WESTMINSTER, LONDON — Last week, Reform UK leader and perpetual thorn-in-the-establishment’s-side, Nigel Farage, told the press he intended to be on the streets of Havering in East London on the morning of Friday, May 8th, celebrating Reform UK’s first capital city breakthrough. Sure enough, the borough is now his, with the once-dominant Conservative Party relegated to ZERO seats in the white-van-and-mortgage belt of London.

These results are being replicated up and down the nation, with over 5,000 council seats up for grabs in Thursday’s elections, and Reform UK already picking up around 1 in 3 of them. It’s a nightmare scenario for the governing Labour Party, which is still being led by one of the most unpopular political figures in modern political canon.

“I can honestly say you are witnessing an historic shift in British politics,” Farage told the assembled press, insisting that “this is now the most national of all parties.”

GETTING STARMER OUT.

Asked whether the result was a protest vote against Labour, he was blunt: “It cannot continue to be a fluke or a protest vote.” He compared his party’s gains to clearing Becher’s Brook in the Grand National, telling assembled reporters at the Reform UK headquarters in the early hours of Friday morning: “if we cleared Becher’s Brook and land well, we go on to win the Grand National.”

While there isn’t a General Election scheduled in the United Kingdom until 2029, the British parliament does technically have the ability to dissolve itself and “go to the country” earlier. If the Labour Party manages to oust Starmer – an increasingly likely prospect – a new leader may want a snap election to try and gain some public credibility. That situation would, at least currently, likely end in further disaster for Labour.

In any case, Starmer refuses to go. He told the media on Friday morning: “The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it. We have lost brilliant Labour representatives across the country. And that hurts, and it should hurt, and I take responsibility. The voters have sent a message about the pace of change, how they want their lives improved. I was elected to meet those challenges but I’m not going to walk away from those challenges.”

Labour’s MP for Hartlepool, Jonathan Brash, told reporters overnight: “I don’t think Keir Starmer should survive these results,” adding that “we have to be bolder, and we have to go further.”

By noon on Friday, when still only a fraction of the 136 English councils had reported, Reform’s net seat gain was already past 420, with Labour shedding more than 250, and the Conservatives (Tories), dropping near 200.

POLL POSITION.

Sir John Curtice, Britain’s elections guru, told the BBC that “however you look at it Reform are in poll position.”

Across East Anglia, the very part of England the Tories have spent decades treating as ancestral land, Reform was the party that prospered.

Basildon delivered eleven new Reform councillors on a night when both Labour and the Conservatives lost ground. Brentwood and Southend each handed Reform another seven. Peterborough returned four more, making Reform the second-largest party there. By the time Friday afternoon’s county counts begin in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, the only real question will be the size of the Conservative defeat, with Essex County Council widely expected to fall to Reform outright.

The mood at Reform UK HQ on Thursday night and well into Friday morning was ebullient. No party worked harder, traveled further, recruited better, or staved off more attacks than Farage’s Reform. Indeed by every metric, Farage outpaced his competition, criss-crossing the country for nine weeks straight, proving that actually putting the hard work in and meeting voters where they are – the old fashioned way of doing politics – works.

But Reform UK also outpaced across digital platforms too, with a quicker, savvier, and more engaging online operation than the other major British political parties. Their Thursday night “spin room” – in a swanky skyscraper in Westminster – was adorned with floor-to-ceiling television screens blaring every latest detail of every count across the nation. All this while the other parties sat huddled around old laptops in stuffy old digs.

THE OLD GUARD.

For the better part of 40 years, the Conservative Party has insisted that it alone speaks for shire England. Voters in the shires, on the evidence of the past 24 hours, no longer agree. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s defenders will note that they defied some expectations in pockets of London, holding Bexley and Kensington & Chelsea and even adding seats in Wandsworth as Labour collapsed there. But these are skirmishes won on the edges of a war that is being lost in the middle. A Conservative Party that cannot hold East Anglia is not, in any meaningful sense, a national party of opposition.

