Armwood Editorial And opinion blog

How a war fought to save the union became a war to end slavery

2026-11-01T00:28:28.440-04:00

Obamacare Dealt Yet Another Blow as Premiums Jump Again

2026-10-31T08:03:15.282-04:00

Obamacare Dealt Yet Another Blow as Premiums Jump Again

Summary

“Obamacare premiums will rise an average 13 percent in 2027, per KFF analysis. The Trump administration cited fraud in canceling coverage for 750,000 people and issued $500 checks. Enrollment fell nearly five million; some may go uninsured.

Premiums will increase an average 13 percent next year for millions of Americans, on top of an earlier steep increase. It adds to the problems facing the program, which the Trump administration has weakened.

Oct. 30, 2026

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Millions of Americans who depend on Obamacare for their health insurance face another double-digit price increase next year, adding to the financial toll that has already driven millions of others to drop coverage since last year.

The price increases largely reflect higher medical costs across the country. But they also are a signal of the latest blow to Obamacare under the Trump administration, which has overseen the expiration of tax credits that helped Americans pay for coverage and has erected new barriers to enrollment in an effort to root out what it describes as widespread fraud.

The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.

The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.

The large premium increases for Obamacare plans are similar to changes expected in other health insurance markets, though slightly higher. Reports by several consulting firms projected that premiums for employer plans, which cover around 150 million people, could go up by about 10 percent in 2027. Premiums for federal workers are increasing by more than 10 percent.

Public opinion polls have shown that the cost of health care has been among voters’ top economic concerns going into the midterm elections on Tuesday. In a recent poll from KFF, about 60 percent of registered voters said they were worried about being able to afford health care for themselves and their families.

Kate and Mark Dwyer, a couple in rural Oregon, have been wrestling with whether their budget can handle another annual increase. They had already shifted to the cheapest available Obamacare plan, leaving them on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.

Next year, the least expensive plan will increase their costs by more than $500 a month, to nearly $3,000, Ms. Dwyer said. That amounts to more than a third of her earnings at a nonprofit.

“We are looking at going without next year,” Ms. Dwyer said. “There is no middle ground. It’s either $3,000 or nothing.”

In an apparent nod to such concerns, the Trump administration sent many Obamacare customers $500 checks this month to offset their insurance premiums — a one-time payment just before the election.

Across the private and public health sectors, the increases have been driven by rising hospital prices, high payments under a consumer protection law that changed how some doctors are compensated, and the growing use of artificial intelligence in doctors’ offices, according to benefits consultants and industry analysts. Several large employers also pointed to a rising bill for expensive specialty prescriptions, like cancer drugs and GLP-1 medicines.

The Trump administration released the numbers quietly on Friday afternoon as a data file. A government fact sheet about open enrollment published shortly afterward did not mention the premium increase, but noted that three-quarters of Obamacare customers with subsidies can still find plans for less than $50 a month.

Open enrollment and shopping for plans begins Sunday, just two days before the midterm elections, in which affordability and the higher prices for groceries, gasoline and health care have been a central issue.

Kate Dwyer with her husband, Mark. She said they might drop their coverage next year, because it will cost $3,000 a month.Mason Trinca for The New York Times

Although the federal government reported that 19.2 million people were enrolled in Obamacare coverage early this year, more recent estimates indicate a lower total.

Roughly 10 percent are older consumers who earned more than $63,840, a group largely composed of self-employed workers, such as chiropractors, dentists, ranchers and farmers, as well as many early retirees. Many already faced premium increases exceeding $1,000 a month in 2026.

“This is a really small number of people,” said Cynthia Cox, the director of KFF’s program on the Affordable Care Act. “But these people are getting hit the hardest by rising health care costs, and they don’t get any help.”

The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.

Obamacare customers who earn less than $64,000 a year make up most of the people enrolled in the program and will still benefit from income-based subsidies and will not have to pay higher out-of-pocket premium costs next year. For those people, taxpayer dollars will cover the extra cost.

But many with strained household budgets are struggling to pay their portion since their Obamacare premiums went up in 2026, and many have been forced to switch to plans with higher deductibles.

In 2026, premiums rose by an average of 26 percent, with the cost for all consumers more than doubling on average for the same plan, after the Republican-led Congress decided to let temporary federal subsidies expire.

Recent estimates from KFF, based on insurance filings with regulators, suggest that enrollment fell by nearly five million people, as of June.

A recent large survey released by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation and research group that supports the Affordable Care Act, found the uninsured rate among working-age adults had risen since two years ago.

Democrats forced a record 43-day government shutdown last year, as they tried to leverage government funding on an extension of the subsidies or health care tax credits. Aides to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, have said he will schedule a vote to restore the extra subsidies in the first days of the next Congress if Democrats win a majority in the midterm elections.

