Latest news with #RepublicanRevolution
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former FSU president John Thrasher under treatment for cancer, his firm announces
Former state lawmaker and retired Florida State University president John Thrasher is "battling cancer," his lobbying firm announced April 22 on social media. "Our prayers and best wishes go out to John Thrasher today, a founding partner in this firm and one of Florida's most storied public servants in this century," The Southern Group said in a post on X. "John is battling cancer and is currently at Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare where he is receiving treatment," it added. "His amazing public record of accomplishment — House Speaker, Senator, FSU President — often obscures his private greatness as a friend and mentor. "He is a fighter, and he has the love and support of the entire TSG family." Thrasher rejoined the firm after retiring from the presidency of FSU, where he served 2014-21. He was later replaced by current President Richard McCullough. Thrasher, a longtime Republican who came to power when the GOP began its takeover of state government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was Florida House speaker and a state senator. He was a partner with The Southern Group 2001-09 before being elected to the Senate. 'I'm not going to be lobbying, per se, mostly working in client development and working with existing clients, not the Legislature,' Thrasher told the Tallahassee Democrat in a 2021 interview when he rejoined The Southern Group. Thrasher also is listed as a professor at Florida State's College of Law. Requests for comment are pending with the university and the Florida House. 'John Thrasher has been a fighter his whole life," Florida Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said in a statement on behalf of himself and his wife Missy. "He fought for our country in Vietnam, earning a battlefield commission and two bronze stars. He fought for and won the Republican Revolution in Florida. He fought for FSU as their biggest fan and advocate. "Speaker of the House, the Lion of the Senate, and Chair of the RPOF, he fought for school choice, parental rights, and so much more," he added. "I know he's running to this fight. Given his track record, I'd say the odds are in his favor. Missy and I praying for John, Jean (Thrasher, his wife) and the entire family.' Thrasher served in the House from 1992 to 2000, the final two years as speaker. He was chair of the Senate Rules Committee and chaired of former Gov. Rick Scott's reelection campaign. Thrasher was nominated for the FSU presidency by Sandy D'Alemberte, a Democrat who was president of the university 1994–2003. He was president during the November 2014 shooting on the school's Tallahassee campus. Myron May, 31, went into the university's Strozier Library just after midnight and opened fire, injuring three before he was quickly shot and killed in a hail of bullets by Tallahassee and FSU police. John Thrasher looks back on challenges, changes as he leaves Florida State presidency 'We need you now more than ever': FSU's Thrasher presides over his final commencement Moments that best exemplify John Thrasher's leadership at FSU, as told by those who know him Key dates during the John Thrasher tenure at Florida State University This is a breaking news story and may be updated. Byron Dobson of the Tallahassee Democrat and the News Service of Florida contributed background. Jim Rosica is a member of the USA TODAY Network's Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jrosica@ Follow him on X: @JimRosicaFL. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Retired FSU president John Thrasher 'battling cancer,' his firm says
Fox News
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Democrats' identity crisis: Youth revolt rocks party after Trump comeback
The tract of political land where Democrats reside is unique. It's not the same political street address where they took up shop in 1995 after losing the House and Senate to the "Republican Revolution" of 1994 – which flipped control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40 years. They still held the presidency then with President Bill Clinton. It's not the same zip code after the legendary House blowout in 2010 where they dropped an historic 63 seats. President Barack Obama remained in the White House. It's even a different electoral co-op for Democrats compared to 2016, when President Donald Trump unexpectedly prevailed over Hillary Clinton, winning in the Electoral College. Democrats controlled neither the House nor Senate in 2017. But a lack of support for Trump in Congress and his inexperience at governance undercut sizable portions of his legislative agenda. Fast-forward to 2025. President Trump is back in the White House – this time after winning the popular vote and Electoral College, scoring a decisive knockout over former Vice President Kamala Harris. Republicans clung to power in the House and flipped the Senate. And the political real estate Democrats now occupy is a very foreign locale. They're out of power in Washington. But President Trump returned to power resoundingly and emboldened. And this time, congressional Republicans – MAGA Republicans – stand foursquare behind Mr. Trump. So it's natural there's Democratic infighting about what went wrong, who deserves blame and, more importantly, what direction the party should take next. Here's the schism: Younger, more progressive Democrats are trying to weed out senior lawmakers and power brokers who have been in office for years. Let's start with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. She's the best known of younger, energetic, left-leaning Democrats. She's also the most-experienced figure in the Democrats' youth movement. Ocasio-Cortez arrived on the scene, upsetting former Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in a 2018 primary. "We got them on their back foot. We've got them scared," said Ocasio-Cortez recently about MAGA-aligned Republicans. They're brash. "Let's go kick some a--! Let's go win our young people back," thundered 25-year-old Democratic National Committee (DNC) Vice Chairman David Hogg. And they're blunt about Democratic errors and missteps. "What if we didn't suck?" asked 26-year-old Kat Abughazaleh, the Democratic Illinois congressional candidate and TikTok influencer. Younger Democrats are trying to banish party veterans. "We' have to have a whole rebrand of the Democratic Party," said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. "New leaders. Not the old guard." Hogg is now spending $20 million to coax younger Democrats to primary longtime congressional incumbents. "What we're trying to do here is not just focus on primaries where there's potentially an older incumbent. But more than anything, an ineffective person in that position. And replace with a generational leader," said Hogg on MSNBC. Abughazaleh is primarying 80-year-old Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who is progressive. But she first came to Congress in 1998. She's been a member of the House of Representatives longer than Abughazaleh has been alive. "You have to look to the exceptions for real leadership, as the majority work from an outdated playbook. We need a makeover," said Abughazaleh. But devouring your own is risky. "Beating the other side is more important to many voters [rather] than who exactly is representing your own team," said University of Mary Washington political scientist Stephen Farnsworth. But Farnsworth concedes that unrest brews on the Democratic side of the aisle. "What we're talking about here is a pretty powerful, generational clash within the Democratic Party over how to aggressively challenge President Trump," said Farnsworth. "The Democratic Party has to figure out where the sweet spot is. You have to be energized enough to motivate those voters who might stay at home." Some top political handicappers like Nate Silver now believe that