INSIDE D.C. WITH JOHN GIZZI NEWSMAX WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT
White House Split Over McConnell Seat • Watch for Vice President JD Vance to make a rare move in a contested Republican primary and endorse close friend and multimillionaire entrepreneur Nate Morris in the heated, three-way primary for the seat of retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. The two are close friends,
and Morris vigorously supported Vance’s 2022 race for the Senate in Ohio. It is unlikely, however,
that Vance will bring with him the endorsement that counts most among Republicans — Donald Trump’s. Morris’ two opponents, Rep. Andy Barr and former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, are both rock-solid MAGA Republicans whom the president has supported in the past. For his part, McConnell
will probably endorse one of the two (both of them have worked for him on his Senate staff) but not Morris, who has repeatedly attacked the longtime Senate leader as a RINO (Republican in name only).
Virginia AG Eyes Next Move • Within hours of his narrow defeat for reelection as attorney general of Virginia in November, Jason Miyares was immediately boomed for bigger things. It is widely assumed
that Miyares, 49, the son of
Cuban refugees, would run for governor in 2029. But following his loss
to Democrat Jay Jones in the closest of the three statewide races in Virginia, Miyares-watchers say he is open to the idea of challenging Democrat Sen. Mark Warner in 2026 — especially since outgoing GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin has apparently ruled out a Senate race and will focus on a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028.
Trump Backs Orbán • The unusually long wait of 10 months for the administration to choose an ambassador to Hungary fueled rumors that President Donald Trump had grown distant from longtime friend and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, important at a time polls show Orbán’s conservative Fidesz Party trailing in elections scheduled for next year. Not so. At the annual celebration
of the 1956 uprising against the Soviet Union held at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington D.C., Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared that “Viktor Orbán and Hungary are key partners of the U.S.” in the world, and went on to hail Hungary as “sometimes the lone bearer of the torch of freedom and sovereignty” — a not-so-subtle to reference to Orbán’s
occasional defiance of the European Union. Sources within the Hungarian government say that whatever the polls show, it would be no surprise for Trump to publicly indicate his support for Orbán in the 2026 elections.
Willie Horton Returns • In the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H.W. Bush used TV commercials to successfully link his Democrat rival, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, to a furloughed criminal, Willie Horton, who became a household name and a metaphor for soft-on-crime policies. (Horton, convicted
of first-degree murder in Massachusetts, fled a weekend furlough and then committed a rape and assault in Maryland.) Similar commercials may
resurface against former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Republican challenger Michael Whatley claims Cooper bears “direct responsibility” for the murder on a light rail train of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in August. Zarutska was stabbed to
death by Decarlos Brown Jr., who had been arrested more than a dozen times and had recently been released without bond.
Justices Vow to Stay Put
• Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have no plans to retire from the U.S. Supreme Court. Since President Donald Trump’s election last year, speculation was rampant that Thomas, 77, and Alito, 75, would both step down while Trump was in the White House and permit him to name like-minded conservatives who would serve for decades. But friends of Thomas and his wife, Virginia, insist
to Newsmax that the justice, first appointed in 1991, wants to stay on the court until at least August 2028, when he will set the record as longest-serving Supreme Court justice and, as one friend put it, “will remain on the court until they have to carry him out.” A former clerk for Alito said he seriously considered retiring after Trump’s election but grew irritated by speculation he was leaving and “when his fellow justices started treating him like someone on the way out.”
DECEMBER 2025 | NEWSMAX 45
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