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Rod Blagojevich has a new job: representing the interests of an ultranationalist politician known as the “Bosnian Bear” who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The former Illinois governor, who was pardoned in February by President Donald Trump, has agreed to lobby on behalf of the Republic of Srpska, a Serb-majority territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina long mired in the bitter ethnic tensions of the region.

RRB Strategies, Blagojevich’s firm, “will provide communications and public affairs support on behalf of the Republic of Srpska,” according to the registration statement he was required to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is held together by the Dayton Accords, a 1995 agreement that ended the Bosnian War and unified the country. Blagojevich told POLITICO on Wednesday that he hopes to “use whatever ability I have to persuade the decision-makers that we need to take another look at the Dayton Agreement and bring it in line with the realities of today.”

As he begins the role, Blagojevich is seeking to cast himself as one in a long line of populist leaders thwarted by “unelected bureaucrats who have exceeded their constitutional power,” from Trump to Marine Le Pen in France and Milorad Dodik, Srpska’s president

“I believe the weaponization that’s going on in Europe right now by the European Union against certain populist political leaders they don’t like started with me as a left of center Democratic governor in Illinois,” Blagojevich said. “I just know this. And then they took it to the next level and did it to President Trump.”

Dodik has long pushed for the Republic of Srpska, to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina and join nearby Serbia. In February, he was sentenced to a year in prison for defying the country’s Constitutional Court. Dubbed “the Bosnian Bear,” for his physique and crude antics, Dodik has since fled to Moscow.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March condemned Dodik for “undermining Bosnia and Herzegovina’s institutions and threatening its security and stability” in a post on X.

Blagojevich was pardoned by Trump in February after being convicted in 2011 on charges of extortion and for trying to sell or trade the appointment of the Senate seat that had been held by Barack Obama. Acquainted from their days on The Celebrity Apprentice, Trump commuted Blagojevich’s sentence in 2020.

Trump weighed tapping Blagojevich to serve as U.S. ambassador to Serbia before picking former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich for the post.

Blagojevich, whose parents were Serbian, touted to POLITICO his long experience working in Balkan politics. As a Democratic House representative in 1999, he traveled to Belgrade with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to clinch a deal that freed three American prisoners of war.

“I believe the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Srpska can be bastions of Judea-Christian values in the Balkans just like Israel is in the Middle East,” he said. “And I’d like to be able to play a role in that and am fortunate to have been brought on and be hired to do just that.”

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After Tuesday night’s elections, Republicans are starting to worry that the shock and awe of President Donald Trump’s second term will haunt them in the 2026 midterms.

Inside the GOP, there is a growing sense that the party should get back to basics and focus on the pocketbook issues that many voters sent them to Washington to address. There’s internal disagreement about the effects of Trump’s new tariffs announced on Wednesday. Some say they will ultimately lead to reviving American manufacturing — but even many of the president’s allies fear they could drive up prices and potentially crash the economy.

The Republican anxiety comes in the wake of a landslide defeat in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and double-digit underperformance in two Florida special elections. Both reverberated across the party on Wednesday, as some Republican elected officials and strategists called for Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk to adopt a more cautious approach to governing.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of the most vulnerable GOP senators facing reelection next year, said in an interview that Republicans must be “smart and measured” otherwise they risk a major backlash at the polls. Tillis pointed to the early opposition against then-President Barack Obama, which led to a 2010 wave election where Democrats lost a number of seats in the House, Senate and state legislatures, including the North Carolina House where Tillis was subsequently elected speaker by the new GOP majority.

“What we don’t want to do is overreach,” said Tillis. “We’ve got to be careful not to do the same thing. And I think that these elections are going to be proxies, or almost like weather devices for figuring out what kind of storm we’re going to be up against next year.”

Brian Reisinger, a former GOP strategist and rural policy expert, said Republicans running in battleground races next year must pay attention to Tuesday’s disappointing results and zero in on bread-and-butter issues.