Ocasio-Cortez could be the odds-on favorite to emerge as the Democrats' 2028 presidential nominee. Now 35 years old, the New York Democrat is old enough to become president. Ocasio-Cortez has kept busy during the congressional recess by barnstorming the country with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the 83-year-old former Democratic presidential candidate. "We're here together because of an extreme concentration of power, greed and corruption which is taking over this country like never before," Ocasio-Cortez declared during a whistlestop in Missoula, Montana. So Democrats are searching for a toe-hold against the president. Younger voters favored Democrats for years. But a Fox News voter analysis found a staggering 11-point spike in voters under age 30 favoring Trump in 2024 compared with 2020. "In the 2024 election, Democrats lost a lot of voters who had voted for Biden four years ago. Some of them went to Trump," said Farnsworth. "It seems to me that a more aggressive messaging strategy is certainly one way of connecting with voters who didn't feel as warmly toward the Democrats in 2024 as they did in 2020." Republicans found themselves at a loss in late 2012. They were perhaps overconfident that they were going to blow out President Obama. Republicans retreated to backrooms in Washington to conduct an "autopsy" about reaching out to minorities and retrenching the party. The party didn't rely on the findings of that postmortem much. Republicans held the House and finally flipped the Senate after they tried to get control dating back to 2006. Republicans also won the House in 2010 after Obama's big 2008 victory. In 2009, many Republicans felt it was best if the GOP took a couple of cycles to retrench their bench and agenda during the echoes of the presidency of George W. Bush. But Republicans found themselves in control of the House following the 2010 midterms. The party was more than happy to be back in power in the House. They viewed their victory as a repudiation of Obama and the policies of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. But, nonetheless, this was a strange piece of political landholdings to acquire for the GOP in 2010. In politics, you sometimes "inherit" property. We don't know what the political real estate market will look like in 2026. But Democrats now occupy a remote, unfamiliar province. Democrats are trying to map and navigate this alien territory. But the key with any piece of real estate is how you use it. Do you build on it? Do you rent it out? Do you grow crops? Democrats are trying to determine if drifting further to the left helps them use this particular land tract. Does cultivating youth boost them at the polls? Democrats are surveying their turf. Taking measurements. Understanding the topography and geology. We'll know in November 2026 if Democrats successfully converted their property into something useful. Or a total wreck and undesirable.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How the Navy SEALs Became Trump's Shock Troops in Congress
When Ryan Zinke entered the House of Representatives in 2014 as the junior member from Montana, he was something of an anomaly. A three-decade veteran of the U.S. Navy SEALs, Zinke was the first member of the elite special force unit to serve in the House and only the second ever to serve in Congress. His arrival on Capitol Hill became the source of some intrigue among his colleagues, Zinke says: At the time, the SEALs were experiencing an intense period of public celebrity thanks to SEAL Team Six's role in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which had cemented the public mythology of the SEALs as a lethal band of expert killers. Zinke, a former offensive lineman for the University of Oregon football team, seemed perfectly constructed to bring that mythology to life. 'You don't have to be six-foot-three, 225 pounds and be able to bench 400 pounds,' Zinke joked, 'but it helps.' Since their founding in the early 1960s, the Navy SEALs have made their presence felt in every corner of the globe, executing some of the most dangerous and celebrated missions in U.S. military history. But now, a decade after Zinke came to Washington, the elite unit has infiltrated a different kind of hostile territory: Congress. When the 119th Congress was gaveled into session in January, Zinke counted six former SEALs as his colleagues, the most ever: Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Morgan Luttrell and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, John McGuire of Virginia and freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana. All are Republicans who have aligned themselves, in varying fashions, with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It's a small number overall, but — with ex-SEALs making up over 1 percent of Congress — markedly disproportionate to the SEAL population at large. And the consequences of the growing numbers of SEALs-turned-lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been quiet but significant. According to interviews with five of the current ex-SEALs in Congress, the swelling in their ranks has coincided with — and, in many respects, aided — a marked shift in the style of Republican politics on Capitol Hill. In the second half of the 20th century, the generation of Republican lawmakers who entered politics after serving in World War II, Korea and Vietnam helped define a style of consensus-based conservatism that flourished until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. By contrast, the current generation of ex-SEALs, who mostly came of fighting age during the Gulf War and the war on terror, have eagerly embraced a more combative style of politics — one that favors partisan warfare, legislative brinksmanship and an open embrace of Trump. This style takes its cues in part from the MAGA movement more broadly, but it draws on the combativeness at the heart of what several of the members called the SEALs' 'warrior mentality': the sense the SEALs will do whatever it takes — short of opposing Trump outright — to achieve their objective, even if it means bucking Republican leadership or breaking congressional norms. This background, several of the former SEALs told me, has made them particularly effective proponents of the new style of Republican politics ushered in by the Trump revolution. As the MAGA revolution has remade Washington in its own image, the former Navy SEALs have dutifully served as its shock troops on Capitol Hill. 'From the tea party movement through the Trump movement, people are looking for aggressive and kind of independent anti-establishment voices, and [the SEALs] are a brand that people recognize as brash,' said John Byrnes, strategic director of the right-leaning advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. 'They recognize [them] as fighters.' At the same time, that 'warrior mentality' has not resulted in a particularly effective legislative strategy. Despite their 'mission-focused' rhetoric, none of the former SEALs are especially prolific lawmakers. Their martial attitude manifests in an especially enthusiastic embrace of Trump's bare-knuckled political style, which is more concerned with breaking existing political institutions than working within them. Within the GOP, the SEAL brand has become a kind of shorthand for this attitude: In campaign ads, campaign speeches and fundraising emails, many of the ex-SEALs brandish the SEAL trident as evidence they, like the MAGA movement more broadly, see themselves as insurgents battling a corrupt establishment made up of Democrats and moderate Republicans alike. 'I don't see the Republican Party as my chain of command,' said Crane, a member of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus who launched his first campaign in 2021 with an ad featuring him discussing his SEAL background while getting 'We the People' tattooed into his right bicep. 