Congress Delivers An Extraordinary Rebuke To A Weakened, Ailing, Failing Trump

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET/Welcome new subscribers!

Good morning all. Let’s start our morning with a passage from Thomas Paine that kicks off Ken Burns’ new, inspiring documentary, The American Revolution:

From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Without consuming, like the Ultima Ratio Regum, it winds its progress from nation to nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed, he scarcely perceives how. He acquires a knowledge of his rights by attending justly to his interest, and discovers in the event that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that, in order to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it.

Ultima Ratio Regum is Latin for the “last argument of kings.”

Yesterday, before the historic rebuke of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a powerful press conference with the Epstein survivors, further threw off his yoke, calling him, on the day he bowed before his Saudi paymaster, a traitor. Just watch this:

The losses, rebukes, and repudiations just keep piling up for Trump. The Senate voted to repeal his terrible tariffs. Republicans got blown out in the 2025 elections, losing everywhere by double digits. Polling tells us that Trump lost the shutdown fight to the Democrats, badly. His illicit prosecutions of his political enemies are falling apart. Members of his own party have challenged him and won, and others are issuing loud warnings about a mid-term blow out. He appears to have lost control over the House. Jeffrey Epstein, from the grave, has directly implicated him in his sex trafficking ring while raising questions about whether he shared kompromat on Trump to the Kremlin. The stock market has gotten wobbly. His mid-decade redistricting gambit has blown up in his face.

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Survey just recorded it’s lowest reading in its 65 year history.

And then there are the polls, the terrible, terrible polls. On Friday the pollster for the House Republicans warned that without a course correction the midterms could be a bloodbath. Yesterday another prominent Republican pollster, Echelon, released their monthly national tracking poll and it showed Trump dropping 8 points - yes 8 points!!!!!! - since mid-October. A new Reuters poll found him dropping 4 in the past week.

Echelon

42% approve (-4) 57% disapprove (+4) - 8 pt drop since mid October

Reuters/Ipsos

38% approve (-2) 60% disapprove (+2) - 4 pt drop in past week

Trump is now regularly seeing polls in the 30s and 60s:

• Reuters/Ipsos 38%-60% (-22)

• CNN/SRSS 37%-63% (-26)

• AP/NORC 36%-62% (-26)

• NPR/PBS/Marist 39%-56% (-17)

• Civiqs 39%-56% (-17)

And near the 30s…..

• Econ/YouGov 40%-56% (-16)

• Strength In #s 41%-57% (-16)

Look at this ugly trendline from a new Marquette University poll taken largely before the Epstein emails were released last week. Ain’t no way to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig right now:

While many generic ballot polls have shown modest Dem leads of late, some have shown Dems up in high single digits, deep blue wave territory. The new Marist poll today has it +14:

As a reminder of why we must keep fighting as hard as we can yesterday, our deeply corrupt and venal leader, from the newly gilded Oval Office, made a “last argument of kings,” backing MBS’s assassination of Jamal Khashoggi on American soil:

We’ve also learned that Trump has been holding secret talks with the Kremlin here in the United States without consulting Ukraine or our former allies in Europe (what could go wrong?):

When we started talking this summer about “winning the fall” my hope was that we would win the November election and then score meaningful wins in Congress itself. Well we won big in November, all across the country. We just had our biggest legislative win against Trump this year. Now we must focus on getting as much as we can in the ongoing negotiations over the fiscal 2026 budget. Trump is weaker now. More is possible for us now. And we must be aggressive in letting our Congressional leaders that we expect them be acting with significant ambition in these ongoing talks. Our agenda, what we want from these talks, appears every day here at Hopium, below. Many of you have called your Senators and Rep and asked them to act on all four parts of our agenda, or just one. Please plan on calling them today, tomorrow, and every day and demand they do the right thing here for the country and the American people.

The lesson of these last few weeks is that we can defeat Trump and MAGA when we fight. He and they are weaker, we are stronger now. He is failing, we are succeeding. We are winning, they are losing. He is now a clown man, a big blubbery baby man, anything, anything but a strong man.

While we have a lot of work ahead of us, here we take and celebrate the wins when they come, and friends we have had a lot of wins, true and meaningful wins, these last few weeks. Congratulations to all of you. Excited to be getting together tonight with paid subscribers to celebrate these wins and talk about what comes next…..

Now, Let’s Get To Work Everybody!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In a new essay I talk about how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up now, be loud now, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land. The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got.

Winning The Midterms - Support Our 2026 Candidates

• Roy Cooper for NC Senate (2026) - $52k raised, $250,000 goal, - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Watch my interview with Gov. Cooper

• Jon Ossoff GA Senate (2026) - $95k raised, $250,000 goal, - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Watch my inspiring interview with Senator Ossoff

• Hopium Winning The House Campaign (2026) - $4,900 raised, $50,000 goal - Donate to all four endorsed House challengers with one click | more info coming soon | Watch my new interview with Christina Bohannan (IA-01)

• Hopium House 7 - Our Top House Incumbents Running For Re-election (2026) - $242k raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More, Volunteer | Watch My Interviews With Our Intrepid Incumbents | Keeping these newly elected Members in Congress is the first step in winning the House in 2026

Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps (2026-2032)

• Hopium’s Audacious Expansion Fund - $198,000 raised, $250,000 goal, - Join our new campaign to expand our map by investing in the Democratic Parties of Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, and Texas | Donate to all five state parties in a single contribution | Watch my interviews with Alaska Chair Eric Croft, Florida Chair Nikki Fried, Iowa Chair Rita Hart and Texas Chair Kendall Scudder | Many thanks to two generous Hopium community members who have audaciously donated $10,000 to each of our five state parties!

• North Carolina and Ohio - Learn more about our 2026 opportunities in Ohio in this conversation with David Pepper, and in North Carolina in this new interview Anderson Clayton.

Defending America, Winning The Big Arguments With Trump - We have two recommended actions today:

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Four-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our four part agenda:

1. Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world

2. Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by blocking the expansion of ICE, restoring due process for immigrants across the country, vigorously defending the 1st Amendment, warring against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents, and ending the use of the military on our streets and the unlawful occupation of our cities

3. Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse - not delay - the cuts to the ACA and Medicaid; support and co-sponsor Rep. Haley Stevens’ effort to Impeach and remove Robert Kennedy

4. Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia and China

2 - Celebrate America, Our Constitution, Our 250th Birthday By Bringing Our Resolutions Project To Your Community - Next year, on July 4th, America celebrates it’s 250th birthday. We need to make this holiday, a celebration of our Declaration Of Independence from a mad king, our day, and not allow it to become his.

One way we can do this is by bringing our Resolutions Project to your community or state. Imagine if by July 4th of next year a large number of towns, counties and states had passed formal resolutions, in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence, defending our Constitution and condemning the “injuries,” “abuses,” and “usurpations” of our mad king. For as our Founders wrote in the Declaration:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

So far Hopium members have introduced or passed resolutions in 85 communities in 23 states. In the coming days we will be convening to discuss how to bring this campaign to more places and start planning to Own The Fourth next year.

Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder!

Keep working hard all, and remember Hopium is hope with a plan. We don’t just hope tomorrow will be better than today.

We do the work to make it so.

- Simon