Washington, D.C
How Trump won a second term and delivered DC to the GOP – Washington Examiner
President-elect Donald Trump entered Election Day in a virtual tie against Vice President Kamala Harris, according to several poll aggregates, yet by early Wednesday morning, he easily defeated his rival.
“This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump boasted during his victory speech.
As the results began to roll in that Tuesday evening, Trump won the first battleground state of North Carolina before winning Georgia, then Pennsylvania, and sweeping Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.
He went on to win 312 Electoral College votes compared to Harris’s 226 votes and the popular vote, becoming the first Republican president since George W. Bush in 2004 to accomplish this feat.
Trump rode a wave of public anger over rising grocery and gas prices that helped reinstate him as president and gave Republicans control over the House and Senate, along with previous majority control of the Supreme Court, in a backlash against President Joe Biden’s administration.
With Biden and subsequently Harris as the de facto incumbent candidate, one political expert claimed the race was there for Democrats to lose.
“While I see the political accomplishment of Trump (or any Republican) winning the popular vote and sweeping all swing states, I nevertheless think that it’s mostly Democrats who lost the election,” said Louis Perron, a political consultant and author of Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections.
“Did you win? Or did the other side lose? In this case, I think Democrats blew it. And I say Democrats specifically and not Harris,” Perron continued.
Trump was likely on the march to trouncing Biden, whose mental acuity was a key topic of concern among voters and as voters increasingly disapproved of his leadership. Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump on June 27, in which he often appeared confused, accelerated calls among fellow Democrats for him to stand down from reelection.
A little over a month later, Biden announced on X that he was suspending his campaign. Hours later, he endorsed Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.
Harris’s quick consolidation of the Democratic Party, historic fundraising figures, and extensive ground game operation should have given her the advantage heading into the election. But there were key warning signs.
Public heartburn over the economy and the rising immigration crisis at the southern border proved no match for Harris, who struggled to distance herself from Biden’s administration. When Harris told the hosts of The View there was “not a thing” she would do differently than Biden, Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance repeatedly aired the clip at campaign rallies.
Piggybacking off of Trump’s populist approach, Senate Republicans were able to brand the Democrats and Biden as out-of-touch elitists. The effort resulted in the GOP retaking the upper chamber by flipping seats in West Virginia, with Sen. Joe Manchin retiring, Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania.
Bernie Moreno took down Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), while Tim Sheehy toppled Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), the most vulnerable incumbent senator, and Dave McCormick unseated Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA). The GOP now holds a 53-47 majority.
More than a week after the election, House Republicans narrowly held on to their control of the lower chamber after losing seats in New York and California. Their win marks the first year since 2018 that the GOP has had a governing trifecta.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will likely hold on to his leadership role after the success of the election and given Trump’s support.
“The mandate that has been delivered shows that a majority of Americans are eager for secure borders, lower costs, peace through strength, and a return to common sense,” Johnson wrote in a congratulatory letter to the conference. “With unified Republican government, if we meet this historic moment together, the next two years can result in the most consequential Congress of the modern era.”
Grant Reeher, professor of political science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, claimed that voters in the battleground states were most primed to display their economic anger at Democrats after the last four years of inflation.
“They have been the ones that have really been living the brunt of this,” Reeher said. “And so they were the most, I think, ripe for the picking, if you will, for the Republicans, and the most receptive to the kinds of messages that Trump was offering on the economy.”
The vice president raised a historic $1 billion in roughly three months and repeatedly boasted about having more campaign staff and field offices in the seven battleground states. Yet, according to most preelection polls, Trump remained within striking distance of Harris.
Harris also campaigned heavily on galvanizing women voters around the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and restoring abortion access. However, Trump proved he could run on gender, and he frequently appeared on podcasts geared toward young male voters, culminating in an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Harris won women voters by an 8-point margin, while Trump won male voters by a 13-point margin, according to CNN exit poll results.
Anti-abortion conservatives championed Trump’s win as an example that the public was no longer politically motivated by Roe.
“This election proves that abortion was not the silver bullet Democrats thought it would be. Even after Democrats put half a billion dollars behind abortion TV ads in this election, they still lost the presidency, the Senate, and potentially the House,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “The reason? Their extreme abortion agenda is out of step with Americans. And their fearmongering and abortion lies did not work. There was not a historic gender gap that ushered in Kamala Harris’s abortion policies. That’s because most Americans support early, reasonable limits on abortion.”
Another feat Trump accomplished was winning more Hispanic voters at 45%, according to NBC News exit polls, a record high for a GOP presidential candidate, and winning more Asian and black voters than most GOP candidates have done in decades by running on a populist pitch.
Steven Hilding, a Republican strategist in Nevada, pointed to Trump’s efforts to reach niche voting blocs as an example of how his campaign helped win the popular vote.
“You saw Trump do things like going to the sneaker convention and socializing with young minority males,” Hilding said. “You saw him having a Greek and Cyprian American leadership council … he was able to make some inroads in the Muslim communities in Michigan.”
In the final days before the election, Trump visited a Dearborn, Michigan, cafe owned by an Arab American leader. Dearborn’s Arab and Muslim population long signaled their disapproval of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Also hobbling Harris was the struggle to define herself to the public once she became the nominee. During her 2020 run for president, she embraced several left-leaning policy issues, such as fracking, that she later denounced in the run-up to the election.
“Harris ran a deliberately, in terms of policy, pretty vague campaign. I don’t blame her for that. You have 107 days. What are you going to do?” Reeher said. “And also, you want to distance yourself from a presidential administration, but you don’t want to throw that administration under the bus. So, how do you finesse that? Well, she tried, but it didn’t really end up working out.”
