After a disastrous showing in the November 2025 elections and under pressure from President Donald Trump, many Republican-controlled legislatures are looking to (further) gerrymander their states prior to the 2026 midterms. The Court’s recent shadow docket decision permitting Texas Republicans to use their new map in 2026 is just the latest signal that whatever Republicans try, the U.S. Supreme Court will back them up.

Even more alarming is that other Republican-controlled states have been expanding on the same playbook that Texas just used to sneak in its illegal map. And under the Roberts Court’s application of what’s become known as the Purcell principle, Republican states can deliberately time redistricting to dodge meaningful judicial review, knowing that the Court’s commitment to GOP-friendly elections will beat out the Court’s concern for consistency with its own precedent and logic.

In the spring, facing declining poll numbers and broad backlash to his signature policies, President Donald Trump started pushing lawmakers in red states to redraw their maps, hoping to increase Republicans’ odds of holding the House in the 2026 midterm elections. In Texas, this effort resulted in a proposal to flip up to five Democratic seats in a congressional delegation that Republicans already control 25-13, which would give the GOP 79 percent of the state’s representatives despite winning only 58 percent of votes statewide in 2024.

Minority voters and advocacy groups filed suit, and a three-judge panel of federal judges determined in November that the map constituted an illegal racial gerrymander and blocked its use for the 2026 midterms. Weeks later, though, the Supreme Court stayed the decision in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens. Although the majority did not explain its reasoning, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurrence claiming that the lower court had “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith,” and “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is ready to give up on demands for Nato membership in exchange for security guarantees from the US and Europe, in a move aimed at advancing peace talks in Berlin on Sunday. 

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have pushed Ukraine to accept painful concessions, including ceding frontline territory to Russia, ahead of talks with Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s European allies on the White House plan to end Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine has admitted that it was unlikely to join Nato in the foreseeable future due to strong opposition from Russia, which has long demanded that the transatlantic alliance pledge to halt its eastward expansion as a condition for ending the war.

But Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday that Ukraine still requires security guarantees from the US and Europe, similar to Nato’s Article 5 clause of mutual protection for any member under attack.

Ukraine would join the EU next year under a proposal backed by Brussels in negotiations to end Russia’s war, a move that would transform the bloc’s approach to admitting new members.

EU accession by January 1 2027 is specified in the latest draft of a peace proposal that Ukrainian and European officials have presented to Washington, people briefed on the document’s contents told the Financial Times.

The plan is a revised version of proposals the Trump administration has made to end the war, a plan that Kyiv and its European allies had seen as tilted towards Russia.

The latest version comes as Donald Trump steps up pressure on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree a peace deal by Christmas.

Officials supportive of Ukraine’s EU ambitions said the European Commission now understands it should not derail the peace process by opposing the rapid timeline for Kyiv’s membership.

For most people, the tax cuts that President Trump signed into law this summer have yet to materialize. Only after Americans file their taxes next year will the savings become apparent, launching what Republicans hope will be a “refund boom” that lifts the public’s view of the economy.

Many of America’s largest companies have not had to wait. In the months since the law’s passage in July, corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Verizon and Eli Lilly have all disclosed in securities filings that the law would reduce their cash tax payments in the near term. AT&T Inc. projected that it would save as much as $2 billion in taxes just this year.

Those corporate tax savings have already started to have an effect on the federal budget. Between July and November, the last full month of data, revenue from the corporate income tax has dropped by roughly a third, or $52 billion, compared to the same period the year before, according to Treasury data.

Driving the cash savings is not a change in the corporate tax rate, which Republicans kept at 21 percent. Instead, a constellation of tax breaks has given companies a better ability to reduce the amount of income subject to tax. Rather than writing off the costs of new investments and research projects bit by bit over several years, companies are now able to deduct the full cost of these expenses in one year.

The next signs of the nation’s political divide might be jingling in your pocket next year.

The administration plans to issue a $1 coin with President Donald Trump’s likeness on it next year, despite a century-old precedent of not honoring sitting, or even living former, presidents on coins.

Instead of quarters honoring the abolition of slavery, granting women the right to vote and the Civil Rights movement, the Treasury will instead issue historical quarters featuring white men from the 18th and 19th centuries who were already well represented on currency and in historical tributes.

The new coins, coming after the administration stopped issuing new pennies earlier this year, underscore Trump’s drive to put his own stamp on the presidency far beyond the confines of the White House – whether it’s by putting his own face and name on US institutions or by pulling back on diversity efforts to reframe the story of America itself.

The US Mint on Thursday released the final coin designs for historical quarters celebrating the country’s 250th birthday next year. Rather than the fight against slavery or giving women the vote, the designs primarily honored a more homogeneous view of US history: George Washington for the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, James Madison and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, as well as pilgrims to celebrate the Mayflower Compact.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and his wife Erin Hawley are launching a new dark money group to shine a spotlight on anti-abortion ballot measures and pro-family policies.

Why it matters: After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the Republican establishment quietly moved on from abortion politics. The Hawleys want to revive the issue.

"We think that there needs to be a voice, strong voice, advocating for life, and not just in the narrow political sense," Sen. Hawley said in a phone interview, "but also advocating culturally."

Driving the news: The Hawleys, who started dating when they were Supreme Court clerks, are launching the Love Life Initiative this week.