The data on premium costs were published on Friday just before the start of next year’s enrollment period, which runs from Nov. 1 to Jan. 15. People in most states who want to buy Obamacare insurance for next year need to sign up during that period. (A handful of states keep the enrollment period open longer.)

Increases for consumers who renew their current plans could be higher than the average increase.

“We really do encourage people to shop and compare” among the plans they are offered, said Anthony Wright, the executive director for Families USA, a left-leaning consumer advocacy group. The average price increase can mask tremendous variation in the cost of a policy, he said.

To lower the cost of coverage, many people switched from more comprehensive plans to so-called bronze coverage this year, which often offers lower premiums and much higher deductibles. The average A.C.A. deductible rose to a record high of nearly $4,000 in 2026. As they consider plans for next year, those people may no longer be able to avoid a price increase by switching to a skimpier plan.

Caroline Pearson, the executive director at the Peterson Center on Healthcare, a group focused on lowering health care spending, said she had been watching the market closely for signs of instability, given last year’s big price shock. But she described the newly published increase as “consistent with the rate increases we are expecting” for employers and their workers.

But few people covered by an employer health plan are exposed to the full cost of insurance like unsubsidized Obamacare consumers. Employers pick up more than half of the tab for the typical person in work-based coverage, and such insurance premiums are deductible from people’s taxes.

Administration officials attribute some of that drop-off to its efforts to reduce fraudulent enrollment, arguing that brokers had enrolled fake consumers in subsidized coverage.

In September, Vice President JD Vance announced the government had canceled coverage that he said brokers arranged for about 750,000 people whose records lacked Social Security numbers and who had not used or contacted their health insurer through August. He and other administration officials argued there was evidence of additional fraud.

But the Commonwealth survey suggests that some people who have dropped Obamacare coverage may now be going without any health insurance.

Reed Abelson covers the business of health care, focusing on how financial incentives are affecting the delivery of care, from the costs to consumers to the profits to providers.

Margot Sanger-Katz is a reporter covering health care policy and public health for the Upshot“

Led by Trump, Republicans Close Midterms With Ugly Personal Attacks

2026-10-31T07:57:14.377-04:00

Led by Trump, Republicans Close Midterms With Ugly Personal Attacks

Summary

“Republicans, following Trump’s lead, use baseless personal attacks against Democratic candidates in the midterms. Examples include Roger Marshall’s claims against Adam Hamilton, JD Vance and Trump targeting James Talarico, and Islamophobic rhetoric against Abdul El-Sayed. Critics like Jeff Flake and Susan Collins warn of degradation; some Republicans remain silent.

Facing backlash over inflation and anger with the president, Republicans have turned to an onslaught of baseless claims about Democratic candidates.

Oct. 31, 2026, 5:05 a.m. ET

President Trump has repeatedly redrawn the bounds of acceptable discourse in American politics. Many Republicans are following his lead.Alex Kent/The New York Times

In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a vulnerable Republican, baselessly said his Democratic opponent “probably is grooming” children.

In Texas, Republicans have cast James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee, as a “freak” and insinuated he is gay, secretly a vegan, and obsessed with transgender children because he made statements supporting them in the past.

And in Michigan, Republicans have targeted the Democratic Senate nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, with Islamophobic attacks. Mr. Trump has described Dr. El-Sayed as a “vicious, violent jihadist.”

Facing a backlash over rising prices and working to overcome the president’s deep unpopularity, Republicans across the country have tarred their opponents with false, inflammatory and deeply personal attacks in the final stretch of the midterm election.

In many cases, they are following the lead of a president who has repeatedly rewritten the rules of acceptable discourse in American politics. Many of the attacks have drawn little pushback from within the party, but some Republicans say they are concerned by the trend.

“It’s awful,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and critic of Mr. Trump. Mr. Flake, who is backing candidates in both parties in the midterms, said Republicans had gone down a darker road in their messaging: “We’ve gotten progressively more crass and crude and vulgar. But this seems to be a new level.”

The strategy risks turning off some moderate voters who see the rhetoric as over-the-top or offensive, political observers said. But it could be effective at energizing the Republican base. Democrats, who have widely condemned the Republicans’ attacks, worry the lines will land with some voters.

Democrats themselves have at times used strikingly personal attacks, often accusing Republicans of corruption. And some Democrats have imitated the president’s crude approach: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, for example, made social-media posts this year suggesting that various conservatives were gay.

But in the midterms the Republican attacks stand out for their viciousness.

American political campaigns have long been awash in negative and dubious attacks by both parties — in debate lines, TV commercials and stump speeches — but this bitter, hard-fought cycle may set a new standard. Some political scientists said this election season had devolved into the most negative, dark campaign in modern American history.