'I see the Republican Party, in many ways, as a big part of the problem.' The rise in the number of former SEALs in Congress comes at a time when the overall number of military veterans serving on Capitol Hill has been declining. Between 1965 and 1975, at least 70 percent of members in both the House and the Senate had prior military experience, reflecting the high rates of military participation among the generations that came of age during World War II and the Korean War. The shared experience of military service served as a basis for a degree of bipartisan cooperation throughout the Cold War, but no longer: In the current Congress, less than 19 percent of all members are veterans, a consequence of the diminished rates of military service following the end of the draft in 1973 and the rise of an all-volunteer force. The shrinking proportion of veterans has coincided with a shift in the partisan valence of military service: Of the 100 members in the 119th Congress with military backgrounds, 72 are Republicans and 28 are Democrats. Yet the rising number of ex-SEALs on the Hill is, in another respect, not entirely surprising. Practically since the creation of the force, the SEALs have occupied an outsize place in America's popular imagination, buoyed by a steady stream of best-selling books and Hollywood films showcasing their heroics. (The first former SEAL ever elected to Congress, Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, was elected in 1988 after serving as a SEAL in Vietnam.) Over time, the rise of the SEALs as a household brand has allowed a powerful political cachet to attach itself to former SEALs — one that Republicans have been quicker to take advantage of than Democrats. A significant amount of credit for that strategy belongs to Zinke, who, while running for the first time in 2014, founded a Republican-aligned independent political action committee called SEAL PAC dedicated to recruiting and supporting the campaigns of special ops veterans. 'There's a perception of the SEAL as being the very best and capable warriors, and that perception is easily transferred to a candidate that is running for political office,' said Zinke, who returned to Congress in 2023 after a tumultuous term as secretary of the Interior during Trump's first term. 'Americans want to be represented by a winner.' At the same time, the politicization of the SEAL brand — and its growing association with the conservative wing of the Republican Party — has sparked tensions within the greater SEAL community, where a tradition of 'quiet professionalism' and non-political sacrifice still holds some sway. Unsurprisingly, not all the former SEALs on the Hill share that commitment. 'I've never known a SEAL to be that quiet,' said Zinke. 'Green Berets have traditionally been more quiet, but SEALs? You've got books, you've got movies, you've got calendars' — or, he could have added, campaign buses, which Zinke has been known to emblazon with images of the SEAL Trident. 'When people refer to the SEALs as the quiet warriors, maybe I'm just looking at a different SEAL,' he said. The tensions are heightened by the fact that not all the ex-SEALs on the Hill share Crane and Zinke's hard-line conservative sensibility: Crenshaw, for instance, hails from the more mainstream wing of the Republican conference and has broken with conservative hard-liners by supporting continued military aid for Ukraine. But differences of ideology aside, many of the ex-SEALs share a sense that Congress now represents another battlefront in the war they first waged as SEALs. 'The war is over, but guys are still hungry,' said Luttrell. 'Our entire lifestyle was built around conflict and protection of our country, so it's like, 'Hey, if I can't be in that elite unit out front, where is there another spot that I can do something special and there's only 435 of us?'' Luttrell, who represents Texas' 8th congressional district, was in the middle of a 2-mile open-ocean swim at SEAL training camp when a plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. By the time he got back to dry land, a second plane had hit the south tower. 'All the instructors were trying to get out of training details and get back to a team,' he told me. 'They knew, 'Hey, this is it — we're going to war.'' Luttrell's path to the SEALs was typical of the post-Vietnam era, when a majority of new military recruits came from families with preexisting military ties. He was raised in a military family on a horse ranch in Willis, Texas — both his father and his grandfather had served in the armed forces — and service was 'part of our bone marrow,' he told me. He and his twin brother, Marcus, resolved to become SEALs after watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the special operations forces. On joining the Navy, Luttrell enrolled directly in SEAL boot camp, where one of his instructors in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs — known as 'BUD/S,' the most strenuous parts of SEAL training — was Zinke. 'He was an animal — I mean, really terrifying,' Luttrell recalled, laughing. In 2004, after completing his training, Luttrell deployed to Afghanistan, where he was tasked with 'precision-driven missions' going after high-value targets. ('That's all I can say to answer that question,' he chortled when I asked him to elaborate.) Luttrell's path to politics began with his twin, Marcus. In July of 2005, Marcus was part of a team of four SEALs who were ambushed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, with everyone on the mission dying save for Marcus. Two years later, Marcus published an account of the attack in a book, Lone Survivor, which went on to become a New York Times best-seller and the basis for a Hollywood film starring Mark Wahlberg. The precise details of Marcus' account have since been disputed, but the book swiftly transformed him into a national war hero, earning him — and, by extension, Morgan — public notoriety and high-profile political connections in Texas. In 2015, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his presidential campaign, the Luttrell brothers stood on either side of him. By that point, Morgan was medically retired from the military, having suffered a severe spinal cord injury and a traumatic brain injury during a training incident in 2009, and he was looking for his next chapter. During the Trump administration, he took a job as a senior adviser to Perry at the Department of Energy, where he reconnected with Zinke, who was then leading the Department of the Interior. In 2021, Luttrell called up Zinke about running to fill a vacant House seat. Zinke's first piece of advice was half-joking 'Don't do it!' Luttrell recalled — but after Luttrell made up his mind, Zinke threw his and SEAL PAC's support behind Luttrell's campaign, as did then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Congressional Leadership Fund. In the same election cycle, two other former SEALs — Crane and Van Orden — won election for the first time, and Zinke won reelection, bringing their total number up to five. The influx of former SEALs into Congress has fed a slow-simmering debate within the SEAL community about the relative benefits and drawbacks of the organization's post-2011 visibility. Since their founding in the early 1960s, SEAL teams have been, at least in theory, expected to respect the special operations' motto of 'quiet professionalism': 'I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my action,' reads a line in the official SEAL ethos. But in practice, the SEALs have become the most public-facing — and publicity-seeking — of all the special operations forces. Especially after the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden, the SEAL appetite for self-promotion has reached the point where even some former SEALs regard the 'quiet professional' mantra as a kind of cultural atavism. Yet not all SEALs felt as cavalier about abandoning the ethos of the quiet professional. In 2015, a SEAL lieutenant commander named Forrest Crowell published a master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School