cards, in which nobody can hold another accountable for fear of causing a chain reaction that might bring everyone down with them. 

The solution has been to create an independent anti-corruption prosecutor and, if need be, a specialized court. It’s been tried in Ukraine, where I saw that country’s anti-corruption organ develop firsthand. In Guatemala, an internationally staffed, UN-backed anti-corruption commission led to the arrest of a former president in that country. In Indonesia, an anti-corruption agency was paired with specialized courts. The point here is that they’re independent, but also dangerous: not only are they supposedly designed to be free from a corrupt system, but they have authority to prosecute and imprison people. 

Now Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has proposed a version of this. Unveiled this week, it’s the Senate Minority Leader’s idea to combat massive, Trump II corruption. Under this idea, Congress would create an “Anti-Corruption Bureau.” In an irony lost on nobody at this point, its structure would partly mimic that used in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe: an expert panel would screen candidates to sit as commissioners who would run the agency. 

The idea would abandon much of what has made these agencies successful overseas: criminal prosecution authority. Schumer’s agency could sue people via civil cases and refer matters to the DOJ for prosecution. It would take the Federal Election Commission, Office of Government Ethics, and Office of Special Counsel and combine them into one civil office. 

The FEC has long been paralyzed due to a lack of commissioners; other agencies that have long been independent are no longer so after multiple Supreme Court rulings destroyed that concept. Schumer’s proposal offers something new: a three-judge panel of D.C. Circuit judges would appoint replacements if a commissioner seat stays open longer than 14 days, with a retired federal judge as the replacement. 

The last idea included in this bill would allow people to sue over what they think is corrupt (this is also a boon to trial attorneys). The proposal would create a new cause of action under which private citizens and state attorneys general could sue senior executive branch officials and federal contractors for personal enrichment. For a messaging bill, it’s uniquely American: we might all be beset by rampant corruption, but at least we’d have the power to sue?  

When the UFC Fighters Start Getting It…

“When you’re at a Trump rally, you’re like, Oh I can definitely see how Hitler happened. … When you go to a Trump rally, it makes you question the sanity of everybody. Like Trump’s up there talking about ‘We’re going to throw people in jail for burning the flag.’ And dude I’m like I don’t know, like you shouldn’t do that but it’s like, you know, there is a fucking Constitution.” – UFC fighter Sean Strickland 

 How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which Democratic official has repeatedly asked Sen. Mitch McConnell to provide formal proof of life in order to keep serving?
2. Which longtime New York Times opinion columnist was recently tapped to join the Bari Weissified “60 Minutes”? 
3. Why did Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) deign to wear a suit instead of his usual hoodie this week?

Answers below

Fetterman Is Just Messing With Us at This Point

In his latest “fuck you” to the voters who elected him, Sen. John Fetterman this week published a Washington Post op-ed explaining why abolishing the filibuster would be bad, actually. It’s a reversal from the position he ran on in 2022 and a sentiment that has become increasingly unpopular among Democrats, most of whom realize that they have no hopes of passing any legislation with teeth so long as the GOP can simply kill it with the filibuster. The party fell two votes short of being able to pass a sweeping update to the Voting Rights Act and codifying Roe v. Wade during the Biden administration because Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) refused to use a “filibuster exception” that would’ve allowed those bills to pass with a simple majority. Fetterman, bafflingly, writes that Manchin and Sinema have been “vindicated,” and that it would be a damn shame to, as Manchin once phrased it, “put party power over everything else.” ‘Cause, you know, the GOP would never…

It’s just the latest indication that Fetterman is flirting with switching parties, beyond the incessant cozying up to Israel, his approval of Trump’s ballroom project, and his vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security amid ICE’s crusade against immigrants.

Handbasket Hangs in Brooklyn, the Embarrassing WHCD and Comey vs. Trump

We had an absolutely lovely time at Crystal Lake Bar in Brooklyn on Wednesday with our pal Marisa Kabas! Thanks so much to the TPM and Handbasket readers who made it out to test your trivia skills, have some drinks, and hear Marisa, Joe Ragazzo and Josh Marshall talking midterms, Democratic strategy and the future of independent media. For those of you who live far away or couldn’t make it, we’ll release Marisa and Josh’s conversation as a bonus podcast episode soon. 

Hunter Walker on MS Now’s “11th Hour”

Hunter joined Ali Velshi on MS Now’s “11th Hour” to talk Trump’s 2028 jokes at the (rescheduled) White House Correspondents Dinner.

“We are facing a new type of dictatorial leadership, and this is why it’s kind of hard to have a dinner where we’re all sitting there and clapping on cue with the Mentalist after the President talks about this illegal and dangerous threat to go for a third term, when we know, Occam’s Razor, the guy has never lost an election and left willingly.” Amen. 

David Kurtz on The Daily Blast podcast

“There are an increasing number of examples where we see [Trump] bumping up against the limits of his powers,” David told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent this week. David joined Greg’s podcast to talk about the barrage of new filings in the James Comey “86 47” case, in which Comey’s lawyers argue — quite convincingly! — that he’s the subject of a vindictive prosecution and should be thrown out. As David and Greg discuss, there’s evidence of Trump literally sitting on Air Force One tracking minute developments in Comey’s case

Trivia answers: `1) Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear 2) Ross Douthat 3) To attend Lindsey Graham’s funeral