The Green Party, advertised by sympathetic leftist media as the great progressive alternative, has not arrived either. Curtice noted that the Greens had picked up roughly an eight-point swing in vote share but were converting almost none of it into actual council seats. By the early hours, their net gain stood somewhere in the low 20s, a figure that is a footnote, rather than a foothold.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski – who has faced weeks of scrutiny over his party’s rampant, internal anti-Semitism – went into Thursday promising historic gains in London, Sussex, and Hastings, and a breakthrough in Wales. It hasn’t happened.

WHAT NEXT?

Keir Starmer’s problem is that the public quite plainly treated yesterday’s vote as a referendum on his premiership, and answered no. It was a national vote of no confidence in a man who has promptly presided over one of the worst political and cultural eras in modern Britain.

Just two years into a five-year mandate, he now faces the question of whether the parliamentary Labour Party, which has never previously removed a sitting Prime Minister, will continue to defer to a leader whose approval ratings have spent eighteen months at historic lows.

The devolved picture is in some ways more striking still. In Wales, Labour, the natural party of government in Cardiff Bay since devolution began in 1999, was on course for its worst Welsh result in over a century. Plaid Cymru and Reform were expected to emerge as the two largest forces in the new 96-seat Senedd.

In Scotland, where counts get under way on Friday afternoon, the far-left Scottish National Party (SNP) is expected to remain the largest party but well short of a majority, while Reform UK, which had no Members of the Scottish Parliament whatsoever after 2021, was forecast to enter Holyrood as either the second or third-largest force, displacing the Conservatives and rivaling Scottish Labour.

The immediate consequences for council control are substantial. Reform now governs more of England than at any point in its history, with Havering joining the 10 authorities already captured last year, and the Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counts still to deliver verdicts that look likely to extend that map further. The party will be administering services, setting council tax, and running a DOGE-style efficiency programme in places where, two years ago, it held no seats at all. Every council it controls becomes both an opportunity and a test. If Reform delivers, the case for a Reform government writes itself; if it falters, the legacy parties will ensure nobody forgets.

For 30 years, the British political class has insisted that the Faragist tendency in British politics could be ignored, contained, or laughed off. On the morning of 8 May 2026, on a pavement in Romford, that consensus died.

On Thursday, voters across England, Scotland, and Wales head to the polls in the most fragmented set of British elections in living memory — with projections pointing to the simultaneous collapse of two-party politics across all three nations.

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If you were to walk into a New Jersey pharmacy and ask for a year’s supply of Eliquis, a blood thinner that millions of Americans take to prevent strokes, the list price will be in the region of $7,100. The same drug, manufactured by the same two American companies, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, at the same plant, could cost you just $770… if you lived in Berlin, Germany.

Now do the same calculation with the increasingly popular Ozempic. The list price in Cleveland is $969 a month, but in Copenhagen it costs just $122. In Berlin it’s as low as $59.

None of this is a quirk, nor is it down to cunning European negotiation. It is, in fact, one of the oldest rackets in international trade.

Americans foot the bill at both ends of all this, by the way: once as taxpayers, by publicly funding organizations like the increasingly scrutinized National Institutes of Health (NIH), which underwrites scientific developments, and a second time at the pharmacy counter, by paying the prices that allow drugmakers to absorb the discounts Berlin and Paris demand as their cost of market access.

European governments operate single-payer health systems, which they use as bottlenecks: they tell pharmaceutical companies what price they’ll pay for a given drug, and the companies, unable to walk away from entire national markets, take what they can get. And in some countries the squeeze doesn’t even stop at the register: governments use “clawbacks” to reach back into the pockets of American drugmakers after the sale and demand a refund on medicines already delivered. Whatever margin is squeezed out of Germany or France inevitably gets recouped from the one large market that does not impose statutory price controls: America’s.

Brussels calls the whole process “price negotiation,” which is one of those European terms that means the opposite of what it is.

Take Germany — Europe’s largest economy and the country that lectures the loudest about “solidarity.” For years, Berlin has forced mandatory price cuts on American medicines the moment they cross its border, suppressing what American companies can charge and sending the bill for the shortfall back across the Atlantic to American patients.