decrying the 'emergence of a SEAL counterculture characterized by an increasingly commodified and public persona.' He specifically called out former SEALs like Zinke for trading on their association with the force for partisan political purposes: 'It is difficult to find a picture of him in which there is not a Trident pinned somewhere to his suit,' Crowell wrote of Zinke. The dual commodification and politicization of the SEALs, Crowell concluded, had done serious harm to the force's integrity, having 'eroded organizational effectiveness, damaged national security, and undermined healthy civil-military relations.' The paper landed like a bombshell within the ex-SEAL community. For the group at large, it prompted what many saw as an overdue debate about the organization's trajectory in a post-war on terror world. (In 2020, Crowell was hired as a top aide to the SEALs' new commander as part of a broader overhaul of the organization. He did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) For the emerging generation of ex-SEAL lawmakers, meanwhile, it has continued to raise questions about the proper way to balance obligations to the SEAL community against the requirements of serving as an elected official. 'You have to find entertainment value in [the SEALs], since my brother wrote a book about it,' said Luttrell with a laugh. Yet at a more personal level, he said, he tries not to be overly ostentatious about his SEAL background, and he goes out of his way not to display SEAL memorabilia in his offices. 'That chapter in my life was quiet,' he told me. 'It's supposed to be quiet.' Sheehy, who recently became the second-ever Navy SEAL to join the Senate, said that embracing the SEAL moniker is an inescapable fact of political life, even if ex-SEALs looking to enter politics might wish otherwise. 'If someone reads about you on the internet and they see that you are a small business owner, a pilot, a father, a farmer, a rancher and a Navy SEAL, the two words they pull out that whole resume are 'Navy SEAL,'' said Sheehy, who defeated Democrat Jon Tester in one of the most expensive Senate races of the 2024 cycle. 'Whether we like it or not, and whether we were SEALs for two years or for 20 years, that title really becomes what you're known as." From their inception, the SEALs stood apart from the rest of the Navy for their air of machismo-infused independence. The first SEAL teams were officially created in 1962 as a response to the military's gradual recognition that the nature of military conflict was rapidly evolving — and the U.S. was ill-suited to meet the tactical necessities of the Cold War. In an era of nuclear bombs and long-range weapon systems, the Pentagon realized, fewer conflicts would play out on conventional battlefields. Existing chains of command and military bureaucracy could be cumbersome and counterproductive to the success of operations. Direct troop engagements, when they did happen, would need to be targeted, stealthy and flexible. This mentality, baked into the SEALs from their founding, has evolved over time into a sense that the SEALs enjoy a greater degree of operational autonomy than the average unit — that, when necessary, a SEAL team can go at it alone. As ex-SEALs have migrated to Capitol Hill, they've brought some of this spirit with them. In terms of partisan alignment, that sense of independence has prompted almost all of them to align themselves with Trump's MAGA insurgency and against the old Republican establishment. In practice, it has led some of them to adopt an openly adversarial relationship with Republican leadership. 'It's up to each individual [to decide] who they actually think their chain of command is,' said Crane, who was one of the conservative Republicans who bucked McCarthy's speakership bid in 2023. 'I see my chain of command as the voters from Arizona's second congressional district, so that's why I'm much more willing to buck the system and take a stand against my own party.' To the extent that it drives their legislative strategy, this attitude has not allowed the ex-SEALs on the Hill to become especially effective lawmakers. Of the 23 bills that Crane has sponsored during his two terms in the House, three have passed the House, and none has become law. Luttrell, meanwhile, has had three bills pass the House and one signed into law. The relatively most effective ex-SEAL legislator, measured by number of sponsored bills to pass the House, is Crenshaw, a more moderate conservative, who has sponsored five bills that have passed the chamber during his four terms in office. Yet at least for the more hard-line conservative members like Crane, it's clear that they see the objective of their mission as tearing down an irreparably broken system rather than working within that system to pass bills. Judged by this metric, the former SEALs have been diligent foot soldiers in the MAGA movement, especially insofar as they have green-lit the Trump administration's more aggressive efforts to extend his authority over independent agencies created by Congress and concentrate policymaking power in the executive branch. 'I do think it resonates with guys like me who want to change the system,' Crane said of Trump's early moves. 'People feel like it's broken and are willing to take hard stands on things.' The apotheosis of this emerging SEAL-MAGA synthesis is Sheehy, who with his broad shoulders and neatly coiffed blonde hair seems plucked out of the Hollywood films that made the SEALs famous. On the campaign trail, Sheehy aligned himself with Trump both substantively — by hammering Democrats on the border, abortion and anti-'wokeness' in education — and stylistically. When media reports emerged challenging Sheehy's claim that he suffered a gunshot wound in his arm while serving with the SEALs in Afghanistan, Sheehy responded by accusing his doubters of being 'never Trumpers.' (In 2015, Sheehy told a National Park Service ranger that he had accidentally shot himself in the arm, though he has since said that story was a lie.) If Sheehy embodies the most MAGA-fied version of the SEAL brand, Crenshaw represents the least. First elected in 2019 and seen by some at the time as a younger and more palatable conservative alternative to Trump, Crenshaw has continued to support Trump publicly, though he has gone on the record criticizing Republicans who challenged the validity of the 2020 election and freely lampoons the more outlandish members of the MAGA coalition in the House. If there are tensions among this group of ex-SEALs, they haven't burst into the open. The members I spoke with told me that a kind of solidarity still holds sway among the cohort, even as individual members disagree with each other on policy and strategy. (Crenshaw and Van Orden's offices did not respond to interview requests.) 'There's always accountability from that pin that we wear on our chests, the training we went through and the wars that we fought together,' Luttrell told me. 'I can be like, 'Hey, bro, I need you to shoot straight on this,' and the answer is, 'No problem.'" McGuire, the latest ex-SEAL to join Congress as a new member elected last year from Virginia, told me the other members have eased his transition into the chamber. 'We call, text, ask advice, give advice,' he said. 'I'm friends with all of them.' When I spoke with Luttrell, I asked him if his service on the Hill scratched the same itch as his service in the SEALs — if, as he had suggested earlier, political skirmishes offered something of the same thrill as actual warfare. 'It's just a different kind,' he said. 'But there is success in it.' Just the day before, he told me, he had called a young female constituent to tell her that she had been accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. 'It was the greatest day of her life.' It was a touching story, I said, but I'd imagine not quite the same thrill as repelling onto a moving boat out of a helicopter. 'Well, no one has shot at me,' he said. 'Not so far.'