“This is as clear a sign as you’re going to get — ringing like a bell — that they have to talk about addressing economic frustration and they have to show they have a plan for it,” he said. “There’s a lot of support in these communities for getting tough on trade, for cutting government spending, but if tariffs spin out of control, and there’s no results on trade deals, then rural communities are really going to be hit by that.”

Inside the White House, however, officials have been shaking off the margins of the Tuesday night election. In the view of Trump’s team, the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race was never close, Republican Rep.-elect Randy Fine was a weak candidate who won against a strong Democrat in Josh Weil, and the other Florida seat previously held by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was never in jeopardy, according to two people close to the White House who were granted anonymity to share private conversations.

“President Trump is the only Republican in nearly 40 years to destroy the Democrats’ blue wall and it’s embarrassing to see them spike the football after their massive defeat in November,” said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields.

It’s a conclusion some outside Trump allies are reaching, too.

“I’m not freaked out about it. Republicans were somewhat panicked that they’d lose a House seat, and they didn’t,” said Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union. “A win is a win in a special election, especially when all this crazy outside money is spent.”

And the White House remains unafraid to wade into even more politically sensitive waters, with Trump announcing a new set of sweeping levies on U.S. global trading partners on Wednesday afternoon.

While many of the president’s allies are sympathetic to his argument that the tariffs will encourage companies to invest in domestic manufacturing and production, they fear that imposing new trade barriers will cause short-term economic harm, drive up prices, potentially throw the U.S. into a recession, and jeopardize Republicans’ chances of hanging onto control of Congress in the midterms.

Just four in 10 voters view Trump’s handling the economy and trade favorably, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in late March.

“The thing that’s probably holding Trump back from having a 50 to 55 percent job approval rating is still this overwhelming fatigue about rising costs,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard. “Most voters, Republicans included, at the end of the day, aren’t exactly sure about what the positive impact for them is when it comes to tariffs.”

Democrats need to flip only a few seats to win the majority in the House. Their overperformance in Florida — and the Democratic apparatus’ success running an anti-Musk campaign in Wisconsin — left Democratic operatives increasingly bullish about using Musk as a midterm-messaging bogeyman.

“As long as he’s there using a chainsaw to all the programs that people back home rely on and need to make ends meet, of course we’re going to make him a central character,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), a member of House leadership, said in an interview.

Democratic leadership sees an opportunity to hone in on Musk as part of a winning message.

“The Republicans are going to try to distance themselves from Elon Musk. It’s not going to work. It’s too late. You’re attached at the hip, and you’re going to feel the consequences of it, just like you did in Wisconsin last night,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.

But some Republican House members said they were not shocked by the Tuesday results. And there was little consensus within the party on whether Musk was uniquely to blame. Trump has even told his inner circle that the tech billionaire’s role will be stepping back soon.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) said Tuesday’s outcomes “were not surprising.” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), who represents a top battleground district, said Musk is a “shiny object” and that Republicans failed to turn out Trump voters in an off-election year.

“I think the results are fairly indicative of what we normally see in special elections when it comes to the party of a newly elected president,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), another swing-seat Republican. “I expected to see an uptick in Dem turnout and some inattention by the GOP” after a November victory.

In a sign of how much some GOP lawmakers would prefer to change the subject, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said he was watching the Yankees instead of the results roll in.

But many in the party are still concerned. Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, saw Wisconsin results as more of a referendum on Musk, who made himself a central character in the race, than on Trump himself.

“Elon Musk is hurting Donald Trump, there’s no question about that,” Ayres said, noting a survey his firm released last week showing more public support for federal workers than the Tesla and SpaceX CEO who’s been tasked with slashing the federal government.

Republicans, Ayres said, should “take his money and tell him to go to Mars.”

With reporting from Ally Mutnick, Lisa Kashinsky and Nicholas Wu.

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Elon Musk will visit Wisconsin on Sunday ahead of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election.

Musk initially announced the plan in a post shortly after midnight on Friday, promising a $1 million giveaway to two attendees who had voted. That post was deleted after legal experts raised concerns it would violate state law. Musk clarified on Friday afternoon that the giveaways would be limited to people who signed his super PAC’s petition.

