Welcome to another edition of Dispatch Politics, where we aim to please—sort of.
Interested in the progress of One Big Beautiful Bill Act? Yes, that's what Republicans have named the massive reconciliation package carrying much of the load for President Donald Trump's domestic agenda. So, interested? If so, reporter Charles Hilu is on Capitol Hill monitoring the ins and outs and covering the story lines that matter, most recently a dispatch on the intra-Republican divide over government spending.
Interested in the future of the Democratic Party and the ongoing debate over what went wrong in 2024? Senior Editor John McCormack gives Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona the profile treatment, as only he can. Spoiler alert: Gallego is interested in running for president in 2028.
Interested in Trump's latest ... everything? Senior Editor Michael Warren examines how the president wields the Oval Office as only he would ever think to do.
And finally, have a hankering for policy? Jessica Riedl, a regular contributor to The Dispatch and a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, dives into the federal bailouts for farmers suffering economically because of Trump's tariffs.
—David
Top Stories From the Dispatch Politics Team
Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego was a rare bright spot for Democrats in an otherwise bleak 2024. In a year when Donald Trump won all seven battleground states and Democrats lost three Senate seats, Gallego defeated Republican Kari Lake in Arizona by 2.4 points—despite Trump carrying the state by 5.5 points in the presidential race. It’s little wonder, then, that Gallego’s name is routinely tossed around as a plausible 2028 presidential candidate. With just four months of experience in the upper chamber (and a decade in the House of Representatives) Gallego isn’t exactly playing coy about 2028 presidential ambitions—and sat down with The Dispatch to discuss his future.
Republican leaders had argued for both cutting taxes and reforming America’s entitlement programs as recently as during Trump’s first term. Trump, meanwhile, has promised the former but largely rejected the latter. As House Republicans worked to craft the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, reforms to Medicaid proved particularly thorny. In one sense, Republicans’ debates on the topic have showcased the ways in which Trump has remade the GOP in his populist image. But at the same time, some of the intraparty disputes over the bill reflect long-standing divisions.
Forget standing upon a bully pulpit. President Donald Trump prefers to humiliate other leaders seated, in the Oval Office, before TV cameras. Consider the scene that unfolded with the visit of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa—when Trump showed a sensational four-and-a-half-minute compilation of clips purporting to be proof of Trump’s claims of widespread land confiscation and murders of white farmers in South Africa. That long, uncomfortable drama is only the latest example of how Trump has used stagecraft and the backdrop of the White House to put political and geopolitical foes on the spot in front of an audience.
Special Counsel Hur’s February 2024 report on President Joe Biden, in which Hur described Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” marked the last potential opportunity for Democrats to push out the president with time for a new candidate to run a real campaign. But rather than take that difficult but wiser path in February 2024, congressional Democrats circled the wagons around Biden. In the Capitol this week, The Dispatch asked a number of Senate Democrats if they had any regrets about how they reacted to Hur’s report or thought they owed him an apology. None did.
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