Politico
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Politico
How the Navy SEALs Became Trump's Shock Troops in Congress
When Ryan Zinke entered the House of Representatives in 2014 as the junior member from Montana, he was something of an anomaly. A three-decade veteran of the U.S. Navy SEALs, Zinke was the first member of the elite special force unit to serve in the House and only the second ever to serve in Congress. His arrival on Capitol Hill became the source of some intrigue among his colleagues, Zinke says: At the time, the SEALs were experiencing an intense period of public celebrity thanks to SEAL Team Six's role in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which had cemented the public mythology of the SEALs as a lethal band of expert killers. Zinke, a former offensive lineman for the University of Oregon football team, seemed perfectly constructed to bring that mythology to life. 'You don't have to be six-foot-three, 225 pounds and be able to bench 400 pounds,' Zinke joked, 'but it helps.' Since their founding in the early 1960s, the Navy SEALs have made their presence felt in every corner of the globe, executing some of the most dangerous and celebrated missions in U.S. military history. But now, a decade after Zinke came to Washington, the elite unit has infiltrated a different kind of hostile territory: Congress. When the 119th Congress was gaveled into session in January, Zinke counted six former SEALs as his colleagues, the most ever: Reps. Eli Crane of Arizona, Morgan Luttrell and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, John McGuire of Virginia and freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana. All are Republicans who have aligned themselves, in varying fashions, with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It's a small number overall, but — with ex-SEALs making up over 1 percent of Congress — markedly disproportionate to the SEAL population at large. And the consequences of the growing numbers of SEALs-turned-lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been quiet but significant. According to interviews with five of the current ex-SEALs in Congress, the swelling in their ranks has coincided with — and, in many respects, aided — a marked shift in the style of Republican politics on Capitol Hill. In the second half of the 20th century, the generation of Republican lawmakers who entered politics after serving in World War II, Korea and Vietnam helped define a style of consensus-based conservatism that flourished until the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. By contrast, the current generation of ex-SEALs, who mostly came of fighting age during the Gulf War and the war on terror, have eagerly embraced a more combative style of politics — one that favors partisan warfare, legislative brinksmanship and an open embrace of Trump. This style takes its cues in part from the MAGA movement more broadly, but it draws on the combativeness at the heart of what several of the members called the SEALs' 'warrior mentality': the sense the SEALs will do whatever it takes — short of opposing Trump outright — to achieve their objective, even if it means bucking Republican leadership or breaking congressional norms. This background, several of the former SEALs told me, has made them particularly effective proponents of the new style of Republican politics ushered in by the Trump revolution. As the MAGA revolution has remade Washington in its own image, the former Navy SEALs have dutifully served as its shock troops on Capitol Hill. 'From the tea party movement through the Trump movement, people are looking for aggressive and kind of independent anti-establishment voices, and [the SEALs] are a brand that people recognize as brash,' said John Byrnes, strategic director of the right-leaning advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. 'They recognize [them] as fighters.' At the same time, that 'warrior mentality' has not resulted in a particularly effective legislative strategy. Despite their 'mission-focused' rhetoric, none of the former SEALs are especially prolific lawmakers. Their martial attitude manifests in an especially enthusiastic embrace of Trump's bare-knuckled political style, which is more concerned with breaking existing political institutions than working within them. Within the GOP, the SEAL brand has become a kind of shorthand for this attitude: In campaign ads, campaign speeches and fundraising emails, many of the ex-SEALs brandish the SEAL trident as evidence they, like the MAGA movement more broadly, see themselves as insurgents battling a corrupt establishment made up of Democrats and moderate Republicans alike. 'I don't see the Republican Party as my chain of command,' said Crane, a member of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus who launched his first campaign in 2021 with an ad featuring him discussing his SEAL background while getting 'We the People' tattooed into his right bicep. 'I see the Republican Party, in many ways, as a big part of the problem.' The rise in the number of former SEALs in Congress comes at a time when the overall number of military veterans serving on Capitol Hill has been declining. Between 1965 and 1975, at least 70 percent of members in both the House and the Senate had prior military experience, reflecting the high rates of military participation among the generations that came of age during World War II and the Korean War. The shared experience of military service served as a basis for a degree of bipartisan cooperation throughout the Cold War, but no longer: In the current Congress, less than 19 percent of all members are veterans, a consequence of the diminished rates of military service following the end of the draft in 1973 and the rise of an all-volunteer force. The shrinking proportion of veterans has coincided with a shift in the partisan valence of military service: Of the 100 members in the 119th Congress with military backgrounds, 72 are Republicans and 28 are Democrats. Yet the rising number of ex-SEALs on the Hill is, in another respect, not entirely surprising. Practically since the creation of the force, the SEALs have occupied an outsize place in America's popular imagination, buoyed by a steady stream of best-selling books and Hollywood films showcasing their heroics. (The first former SEAL ever elected to Congress, Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, was elected in 1988 after serving as a SEAL in Vietnam.) Over time, the rise of the SEALs as a household brand has allowed a powerful political cachet to attach itself to former SEALs — one that Republicans have been quicker to take advantage of than Democrats. A significant amount of credit for that strategy belongs to Zinke, who, while running for the first time in 2014, founded a Republican-aligned independent political action committee called SEAL PAC dedicated to recruiting and supporting the campaigns of special ops veterans. 