LONG-TERM MALIGNANCE.

For 70 years European governments have spent below NATO defensive spending targets, redirecting the savings into their welfare states, which the United States effectively subsidizes. The same mentality drives the medicine racket: why fund your own research when the Americans will do it for you?

Europeans often lecture Americans about the supposed cruelty of America’s “for-profit healthcare,” while running an entire continent’s pharmacopoeia on profits extracted from American patients. European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen condemns capitalism during Davos, but then dispatches her negotiators to enforce the price controls that depend on it. When President Trump suggested at the same conference in January that Emmanuel Macron might consider letting French citizens pay something closer to what Americans pay for the same medicines, the French presidency dismissed the comment as “fake news.” The more accurate translation is that they consider the question itself an impertinence.

Over the past year, President Trump has expended significant effort on this.

His May 2025 ‘Most Favored Nation’ executive order put the principle on paper. By December 2025, 17 of the world’s largest medicine manufacturers (accounting for about 86% of the branded drug market) had signed deals committing to align American prices with the lowest paid in comparable developed countries.

BRINGING PRICES DOWN FOR AMERICANS.

This February, TrumpRx.gov went live, with the cash price of Ozempic falling from $1,028 to around $350 and Wegovy to as low as $149. The British, to their credit, read the room: on 1 December 2025 London signed an agreement to raise the net UK price on new drugs in exchange for tariff relief. The model, in short, works, and now needs to be turned on the governments that still refuse to apply it.

Germany didn’t learn from the UK. It is racing in the opposite direction and will likely be the first EU domino to fly in the face of Trump’s policy. Earlier this month, Berlin published a new cost-containment bill that piles fresh rebates and price cuts on top of an already rigged system.

The administration’s existing Section 301 investigation into the European Union, opened on 11 March 2026, currently focuses on things like excess industrial capacity. But it should be extended (or a parallel one opened) to cover European pharmaceutical price-setting regimes directly.

The language was written for exactly this kind of behavior: foreign government practices that are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and burden the American taxpayer and the nation’s commerce.

For half a century the deal has been that Americans pay for the discoveries and Europeans enjoy them at cut rates. Under Trump, that arrangement is coming to its end. Britain has accepted the new terms. Germany is testing whether the Administration means it. France is watching. They will all likely accept these terms in time, or they will discover at last what it feels like to pay for their own science, their own medicine, and their own defense, all of which the United States has been quietly funding on their behalf for the better part of a lifetime.

President Trump will fly to Beijing on May 14, and when he sits down across the table from Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist leader will almost certainly reach for the same card he has played against every American administration for a decade.

Whenever a trade negotiation turns tough, with tariffs climbing and tempers fraying, Beijing picks up the phone and orders its state buyers to stop purchasing American farm goods. Soybeans, mostly. Beef and pork have had their turns, too. The effect is immediate and brutal. Within days, commodity prices collapse, and somewhere in the American South, a man who planted forty acres for a harvest that was supposed to ship to China in October watches his year’s income evaporate.

No U.S. president can let that stand, of course, so the checks go out. In 2018 and 2019, after Xi halted Chinese purchases of American soybeans during President Trump’s first trade fight, the Treasury cut roughly $23 billion in emergency payments to farmers — a figure larger than the annual budget of several federal departments, wired out in lump sums to compensate American families for damage inflicted by a single foreign leader. In 2025, when the trade fight resumed, Beijing ran the play again. Blocked American beef. Canceled soybean orders. Another $12 billion in aid was duly announced. Another round, another patch on a wound inflicted by a foreign adversary.

It is, if you stop and think about it for more than a moment, an astonishing state of affairs. And hardly sustainable.

The big agricultural companies shrug all of this off because multinationals with grain operations across three continents can ride out a trade war. They have the lawyers, the diversification, the patience of people who aren’t missing a mortgage payment over it. What they do not have is four hundred acres outside Decatur and a son who wants to take over the farm. The family farmer does. When Beijing freezes a purchase order, it is not anybody’s boardroom that absorbs the blow. It is a kitchen table in rural Illinois.