The visit marks an escalation of Musk’s campaigning in Wisconsin, where the Republican-backed Brad Schimel faces Democratic-backed Susan Crawford in an election that will determine control of the state’s highest court. Musk’s political organization, America PAC, has spent more than $12 million on the race, according to campaign finance disclosures, and he personally gave $3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party.

In a Friday afternoon post, Musk said the event would be held Sunday night and would be reserved for those who had signed a petition circulated by America PAC. He will hand out two $1 million checks at the event, he said.

He had previously posted, and then deleted, about the event and the checks, but the earlier post said the event would be “limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election.”

Legal experts immediately raised concerns that offering the Sunday giveaway for only those who have already voted could violate Wisconsin’s election bribery law, which makes it a crime to offer “anything of value” to “induce” potential voters to vote or not vote in an election. Early voting is underway in Wisconsin and runs through Sunday.

“I’m actually surprised that Musk is being so explicit about tying eligibility for this million dollar payout to having voted in the election,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of the watchdog organization Documented, about Musk’s earlier post. “His tweet makes it very clear that you can only enter this event, and you can only be eligible for the million dollar payout, if you voted, and it’s hard to read that as anything other than providing a thing of value to induce a person to vote, or to reward them for having voted.”

The giveaway tactic is not new for Musk. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, America PAC made signees of a petition supporting the First Amendment eligible for a $1 million giveaway. The plan faced legal challenges but judges ruled in Musk’s favor.

The group has replicated a similar strategy in Wisconsin, promising voters $100 to sign a petition “In Opposition To Activist Judges,” and it announced on Wednesday it had cut a $1 million check for a Green Bay resident who signed on.

“Elon, thank you,” recipient Scott Ainsworth said in a video posted by America PAC, where he urged MAGA voters to go to the polls and support Schimel.

Musk is quickly becoming an enormous player in Republican politics. He launched America PAC in the spring of 2024, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into the group, primarily to finance canvassing operations supporting President Donald Trump’s election campaign. He promised the group would stay active in the coming years, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court race becoming its first major investment since Trump’s victory.

The Wisconsin election is already the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, surpassing the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where the Democratic-aligned candidate ultimately prevailed. Liberals currently hold the majority on the state’s highest court, which has say over everything from abortion rights to the state’s legislative maps.

Democrats have spent big in Wisconsin’s race, too. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel family gave $1.5 million to back Crawford, and longtime megadonor George Soros pitched in $2 million.

But no single figure has invested as much as Musk. Democrats in Wisconsin have sought to turn the race into a referendum on him and his outsized political influence. A plane flying over Milwaukee on Thursday carried a banner reading “Go Home Elon. Vote Susan.”

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has an assessment of her one-time presidential rival’s administration’s handling of sensitive information: “It’s just dumb.”

Clinton — who faced off against President Donald Trump for the presidency in 2016 — lambasted the Signal group chat that revealed plans for the recent strike in Yemen as dangerous and “dumb.”

“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws,” she wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”

Trump focused on Clinton’s handling of sensitive information in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign — the infamous emails that she sent from a private server while working in the State Department. He threatened investigations and prosecution throughout his first term, and many of the officials involved in the Signal thread had sharply criticized Clinton in the past. The Trump administration has blasted Clinton’s emails more aggressively in the wake of Signalgate, arguing that they were a bigger breach.

Clinton’s critique of Trump’s second term went beyond just the Signalgate scandal, laying into the administration over the mass firing of federal workers, the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the retreat from global diplomacy, arguing it was weakening the country on the world stage.

“The Trump approach is dumb power,” she wrote. “Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.”

Though they faced off years ago, Trump has moved in the last few months to get retribution against his perceived enemies, stripping security clearances and targeting Clinton’s former lawyer as part of his crackdown on Big Law.

But Clinton’s take on Friday homed in on the looming threat of China filling in where U.S. diplomats have retreated, arguing that “forward-deployed diplomacy” is essential to America’s global standing.

“If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us,” Clinton wrote.

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Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

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