'There's a perception of the SEAL as being the very best and capable warriors, and that perception is easily transferred to a candidate that is running for political office,' said Zinke, who returned to Congress in 2023 after a tumultuous term as secretary of the Interior during Trump's first term. 'Americans want to be represented by a winner.' At the same time, the politicization of the SEAL brand — and its growing association with the conservative wing of the Republican Party — has sparked tensions within the greater SEAL community, where a tradition of 'quiet professionalism' and non-political sacrifice still holds some sway. Unsurprisingly, not all the former SEALs on the Hill share that commitment. 'I've never known a SEAL to be that quiet,' said Zinke. 'Green Berets have traditionally been more quiet, but SEALs? You've got books, you've got movies, you've got calendars' — or, he could have added, campaign buses, which Zinke has been known to emblazon with images of the SEAL Trident. 'When people refer to the SEALs as the quiet warriors, maybe I'm just looking at a different SEAL,' he said. The tensions are heightened by the fact that not all the ex-SEALs on the Hill share Crane and Zinke's hard-line conservative sensibility: Crenshaw, for instance, hails from the more mainstream wing of the Republican conference and has broken with conservative hard-liners by supporting continued military aid for Ukraine. But differences of ideology aside, many of the ex-SEALs share a sense that Congress now represents another battlefront in the war they first waged as SEALs. 'The war is over, but guys are still hungry,' said Luttrell. 'Our entire lifestyle was built around conflict and protection of our country, so it's like, 'Hey, if I can't be in that elite unit out front, where is there another spot that I can do something special and there's only 435 of us?'' Luttrell, who represents Texas' 8th congressional district, was in the middle of a 2-mile open-ocean swim at SEAL training camp when a plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. By the time he got back to dry land, a second plane had hit the south tower. 'All the instructors were trying to get out of training details and get back to a team,' he told me. 'They knew, 'Hey, this is it — we're going to war.'' Luttrell's path to the SEALs was typical of the post-Vietnam era, when a majority of new military recruits came from families with preexisting military ties. He was raised in a military family on a horse ranch in Willis, Texas — both his father and his grandfather had served in the armed forces — and service was 'part of our bone marrow,' he told me. He and his twin brother, Marcus, resolved to become SEALs after watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the special operations forces. On joining the Navy, Luttrell enrolled directly in SEAL boot camp, where one of his instructors in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs — known as 'BUD/S,' the most strenuous parts of SEAL training — was Zinke. 'He was an animal — I mean, really terrifying,' Luttrell recalled, laughing. In 2004, after completing his training, Luttrell deployed to Afghanistan, where he was tasked with 'precision-driven missions' going after high-value targets. ('That's all I can say to answer that question,' he chortled when I asked him to elaborate.) Luttrell's path to politics began with his twin, Marcus. In July of 2005, Marcus was part of a team of four SEALs who were ambushed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, with everyone on the mission dying save for Marcus. Two years later, Marcus published an account of the attack in a book, Lone Survivor, which went on to become a New York Times best-seller and the basis for a Hollywood film starring Mark Wahlberg. The precise details of Marcus' account have since been disputed, but the book swiftly transformed him into a national war hero, earning him — and, by extension, Morgan — public notoriety and high-profile political connections in Texas. In 2015, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced his presidential campaign, the Luttrell brothers stood on either side of him. By that point, Morgan was medically retired from the military, having suffered a severe spinal cord injury and a traumatic brain injury during a training incident in 2009, and he was looking for his next chapter. During the Trump administration, he took a job as a senior adviser to Perry at the Department of Energy, where he reconnected with Zinke, who was then leading the Department of the Interior. In 2021, Luttrell called up Zinke about running to fill a vacant House seat. Zinke's first piece of advice was half-joking 'Don't do it!' Luttrell recalled — but after Luttrell made up his mind, Zinke threw his and SEAL PAC's support behind Luttrell's campaign, as did then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Congressional Leadership Fund. In the same election cycle, two other former SEALs — Crane and Van Orden — won election for the first time, and Zinke won reelection, bringing their total number up to five. The influx of former SEALs into Congress has fed a slow-simmering debate within the SEAL community about the relative benefits and drawbacks of the organization's post-2011 visibility. Since their founding in the early 1960s, SEAL teams have been, at least in theory, expected to respect the special operations' motto of 'quiet professionalism': 'I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my action,' reads a line in the official SEAL ethos. But in practice, the SEALs have become the most public-facing — and publicity-seeking — of all the special operations forces. Especially after the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden, the SEAL appetite for self-promotion has reached the point where even some former SEALs regard the 'quiet professional' mantra as a kind of cultural atavism. Yet not all SEALs felt as cavalier about abandoning the ethos of the quiet professional. In 2015, a SEAL lieutenant commander named Forrest Crowell published a master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School decrying the 'emergence of a SEAL counterculture characterized by an increasingly commodified and public persona.' He specifically called out former SEALs like Zinke for trading on their association with the force for partisan political purposes: 'It is difficult to find a picture of him in which there is not a Trident pinned somewhere to his suit,' Crowell wrote of Zinke. The dual commodification and politicization of the SEALs, Crowell concluded, had done serious harm to the force's integrity, having 'eroded organizational effectiveness, damaged national security, and undermined healthy civil-military relations.' The paper landed like a bombshell within the ex-SEAL community. For the group at large, it prompted what many saw as an overdue debate about the organization's trajectory in a post-war on terror world. (In 2020, Crowell was hired as a top aide to the SEALs' new commander as part of a broader overhaul of the organization. He did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) For the emerging generation of ex-SEAL lawmakers, meanwhile, it has continued to raise questions about the proper way to balance obligations to the SEAL community against the requirements of serving as an elected official. 