There is, mercifully, a bill sitting in Congress that takes the trick off the table.

It is called the Grown in America Act, and the idea is about as uncomplicated as legislation ever gets. When an American food or beverage company sources its ingredients from American farmers rather than importing them, the company gets a tax break. Buy more from American farmers, get more. Buy foreign, get nothing. That is more or less the whole thing.

What this builds, year by year and quietly, is a steady and compounding domestic market for American farm goods. A buyer that doesn’t hang up the phone when a summit in Beijing goes sideways. The soybean farmer in Iowa stops being a chess piece in a game he didn’t sign up for and becomes what he always should have been: a supplier to the American food economy, in a country that grows more than enough of its own food to feed itself. Xi’s favorite card loses its power for the simple reason that the American farmer no longer depends on him.

Will it cost the Treasury money? It will. Will it cost less than the $23 billion the Treasury was forced to write out the last time Beijing pulled this stunt? Considerably. And unlike the emergency checks, it actually buys something: a structural change that doesn’t evaporate the moment the next negotiation ends.

Which brings us to May 14.

When the President walks into that room roughly three weeks from now, he will do so in one of two conditions. Either he will walk in the way every American president before him has walked in — with American farmers dangling behind him like hostages, a fact Xi will have calculated to three decimal places before Air Force One has even landed — or he will walk in having had that weapon taken off the board by a Congress that finally understood what was at stake.

Every day this bill sits unsigned is another day Xi holds a card he is eager to play. It would be a good idea to pass it, and have Trump sign it, before the he boards the plane.

The “doves” on the right have spent weeks being derided as “panicans.” But their warnings: that another Middle East war would spook voters, push up prices, and hand Democrats a line of attack before the midterms have all come to pass. The polling underscores how they weren’t imagining it. But the real panicans are not the anti-war voices. The real panicans are the corporate suits who see a crisis, grab a mic, and start leveraging the war for their own greed.

Take United Airlines CEO, Scott Kirby.

While President Donald J. Trump and his administration have been telling Americans that any oil spike tied to Iran will be temporary, Kirby has been out there acting like the apocalypse is hard-coded into the calendar year. He has floated a scenario in which oil hits $175 a barrel and stays there through 2027.

When the boss of a major airline goes on TV and starts pushing such long-term, worst-case scenarios, he’s trying to set expectations, telling consumers like you to get ready to pay more for the foreseeable future.

Trump has said the opposite.

“When this is over,” he told reporters this month, “oil prices are going to go down very, very rapidly.” A White House spokesman said the same last week, insisting prices would fall “rapidly” once the war in Iran ended. Indeed, on the word of a ceasefire, prices immediately plummeted to $75.

But Kirby keeps going the other way.

On March 20, he said United assumes “oil goes to $175/barrel and doesn’t get back down to $100/barrel until the end of 2027.”

That’s a deeply irresponsible, doomsday scenario that feels as tailored to garnering Democrat voters at the midterms as it does prepping consumers for supply shocks.

On March 25, he doubled down on CNBC, calling that “a reasonable assumption for us to make…” and saying prices could “stay at a high level all the way through next year.”

Then came the part aimed squarely at passengers.

“I think fares will continue to go up in line with oil prices… you’ve got to pass through the costs of inputs…” Kirby said.

There it is. Another corporate executive using a geopolitical crisis to lock in higher prices.

The Trump administration has already pushed back. On CNBC, Energy Secretary Chris Wright dismissed Kirby’s scenario as “highly unlikely” and said the country was dealing with a short-term disruption, not some new permanent reality.

That is the split. Trump is trying to calm people (and markets) down. Kirby is out there hardening the idea that elevated costs are here to stay. One side is saying the shock will pass. The other is normalizing the pain before it has even arrived in full.

That is what a real panican looks like.