WHAT MAGA AND THE GOP WILL LOOK LIKE IN A POST-TRUMP ERA
In the end, Democrats are now left scrambling over how to win back disaffected voters who overwhelmingly rejected the Harris campaign as Trump governs over the next four years. Trump, at least, claims that easing financial burdens for the average American will be a top priority.
“We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it. Because together, we can truly make America great again for all Americans,” Trump claimed in his election victory speech.
Washington, D.C
The director of the Congressional Budget Office—known for its gloomy national debt data—is very optimistic that a crisis will be avoided entirely | Fortune
Dr Phillip Swagel is an optimist, both by nature and when he looks at the U.S. economy.
This fact is perhaps at odds with what one might assume: Swagel is the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that offers independent budgetary and economic analysis to Congress.
Very often—an inevitable occupational hazard—the subject of national debt and the interest the U.S. Treasury pays to maintain is its central focus. The numbers are eye-watering: Public debt stands at more than $39 trillion. The interest expense on that borrowing now exceeds $1 trillion a year. Indeed, the latest budget update from the CBO highlights that the government—according to preliminary estimates—paid out nearly $530 billion between October 2025, when the fiscal year starts, and March 2026. This equates to more than $88 billion in interest payments a month, or more than $22 billion a week.
The CBO’s figures are routinely cited by policymakers, think tanks, and lobbyists as alarming evidence that the U.S. needs to find a more sustainable fiscal path or risk dire straits.
Swagel doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the U.S. will face a crisis of its own making. His justification is simple: He was at the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, and joined the CBO months before the COVID pandemic began. He has watched as the U.S. economy, seemingly against all odds, has clawed its way out of economic crises before.
That’s not to say Swagel isn’t a staunch advocate of setting the U.S. on a more sustainable fiscal path—rather, he trusts the people in power to do so when the time comes.
Why the optimism?
Among those concerned about national debt are notable names: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also worried about federal spending and has endorsed a plan floated by Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett that would render members of Congress ineligible for reelection if they allow deficits to exceed 3% of GDP.
On the other hand, optimistic economists suggest that, despite the value of the debt, it’s not actually an issue: the bond market is holding steady, indicating a reliable market of buyers. Likewise, the U.S.’s own central bank buys huge swaths of the debt, meaning, in the simplest of layman’s terms, the economy can essentially print its own money. There are holes in this argument, not least the fact that Fed chairman nominee Kevin Warsh has suggested he would like to reduce the Fed’s balance sheet and may therefore be less inclined to finance borrowing.
Swagel’s positive outlook doesn’t rely on the argument that a crisis hasn’t happened yet, so therefore it never will: “[My optimism] is rooted in my experience,” Swagel tells Fortune in an exclusive interview in Washington D.C. “First being at Treasury during the financial crisis and seeing very difficult times and the country coming together with an effective response—not saying it’s perfect, lots of controversy—but it was effective.”
“The second thing is policymakers are smart, they’re thoughtful. Interacting with members of Congress makes me optimistic. I know you read about all the squabbles … I’m completely aware of this, but the policymakers that are thinking about these things are thoughtful and effective. Not necessarily always effective at passing legislation, but that’s part of our political system, it was set up to make it difficult ot pass legislation.”
Decisions on the horizon
Swagel’s optimism that Congress will be pushed into action will be tested sooner rather than later, likely at some point in the next six years, he told Fortune. This is partly due to the fact that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) both Social Security and Medicare will become insolvent within that time period.
“Making progress to address the fiscal trajectory would be a positive for the U.S. economy,” Swagel said. “Credible steps would lead to lower interest rates that would make the subsequent adjustment easier, there is a reward to virtue. It’s a positive thing, we can’t go on [with] the scolding narrative. My sense is that members of Congress understand the fiscal situation, it’s not that everyone single one has looked at our one-pager of numbers and understands the debt to the third decimal point, but they understand something needs to be done.”
“It doesn’t have to be done immediately, but at some point reasonably soon.”
Swagel is of the opinion that bond investors haven’t increased risk premiums not because they’re not worried about a fiscal crisis, but because they have priced in preventative action from Congress—in his mind “a vote of confidence that my optimism is not misplaced.”
“As a country, we face up to these problems. It’s not happening now, I’m not sure it’s going to happen in the rest of this year or even the next year, or the next two years. But we will face up to it, and the market in some sense expects us to, because otherwise interest rates would be higher,” he explained.
The Cheesecake Factory
The role of the CBO, to some extent, is to provide policymakers with their options if and when they do choose to take action on federal deficits. It’s a menu not unlike the Cheesecake Factory, Swagel says: Large, inclusive of a range of modifications and options, and delivered without judgement.
“Right now it’s maybe a pick three, and you’re looking at a six or seven course menu,” joked Caleb Quakenbush, director of fiscal policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, in an interview with Fortune. “The longer you delay, the more you’re gonna have to add to your tab, and those options become more expensive.”
Indeed, economists and analysts aren’t necessarily worried about the absolute level of government debt, rather the debt-to-GDP ratio. Depending on whom you ask, the debt-to-GDP ratio stands at around 122% of GDP at present. This measure demonstrates an economy’s spending versus its growth, and the risk associated with lending to a nation that isn’t growing fast enough to handle its spending. To rebalance that ratio, an economy could either cut spending or increase growth—the latter being by far the less painful option.
The growth option is becoming less feasible, Michael Peterson, CEO of fiscal think tank the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, told Fortune in an exclusive interview: “I think it requires government action because we’ve waited so long. We’ve added so many trillions, and the current deficit is so big at 6% that the level of growth you would need really exceeds what is feasible.
“Growth needs to be a part of it, but it’s sort of a vicious cycle. The longer we delay, the more debt we have, the slower growth is going to be. The more we get this under control, I think the greater optimism there is, interest rates go down, more growth comes from that. It’s sort of a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on your policy response.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
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4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
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