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This really may be the political end for Trump

This really may be the political end for Trump

Trump’s Post on Rob Reiner’s Death Tests GOP Limits

Trump’s Post on Rob Reiner’s Death Tests GOP Limits

America’s Partisan Hypocrisy: Hunter Biden’s Crimes vs. Trump’s Business Conflicts

America’s Partisan Hypocrisy: Hunter Biden’s Crimes vs. Trump’s Business Conflicts

The Great Political Finger Trap

The Great Political Finger Trap

K Street profiting from the Trump revolving door

The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumApr 24, 2019
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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Lobbying firms linked to the Trump administration have made plenty of rain this year.

This seems no more true than with the firm created by Trump campaign fundraiser Brian Ballard after the 2016 election. Ballard Partners reported $4.2 million in revenue between January and March from a roster of clients recently expanded to include General Motors and Boeing and also featuring GEO Group, a private prison contractor hoping to benefit from an illegal immigration crackdown at the southern border.

The firm brought in $10 million in its first year and $18 million last year thanks to several "revolving door" moves. Faces at the firm now include Raj Shah, previously White House deputy press secretary, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and Trump transition team member.

A Center for Responsive Politics survey of how K Street has been absorbing former Trump administration officials also found:

  • Turnberry Solutions employs former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Jason Osborne, who was a senior Trump campaign advisor.
  • Avenue Strategies has original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and was co-founded by senior campaign advisor Barry Bennett.
  • Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck's D.C. office is run by Marc Lampkin, a major 2016 campaign fundraiser.
  • Holland & Knight has Scott Mason, who ran congressional relations for the campaign, and Lauren Maddox, a member of the Trump transition team.

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A Baseball Team Caught Between Two Countries — a Visa Shift and a Shutdown

The Tucson baseball team playing against the Águilas de Mexicali in the border city of Mexicali. Photo courtesy of the Tucson baseball team

A Baseball Team Caught Between Two Countries — a Visa Shift and a Shutdown

NOGALES, SONORA, MEXICO — What was meant to be a historic first for America’s pastime — a Mexican Pacific League baseball franchise anchored north of the border — has become a bureaucratic curveball.

The newly relocated Tucson, Arizona, baseball team — formerly the Mayos de Navojoa from Sonora, Mexico — has yet to fulfill a long-held dream shared by fans on both sides of the border: bringing professional Mexican winter baseball to U.S. soil.

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America’s Tariff Mirage and the Coming Debt Reckoning

Record tariff revenues mask a deepening U.S. fiscal crisis as deficits, debt, and interest costs soar, raising alarms about economic stability and governance.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

America’s Tariff Mirage and the Coming Debt Reckoning

The latest fiscal disclosures from the US Treasury offer a stark reality check for a country that continues to see itself as the global lodestar of economic stability. Tariffs, once an auxiliary tool of industrial policy or bargaining chip in trade negotiations, have quietly morphed into the financial backbone of the Trump administration’s economic experiment. October’s revenue haul - an unprecedented thirty-four point two billion dollars, up more than threefold from a year earlier - has been heralded by the White House as vindication. It is, according to President Trump, not merely proof that tariffs are “working,” but a testament to a new era of American prosperity robust enough to fund direct cash transfers to households. A two-thousand-dollar bonus, he insists, is just the beginning.

The president has taken to social media to cast opponents of this approach as out-of-touch elites, blind to a transformed landscape in which the United States is, in his words, “the richest and most respected country in the world.” Record stock prices, swollen retirement accounts, and subdued inflation are deployed to sustain an alluring political narrative: that tariffs are no longer punitive, but emancipatory - a fiscal engine capable of generating national renewal.

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Mamdani’s Choice

New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani speaks during a press conference on December 12, 2025, in New York City.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Mamdani’s Choice

I obviously can’t say with certainty what kind of private advice President Barack Obama, AOC, Bernie Sanders, and other DNC establishment consultants may have given New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani during the campaign or in the days after his victory, but I can make an educated guess.

My guess is that they counseled him to subside a bit with the tumult, recede in the background, quietly focus heads-down on delivering something “concrete” (and do it fast) by working with the people who hold power, including the governor, his two senators, the congressional delegation, and especially Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

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