Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets, lifting the curtain on power and politics in the capital. Today, we look at whether a right-wing talk show host has the secret formula for getting Republicans elected in one of the bluest cities in the country, and the options facing Donald Trump on “infrastructure day.”
No Republican has ever been elected mayor of Washington, D.C., since the Home Rule Act of 1973 established the post. No Republican has served on the city council since 2009.
Radio talk show host and MAGA original John Fredericks is on a mission to change all of that.
“I think people here want to live in a safe, prosperous city, and they want a better quality of life, and I don’t think the ‘R’ matters if you can do that,” he told Secrets in a recent interview. “So I’m running on a Republican renewal revitalization platform.”
Or “Rats, rents, Redskins,” as he puts it. It’s an alternative formulation of his three Rs, with a nod to President Donald Trump’s calls for the Washington Commanders to revert to their old name.
It is all part of Fredericks’ campaign to become chair of the GOP in Ward 2, which covers a big chunk of downtown D.C.
From there, the 68-year-old has an eye on eventually running for the council (if current member Brooke Pinto is successful in her run to become the delegate representing Washington D.C. in the House of Representatives, which would trigger a special election). But for now, his immediate plan is to harness his knack for building an audience in pursuit of making the GOP competitive in an overwhelmingly blue city.
The plan borrows from Trump’s MAGA movement in two major ways: A grassroots appeal to voters who would never set foot in the rarefied environs of Capitol Hill Club, Washington’s major GOP hub, and it uses the example of the president’s intervention in the city.
“I support what President Trump has done here,” he said. “This has been the greatest metamorphosis of an urban city in the history of the republic. In 12 months, he’s turned basically a very dire situation into the Disneyland of the Northeast.”
In 2024, the district had the fourth-highest homicide rate in the nation, according to analysis by the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Democrats will chafe at the hyperbole and question whether Trump’s policies have had an impact, given that violent crime had already begun dropping before he moved into the White House. But Fredericks’ central theme is that change is possible, and that Trump’s push to overhaul the city, clearing homeless encampments and deploying the National Guard on high-visibility patrols, offers a blueprint that will be attractive to voters.
Fredericks already has a powerful platform and a national brand, running his morning show from an office on McPherson Square. He and his wife own more than a dozen radio stations that broadcast to millions of listeners.
And the “Godzilla of Truth,” as he styles himself, has interviewed Trump more than 75 times. An early backer of the President, Fredericks served as Trump’s campaign chairman in Virginia in both 2016 and 2020.
Those communications skills, he said, are what the party needs to engage and connect with D.C. voters.
“I want to be able to go directly to voters on issues that they care about. And that’s how you build something and get the grassroots,” Fredericks said. “… Just controlling 10% of the vote in the city is not going to get you anything.”
Next month, Fredericks plans to hold a town hall with Rep. John McGuire (R-VA), whose Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful Act codified Trump’s executive order promoting law and order.
“Over time, if we do this right, the Republican Party of Washington, D.C., can be viable,” he said. “Right now, it’s not.”
Trump’s infrastructure day
The President has set an 8 p.m. Eastern deadline for his threat to destroy Iran’s bridges and power plants unless it reopens the Strait of Hormuz.
He set the scene with a bellicose Truth Social post this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
We have been here before, of course, and today’s deadline is a rehash of a previous deadline from 10 days ago. So what will Trump do this time?
Nothing: Does he just punt again? Just another TACO Tuesday? Having amped up the leverage, this seems unlikely. Having set the deadline, it seems he has to use it.
Escalate: Trump does not care much for international law, which is the main argument against bombing civilian infrastructure. But at the same time, escalation would suck him further into the quagmire. Does he really want another F-15E to go down in hostile territory?
Concepts of a plan: The most likely, in Secrets’ view, is some sort of off-ramp. Trump could announce progress in the various sets of talks, allowing him to push back his threat. His vice president in Hungary this morning said there was still time for a response from Tehran. And during his Monday press conference, Trump announced the “concept” of charging shipping for using the strait, something that would allow him to declare a win and move on.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing in all of this is how no one, apart from Trump himself, seems to know what will happen. Having stripped down the National Security Council and installed Secretary of State Marco Rubio as national security adviser, the team involved in planning decisions is tiny.
“Only President Trump knows what he will do, and the entire world will find out tomorrow night if bridges and electric plants are annihilated,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Wall Street Journal last night.
And in a macabre nod to his first term, when his administration repeatedly promised to overhaul American roads and bridges with “infrastructure week,” Trump has a new joke.
According to Axios, he is sounding out advisers and confidants about the plan to strike power plants and bridges by asking them: “What do you think of ‘Infrastructure Day?’”
Tucker on Trump
Tucker Carlson went off on Trump over Easter, taking issue with the President’s threats to Iran in a social media post, which included the mocking line, “Praise be to Allah.”
Carlson said no decent person should mock another’s faith.
“That is evil,” Carlson said. “That is an intentional desecration of beauty and truth, which is the definition of evil.”
Lunchtime reading
This prosecutor was floundering. Now he’s a go-to guy at Trump’s DOJ: Thousands of agency attorneys have left as the Department of Justice is brought under more central control by the White House to target Trump’s opponents. Others, like Robert Keenan, are leaning into the new direction.
Sam Altman may control our future — can he be trusted? This is the big read that everyone is talking about. It’s a deeply reported look at the head of OpenAI.
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