Trump coined the word in 2025 for the people who panic on cue and immediately amplify the bleakest possible outcome. Kirby fits the type. So do plenty of executives in corporate America who treat every disruption as an opportunity to condition the public to accept less prosperity and more expense. And Kirby has form here.

While Trump has moved to uproot DEI preferences from government and corporate life, Kirby has embraced them. Under his leadership, United boasted that it was “the first airline to offer nonbinary gender booking options.” He also backed a policy aimed at making 50 percent of United’s graduating pilot classes women or people of color.

Then there is the personal theater. Kirby bizarrely has a history of dressing in drag as both Kesha and Taylor Swift. He’s a leftist, a weirdo, and he’s priming the pump to charge you more to fly on his increasingly awful airline.

The anti-war right did not create anxieties over war. They just spotted them early.

The people feeding the panic are the executives, analysts, and media hands who seize on every crisis and start propagandizing to Americans to expect scarcity, inflation, and decline.

Scott Kirby is doing precisely that. Giving himself PR cover to raise fares. Undercutting a White House trying to reassure the country. Telling Americans to get used to paying more.

The doves were not the panicans; the United Airlines boardroom was.

Our previous arguments against Netflix as the right fit for a Warner Bros. acquisition now look even stronger. Netflix never needed Warner’s library to compete. It needed the market to be kept exactly as it is: fragmented, weaker, and miles behind.

That helps explain the latest round of Netflix price hikes, which, by our calculation, would leave the company with an eye-watering $40-a-month premium price tag by the middle of the next decade. Why anyone would pay that for Emily in Paris, and its ilk, evades us.

Indeed, in under two months since insisting a Warner deal would give consumers “more content for less,” Netflix is doing the precise opposite—because it can.

With roughly 325 million subscribers and no true rival within striking distance, Netflix flexes the kind of market dominance that turns “consumer choice” into a poor joke. Prices will continue to go up, and subscribers will lazily stay put.

The old Hollywood bargain has been torched in the process, too.

Consumers will surely continue to pay more, but writers, actors, and directors are paid less through the erosion of residuals and the casualization of creative labor. Netflix has built a commanding position not just on scale, but on the weakening of everyone around it: competitors, customers, and talent alike.

That is why the Warner Bros. deal was never the right prize for Netflix. It would not have produced a better market. It would have deepened the imbalance. And now, with the merger dead, Netflix is showing exactly what streaming supremacy looks like: higher prices, lower obligations, and no reason to pretend otherwise.

A long list of names has emerged to replace outgoing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was dismissed by President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday.

The National Pulse has compiled a list of individuals who have been speculated about or promoted by Trumpworld insiders. President Trump’s core requirements are likely to include who can advance his political agenda, and who can be confirmed by an increasingly precarious Republican Senate majority.

The confirmation issue, requiring only a simple majority, could be especially troublesome, as Republicans hold only 53 seats to Democrats’ 47 (including two caucusing Independents). This means the votes of retiring anti-Trump Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), persistent RINO Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and critical swing vote Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) will likely be critical, though there is potential for crossover votes like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).

To better understand the field of play, the potential nominees are divided into two categories: those who are ‘Senate Friendly’ and  those who will likely draw a ‘Confirmation Fight.’ The one potential nomination that is worth pulling out from that is of the Acting Attorney General.

SENATE FRIENDLY.

Lee Zeldin, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator: Lee Zeldin is speculated to be the favorite for the nomination. At the EPA, Zeldin has implemented President Trump’s agenda in a satisfactory manner. This has largely prevented the corporate media and Congressional Democrats from acquiring the usual political ammunition they’ve attempted to use to sink other Trump nominees. Zeldin’s amicable relationships with his former House colleagues suggest he has a similar good standing with the Senate, making Democrat crossover votes, such as Sen. Fetterman, more likely.

Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida: While Ron DeSantis is not necessarily a favorite among President Trump’s supporters, the Florida governor, who is term-limited, does have some support in Congress. While political operatives in the DeSantis camp have pushed his name for a Cabinet role since the start of Trump’s second term, an actual nomination for the Florida governor has yet to materialize. While DeSantis is an attorney—having served in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps—he has limited private-sector experience, with his background mostly in the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) rather than American civil or criminal law.