'You have to find entertainment value in [the SEALs], since my brother wrote a book about it,' said Luttrell with a laugh. Yet at a more personal level, he said, he tries not to be overly ostentatious about his SEAL background, and he goes out of his way not to display SEAL memorabilia in his offices. 'That chapter in my life was quiet,' he told me. 'It's supposed to be quiet.' Sheehy, who recently became the second-ever Navy SEAL to join the Senate, said that embracing the SEAL moniker is an inescapable fact of political life, even if ex-SEALs looking to enter politics might wish otherwise. 'If someone reads about you on the internet and they see that you are a small business owner, a pilot, a father, a farmer, a rancher and a Navy SEAL, the two words they pull out that whole resume are 'Navy SEAL,'' said Sheehy, who defeated Democrat Jon Tester in one of the most expensive Senate races of the 2024 cycle. 'Whether we like it or not, and whether we were SEALs for two years or for 20 years, that title really becomes what you're known as.' From their inception, the SEALs stood apart from the rest of the Navy for their air of machismo-infused independence. The first SEAL teams were officially created in 1962 as a response to the military's gradual recognition that the nature of military conflict was rapidly evolving — and the U.S. was ill-suited to meet the tactical necessities of the Cold War. In an era of nuclear bombs and long-range weapon systems, the Pentagon realized, fewer conflicts would play out on conventional battlefields. Existing chains of command and military bureaucracy could be cumbersome and counterproductive to the success of operations. Direct troop engagements, when they did happen, would need to be targeted, stealthy and flexible. This mentality, baked into the SEALs from their founding, has evolved over time into a sense that the SEALs enjoy a greater degree of operational autonomy than the average unit — that, when necessary, a SEAL team can go at it alone. As ex-SEALs have migrated to Capitol Hill, they've brought some of this spirit with them. In terms of partisan alignment, that sense of independence has prompted almost all of them to align themselves with Trump's MAGA insurgency and against the old Republican establishment. In practice, it has led some of them to adopt an openly adversarial relationship with Republican leadership. 'It's up to each individual [to decide] who they actually think their chain of command is,' said Crane, who was one of the conservative Republicans who bucked McCarthy's speakership bid in 2023. 'I see my chain of command as the voters from Arizona's second congressional district, so that's why I'm much more willing to buck the system and take a stand against my own party.' To the extent that it drives their legislative strategy, this attitude has not allowed the ex-SEALs on the Hill to become especially effective lawmakers. Of the 23 bills that Crane has sponsored during his two terms in the House, three have passed the House, and none has become law. Luttrell, meanwhile, has had three bills pass the House and one signed into law. The relatively most effective ex-SEAL legislator, measured by number of sponsored bills to pass the House, is Crenshaw, a more moderate conservative, who has sponsored five bills that have passed the chamber during his four terms in office. Yet at least for the more hard-line conservative members like Crane, it's clear that they see the objective of their mission as tearing down an irreparably broken system rather than working within that system to pass bills. Judged by this metric, the former SEALs have been diligent foot soldiers in the MAGA movement, especially insofar as they have green-lit the Trump administration's more aggressive efforts to extend his authority over independent agencies created by Congress and concentrate policymaking power in the executive branch. 'I do think it resonates with guys like me who want to change the system,' Crane said of Trump's early moves. 'People feel like it's broken and are willing to take hard stands on things.' The apotheosis of this emerging SEAL-MAGA synthesis is Sheehy, who with his broad shoulders and neatly coiffed blonde hair seems plucked out of the Hollywood films that made the SEALs famous. On the campaign trail, Sheehy aligned himself with Trump both substantively — by hammering Democrats on the border, abortion and anti-'wokeness' in education — and stylistically. When media reports emerged challenging Sheehy's claim that he suffered a gunshot wound in his arm while serving with the SEALs in Afghanistan, Sheehy responded by accusing his doubters of being 'never Trumpers.' (In 2015, Sheehy told a National Park Service ranger that he had accidentally shot himself in the arm, though he has since said that story was a lie.) If Sheehy embodies the most MAGA-fied version of the SEAL brand, Crenshaw represents the least. First elected in 2019 and seen by some at the time as a younger and more palatable conservative alternative to Trump, Crenshaw has continued to support Trump publicly, though he has gone on the record criticizing Republicans who challenged the validity of the 2020 election and freely lampoons the more outlandish members of the MAGA coalition in the House. If there are tensions among this group of ex-SEALs, they haven't burst into the open. The members I spoke with told me that a kind of solidarity still holds sway among the cohort, even as individual members disagree with each other on policy and strategy. (Crenshaw and Van Orden's offices did not respond to interview requests.) 'There's always accountability from that pin that we wear on our chests, the training we went through and the wars that we fought together,' Luttrell told me. 'I can be like, 'Hey, bro, I need you to shoot straight on this,' and the answer is, 'No problem.'' McGuire, the latest ex-SEAL to join Congress as a new member elected last year from Virginia, told me the other members have eased his transition into the chamber. 'We call, text, ask advice, give advice,' he said. 'I'm friends with all of them.' When I spoke with Luttrell, I asked him if his service on the Hill scratched the same itch as his service in the SEALs — if, as he had suggested earlier, political skirmishes offered something of the same thrill as actual warfare. 'It's just a different kind,' he said. 'But there is success in it.' Just the day before, he told me, he had called a young female constituent to tell her that she had been accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. 'It was the greatest day of her life.' It was a touching story, I said, but I'd imagine not quite the same thrill as repelling onto a moving boat out of a helicopter. 'Well, no one has shot at me,' he said. 'Not so far.'
Politico
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Are federal employees the next Democratic stars?
