After a historic midterm election surge, Democrats are meeting in Denver for a conference focused on the party’s next steps. The event, called What’s Next, is being hosted by a new organization, Majority Democrats.
President Donald Trump is urging Vice President JD Vance to spend less time discussing the war in Iran and more time highlighting what Trump describes as corruption and crime in Democratic-led cities and states. Vance’s candid post-election assessment, which blamed the conflict and its economic fallout for the Republicans’ sweeping losses, had drawn significant attention.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ gains in Congress are expected to trigger a wave of investigations into the Justice Department. For nearly two years, the department operated as an extension of the White House while a Republican-controlled Congress offered little resistance. During that period, it pursued investigations of Trump’s political opponents, dismissed large numbers of career employees and defended administration policies that judges nationwide repeatedly found legally questionable.
Here’s the latest:
Trump applauds Democrat Scott Colom’s effort to win over MAGA voters at Mississippi rally
President Donald Trump on Thursday praised Mississippi Sen.-elect Scott Colom for reaching out to some of Trump’s most loyal MAGA supporters during the final days of the midterm campaign. The comments marked a rare instance of the Republican president expressing admiration for a Democrat.
When Trump visited Corinth, Mississippi, last month to campaign for Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, he dismissed Colom as a “Marxist radical,” a “fake” and a “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate.”
But during an appearance Thursday on Stephen A. Smith’s “Straight Shooter” podcast, Trump said Colom showed chutzpah by attending the rally and speaking with some of the president’s strongest “Make America Great Again” supporters.
“I heard it the other day, where I had a rally there, and we had lines that went 10 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everybody on the line what a good job he did,” Trump said of Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor who ran as an underdog and capitalized on voters’ frustration with the economy. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”
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Democrats gather in Denver to reflect on midterm gains and chart a new course
Coming off their strongest election showing in half a century, Democratic officials and strategists gathered in Denver on Thursday to map out the party’s future and celebrate its gains.
The two-day What’s Next conference, organized by the newly formed Majority Democrats, had been scheduled months earlier as another milestone in the party’s effort to emerge from the political wilderness that followed the 2024 election.
Democrats must now determine how to use majorities in both chambers of Congress, along with control of at least 12 additional state legislative chambers.
“The fever has broken. The fog has lifted,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. “And now it falls upon us to rebuild the foundation of this great nation and to fulfill the promise of America.”
Just over a week after voters rejected Trump and his Republican Party, Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico said Democrats would need to work with the president. Voters want tangible results and cannot afford to wait two years for Trump to leave office, he said, calling on Democrats to avoid internal battles as well as excessive caution.
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Trump’s Justice Department enters a new era of scrutiny under Democratic control of Congress
For nearly two years, the Justice Department has operated as an extension of the White House. A Republican-led Congress largely left it unchecked as the department investigated President Donald Trump’s political enemies, dismissed waves of career employees and defended administration positions that judges across the country repeatedly characterized as legally dubious.
Democrats’ sweeping congressional victories have now altered the balance of power in Washington. The shift is expected to bring extensive investigations into those actions and others, along with the broader oversight that the Justice Department had largely avoided under Republican congressional leadership.
At least publicly, the department has shown little sign of being deterred by the new political landscape.
Attorney General Todd Blanche says the department will cooperate with Congress, while also insisting that “we will not back down” from the Republican president’s agenda. Separately, a senior aide told prosecutors to prepare for “wartime” conditions, and a U.S. attorney publicly cautioned a leading Democrat about planned congressional investigations.
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Trump tells JD Vance to move beyond Iran and target ‘corruption and crime’ in the U.S.
President Donald Trump on Thursday instructed Vice President JD Vance to turn his attention away from the war in Iran and toward what Trump describes as corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states.
Vance, who served as the chief negotiator for a short-lived truce in the eight-month-old conflict, has openly blamed the war and its economic consequences for the Republicans’ sweeping losses in last week’s U.S. midterm elections.
In a social media post Thursday, however, Trump sharply urged the vice president to redirect his efforts toward an issue he considers more urgent—and potentially more politically effective—after Republicans suffered heavy defeats at the polls.
Trump said earlier in the week that the war was “militarily … effectively over.” He reinforced that position Thursday by telling Vance to devote his “complete and total attention” to the president’s anti-fraud campaign.
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