Andrew Bailey, Attorney General of Missouri: As Missouri’s Attorney General, Andrew Bailey has been a staunch ally of President Trump. In July 2024, Bailey filed a Supreme Court challenge against the State of New York, alleging that its handling of President Trump’s so-called hush money trial infringed on the First Amendment rights of Missouri residents. In addition, Bailey sued the former Biden government over illegal immigration flights to his state and again over allegations of election interference. Bailey is far less likely to draw Democrat cross-over votes. He’s currently the co-deputy director of the FBI, too, which makes things easier.

Eric Schmitt, U.S. Senator from Missouri: Schmitt is the former Missouri Attorney General and a current U.S. Senator. Like Bailey, Schmitt is a decent ally of Trump and, being a sitting U.S. Senator, is likely to receive support from colleagues in the upper chamber. Schmitt has been a leading figure in pushing for stricter restrictions on U.S. H-1 B visa policies.

Ashley Moody, U.S. Senator from Florida: Moody is the former Attorney General of Florida and currently serves in the U.S. Senate. Like Schmitt, she is likely to draw strong support from her Senate colleagues. However, Moody may also be less welcome by some of Trump’s stronger supporters due to her close ties with DeSantis’s political camp.

Mike Lee, U.S. Senator from Utah: Senator Mike Lee is a constitutional lawyer and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Utah, who also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito when the latter was still a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Lee, who has a strong libertarian political streak, would be an interesting choice for Attorney General, as more traditional Tea Party movement conservatives enthusiastically support him. However, Lee’s past support for mass immigration, and especially H-1B visas, could spark resistance among more populist Trump supporters. Like other members of the Senate, Lee is likely to be easily confirmed.

Ted Cruz, U.S. Senator from Texas: Ted Cruz has an extensive legal background and, before being elected to the U.S. Senate, served as the Solicitor General of Texas, arguing several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. While Cruz, on paper, has a sterling resume, his reputation as an outspoken lawmaker who has butted heads with President Trump in the past could prove too much for him to secure the nomination. Cruz is also long believed to have a relatively contentious relationship with his Senate colleagues. However, this may actually aid his nomination as some Republican and Democrat lawmakers would likely welcome his exit from the chamber.

Matthew Whitaker, United States Ambassador to NATO: The former Acting U.S. Attorney General from November 2018 to February 2019, following Jeff Sessions’s resignation during President Trump’s first term, is another likely Senate confirmable nominee. In fact, Whitaker, like Lee Zeldin, has already been confirmed by the Senate once. Another Trump ally and NATO skeptic, Whitaker, should be palatable for the 53-seat Republican majority in the Senate.

Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York: Clayton has extensive legal experience and, before being named the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2017 as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Prior to his tenure at the SEC, Clayton was a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.

Jeff Jensen, Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri: Jensen has a long record of experience with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and previously served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee (AGAC). Before his tenure as a U.S. Attorney, Jensen served as a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent from 1989 to 1999. Notably, he was tapped in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to review the DOJ’s prosecution of former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. Jensen concluded that the federal charges against Gen. Flynn should be dropped.

Stanley Woodward Jr., Associate Attorney General: Woodward currently serves as President Trump’s Associate Attorney General, making him one of the highest-ranking officials in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Before taking the role, Woodward built a high-profile reputation in Washington legal circles and has long been viewed as a trusted figure within Trump-world. More importantly, however, Woodward has already been confirmed by the U.S. Senate for his current post, which would make him one of the more easily confirmable nominees under consideration. He would, however, suffer the same issue as anyone else who has been deputy to Bondi until now.

D. John Sauer, Solicitor General of the United States: Sauer currently serves as the Solicitor General of the United States, one of the most prestigious legal posts in the federal government. He previously served as Solicitor General of Missouri and has extensive appellate experience, giving him the sort of polished legal résumé that would be difficult for even some skeptical senators to dismiss out of hand. While Sauer may lack the overt retail political profile of some other names on this list, his standing inside the DOJ and his reputation as a serious conservative lawyer could make him an attractive choice for a White House looking to avoid a bruising confirmation battle.