Presented by HELP WANTED — The shock of Donald Trump's first victory in 2016 — and his wrecking-ball style of governance — played a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of Democratic Party stars. He had a catalytic effect on the pipeline of candidates running for Congress in 2018, an election marked by a groundswell of women who surged into House races and helped deliver a Democratic House majority. Some from the House class of 2018 — like Michigan's Elissa Slotkin and New Jersey's Andy Kim — are now in the Senate. Others — like New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill, Virginia's Abigail Spanberger and New Mexico's Deb Haaland — have announced bids for governor. Which raises the question — what effect will Trump's second term have on creating the next generation of Democratic talent? Our colleague Elena Schneider reports today on one potential source of candidates in the 2022 midterm elections — the thousands of federal employees who are being jettisoned from their jobs by Elon Musk's DOGE initiative. Democratic political groups that help prepare candidates to run for office are already seeing a sharp spike in interest. They're mad, they're motivated and they already believe in the power of government to affect change. But it's not clear whether government employees can raise enough money to be viable candidates or whether their skills translate to the campaign trail. Or whether general election voters are ready to cast ballots for a much-maligned character — the federal bureaucrat. Already enraged by Trump and Musk's chainsaw approach to reducing spending and resizing the federal bureaucracy, Democratic primary voters will certainly be receptive to their message. They've rewarded other prominent Democratic resistance characters like Sen. Adam Schiff of California and Rep. Dan Goldman, both of whom played prominent roles in Trump's impeachment, or Rep. Eugene Vindman, the Pentagon whistleblower who also played a role in Trump's impeachment. Divisive presidencies have a habit of generating a surge of highly motivated, like-minded classes — such as the Watergate babies of 1974 or the Republican Revolution class of 1994 — but even if angry federal employees fail to constitute a political force, Trump's first month back in the Oval Office suggests he's already minting the resistance stars who the party will look to for leadership over the next four years. Take Janet Mills, the relatively little-known Democratic governor from Maine, whose unyielding exchange with Trump at the White House on Friday is already generating admiring chatter in Democratic circles. After telling Trump she'd 'see [him] in court' because Maine refused to accede to an order banning transgender athletes in women's sports, interest in Mills spiked dramatically over the weekend. At the conclusion of their clash, a peeved Trump told Mills to 'enjoy your life after governor, because I don't think you'll be in elected politics.' Yet the clash could actually fuel Mills' prospects since it has generated national interest in a prospective run for Senate against Susan Collins next year — and likely will turbocharge her campaign treasury in the event she runs. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@ Or contact tonight's authors at cmahtesian@ and cmchugh@ or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie and @calder_mchugh. What'd I Miss? — House budget plan advances to final floor vote: The House Republican approach to President Donald Trump's sweeping domestic policy agenda moved a step closer to approval after Republicans stayed united on a test vote, setting up a possible final floor vote this evening. The Trump-backed fiscal blueprint still faces tough odds on final adoption, with a handful of conservative hard-liners demanding it get rewritten to guarantee deeper spending cuts. Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford one GOP defection on a party-line vote if all members are voting. — The White House has evaded for weeks on saying who is leading DOGE. Here's who it is: After repeatedly refusing to identify the administrator of the new Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration today pointed to Amy Gleason, a former U.S. Digital Service official, as the operation's acting administrator. A White House official granted anonymity to speak openly confirmed to POLITICO that Gleason — who, according to her LinkedIn, served as a digital services expert at U.S. Digital Service during Trump's first term and most recently worked as chief product officer at Nashville health care firm Russell Street Ventures — is helming the operation. — Consumer confidence buckles as Trump's policies revive inflation concerns: Consumer confidence plummeted in February as more Americans grapple with concern that President Donald Trump's policies could slow growth and cause prices to rise, according to a new survey. The Conference Board's widely cited consumer confidence index notched its sharpest monthly decline since August 2021, when the country was experiencing a resurgence of Covid-19 variants. The index now stands at 72.3, well below the threshold that normally signals an imminent recession, as respondents reported increasing pessimism over income, business and labor market conditions. Average 12-month inflation expectations also spiked as Americans face higher prices on eggs and other household staples, according to the group's summary of its findings released today. — Trump administration says it won't shut CFPB: The Trump administration intends to keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau operating, although in a more streamlined form, according to a new court filing. 'The predicate to running a 'more streamlined and efficient bureau' is that there will continue to be a CFPB,' consumer bureau Acting Director Russ Vought said in a motion filed late Monday in federal court in Washington. The motion was filed in response to the CFPB union, which sued the Trump administration earlier this month over what it said were plans to 'dismantle' the agency after Vought ordered staff to stop working. — White House says it will determine which reporters have access to the president: Fresh off a legal victory allowing it to ban the Associated Press from White House events, the Trump White House announced today that the administration — not an independent group of journalists — will determine which outlets have access to the president as part of a pool allowed into the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and into other otherwise closed meetings and events. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the changes in the briefing room today, asserting that the White House Correspondents' Association 'should no longer have a monopoly' on organizing pools and that the White House would determine the makeup of the pool on a day-to-day basis. AROUND THE WORLD WE HAVE A DEAL — Ukraine and the United States have agreed on the terms of a minerals deal and could sign it this week, according to several media reports. President Donald Trump today hinted Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy could travel to Washington to sign the deal this week, telling reporters: 'I hear that he's coming on Friday. Certainly, it's OK with me if he'd like to.' Ukrainian newspaper Economic Pravda cited a version of the deal dated Feb. 24 which would see Kyiv pay 50 percent of the revenues from its state-owned natural resources into a fund that would invest in Ukraine. Notably, the agreement lacks American security guarantees for Ukraine, which Kyiv was reportedly pushing for. But it also does not mention the $500 billion figure Trump was demanding in compensation for Washington's support for Kyiv in fending off Moscow's invasion. The agreement could be inked as early as Friday, with a potential visit by a Kyiv delegation to Washington in the works, according to AFP. It is set to be signed by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. SECRET WEAPON — After being left out of discussions with the U.S. and Russia Feb. 18 on ending the war in Ukraine, European governments could go for the equivalent of the nuclear option — seizing the Russian sovereign assets that were immobilized after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Luckily for the bloc, the lion's share of those funds — around €200 billion ($210 billion) — is being held in Brussels-based financial institution Euroclear and is earning interest. The U.S., on the other hand, holds a mere $5 billion. Seizure of those assets is a drastic option that would almost certainly guarantee Europe a bigger seat at the table, after it was frozen out by the U.S. and the Kremlin in their recent talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But as finance ministers and central bank governors gather in South Africa this week for the G20, EU governments remain divided on whether unfreezing those funds would prove to Trump that Brussels still has some muscle — or whether it would backfire. Amid the looming threat of U.S. disengagement from Ukraine, Russia hawks argue that unfreezing the cash and handing it to Kyiv would allow the war-torn country to gain the upper hand on the battlefield and resist Trump's demands to end the war. But the opposing camp in Europe contains the big guns — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — who fear that in confiscating the funds the EU would spook international investors and relinquish its greatest advantage in the peace talks. Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP FLUSHED AWAY — In the 1990s, as the United States began to get more environmentally conscious, the federal government mandated that new toilets require less water to flush. A company based in Southern California began to give them out for free in a trial run. There was just one problem — they barely worked. Users complained of having to flush multiple times, making the innovation essentially useless. This set off decades of questions — does using more water actually make a toilet better? Researchers now insist that there's a whole other host of questions that are more important than the amount of water, and toilets appear to have become more efficient. But some people remain unhappy with many of these changes. Anna Gibbs reports for Slate. Parting Image Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