Sarah B. Rogers, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs: Rogers currently serves as the State Department’s Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a Senate-confirmed role she assumed in October 2025. Before entering government, Rogers built a profile as a free speech lawyer and conservative legal activist, giving her the sort of ideological résumé that could appeal to a White House still eager to frame legal fights through the lens of censorship, institutional bias, and cultural combat. At the same time, her background is much more rooted in speech law and public diplomacy than in traditional criminal prosecution or DOJ management, which would make her a more unconventional pick than many of the other names on this list. Still, for a White House looking for a loyalist with a sharp ideological edge and recent Senate confirmation, Rogers could emerge as a dark-horse option.

CONFIRMATION FIGHTS.

Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is one of President Trump’s most staunch political allies and a favorite among the President’s supporters. More importantly, however, Paxton is currently locked in a contentious Republican Senate primary race in Texas with anti-Trump Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Recent polling shows Paxton pulling ahead of Cornyn, and his presence in the Senate would provide critical support for Trump’s agenda over the next two years.

Jeff Clark, Former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights: Like Paxton, Clark is another key Trump backer and movement favorite who would likely face significant opposition from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans in the Senate. Clark was a long-running target of Democrat lawfare, with the D.C. Bar Association recommending his disbarment last year. In 2022, Clark’s home was inexplicably raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a legal memo he wrote while serving in the DOJ advising Georgia state lawmakers on legal avenues to challenge the 2020 presidential election results. Notably, the memo only existed as a draft and was never issued. In addition, Clark was indicted, along with President Trump, by former Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was herself removed from her own prosecution for corruption, and the charges against Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were subsequently dismissed.

Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia: Jeanine Pirro, a former New York county judge, district attorney, and Fox News host, currently serves as President Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. In her current role, Pirro has helped spearhead Trump’s crackdown on violent crime in the nation’s capital, which has resulted in a precipitous drop in homicides, muggings, carjackings, and assaults. Still, Pirro’s detractors are likely to accuse her of not being able to remain independent of Trump, something Senate Democrats and anti-Trump Senate Republicans insist the Attorney General nominee must be in the role.

Aileen Cannon, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida: Judge Cannon could be considered a dark horse candidate, and falls under the ‘Confirmation Fight’ category mainly because her nomination would likely draw some of the most fierce opposition from Senate Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. Cannon, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, oversaw former Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for possession of classified documents. The District Court judge, herself a Trump appointee, clashed with Smith over his penchant for overprosecution and allegations that he withheld evidence from the defense. In July of 2024, Judge Cannon dismissed Smith’s prosecution, while ruling his appointment as a special prosecutor was unconstitutional.

Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights: Dhillon currently serves in the Trump DOJ as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. While she has been highly active in addressing allegations of anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination at American universities, Dhillon is not without her detractors, even amongst Trump supporters.

Alina Habba, Counselor to the President: Alina Habba, like Todd Blanche, is one of President Donald Trump’s defense attorneys and his choice to serve as United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. However, Democrat lawfare efforts and anti-Trump judges in the state derailed Habba’s nomination and even her role as the Acting U.S. Attorney. Like the other possible nominees in this category, Habba is likely to face more than just opposition from Senate Democrats, with Sens. Tillis, Collins, and Murkowski possibly opposing her nomination as well—along with even the likes of Sen. Cornyn.

Robert Giuffra, Co-Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell: An attorney with extensive legal and management experience, Robert Giuffra would likely receive significant support from the political establishment within the GOP. However, the Co-Chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell is likely to give Democrats a platform to revive their Russia collusion conspiracy. During the first Trump administration, Giuffra declined to represent President Trump in the Mueller investigation. However, he did represent former Deputy National Security Advisor K. T. McFarland in the same probe. Currently, he is leading President Trump’s appeal of his New York conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

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