“I think it’s the worst,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University. She attributed the tone to candidates’ desire to package their message for social media, and to Republicans’ mirroring of Mr. Trump: “He’s opened a portal to the degradation of our electoral system.”

In Texas, Vice President JD Vance suggested at a rally that Mr. Talarico was gay, drawing gasps from the crowd. “A guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history,” Mr. Vance added, referring to Mr. Talarico’s past statements in support of transgender youth.

Mr. Talarico has a girlfriend. The attack was part of a broad effort by Republicans to portray Mr. Talarico as extreme. Mr. Trump has taken to referring to Mr. Talarico as “Talafreako.”

Vice President JD Vance at a campaign rally in Tyler, Texas.Pool photo by Saul Loeb

A spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee suggested that Democrats had brought the attacks upon themselves. In a statement, the spokeswoman, Bernadette Breslin, claimed that Dr. El-Sayed had “pledged support” for a terrorist regime and said that “if Talarico didn’t want to be called anti-meat, he shouldn’t have announced his campaign would go vegan.”

Dr. El-Sayed has said he is loyal to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Talarico has said he is not a vegan and that his campaign “basically” runs on barbecue.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Flake said the coarseness of some Republican attacks stemmed from a mix of desperation in the party and a mimicking of Mr. Trump. But he said he found a “silver lining” in the backlash some of Mr. Trump’s “imitators” had experienced — including in Republican criticism of a headline-grabbing attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race.

That ad came from the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor. The commercial featured the mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, who says she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, after her stepfather was charged with raping her. The sitting governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, a Republican, called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling,” even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance defended it.

Former President Barack Obama, appearing at a rally in Ohio this month, said he was baffled that “the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that.”

Some Republicans have criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, for his ad that featured the estranged mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

In Maine, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who built a brand on civility, denounced a radio ad from the top super PAC for Senate Republicans that cast her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, as a “freak” for having two children with his second cousin. Ms. Collins called for the ad to be taken down.

But Ms. Collins, who has deplored Mr. Jackson’s efforts to cast her as corrupt, herself commented on Mr. Jackson’s family in the summer, telling Politico: “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”

Other Republican attacks have gone largely unchallenged inside the party. After Mr. Marshall suggested his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, was a “groomer” of children, there was no significant Republican criticism. And there was no Republican uproar after Mr. Trump used an anti-trans slur to refer to the Democratic Senate nominee in South Carolina, Dr. Annie Andrews, calling her “Tranny Annie.” (Dr. Andrews is not transgender.)

In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a vulnerable Republican, has baselessly said his Democratic opponent “probably is grooming” children.Eric Lee for The New York Times

A spokesman for Mr. Hamilton, Tyson Brody, said in a statement that Mr. Marshall was “resorting to increasingly unhinged and inexplicable smears.” Dr. Andrews released an ad this month in which she said she did not support transgender women playing in women’s sports or gender transition surgeries for minors. (In 2022 she had spoken out against a trans sports ban in South Carolina.)

On the campaign trail in Michigan, Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for Senate, has often brought supporters who have questioned Dr. El-Sayed’s loyalty to America.

At a Rogers rally in Plainwell, Mich., on Thursday, Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, told the crowd, “You better be afraid,” suggesting that supporting Dr. El-Sayed would be a step toward Shariah law in Michigan. “We have a radical Islamist on the other side of this ticket who hates this country.”

Asked later about Mr. Sheehy’s comments, Mr. Rogers told reporters, “You haven’t heard me say any of those things.”

Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, in Washington. This week, he told a crowd in Michigan, “You better be afraid,” suggesting that supporting Dr. Abdul El-Sayed would be a step toward Shariah law.Al Drago/Reuters

Dr. El-Sayed said at a rally on Sunday that Mr. Rogers’s “whole campaign is to point at me and my name and my faith.”

“But my name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your gas,” Dr. El-Sayed said. “My name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”

Islamophobic attacks have long been a feature of American politics. But in the past, candidates in both parties sought to push back. In 2008, the Republican nominee for president, Senator John McCain, defended his opponent, Barack Obama, when a woman at a rally said she did not trust him because “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain replied, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.”

This year, Democrats say they fear that Islamophobic attacks on Dr. El-Sayed have resonated with some voters and are hurting his chances in a race that is critical in the battle for Senate control.

“I won’t say it’s the worst and most horrific ever,” Mike McGuinness, the Democratic mayor of Pontiac, Mich., said of the Republican attacks on Dr. El-Sayed’s faith and background. “But it is definitely a Hall of Fame contender.”

The Rev. Horace Sheffield III of New Destiny Christian Fellowship in Detroit said the rhetoric in the campaign felt to him as if it came from long ago in American history.

“This tenor and tone that we find ourselves in now is very dangerous,” said Mr. Sheffield, who supports Dr. El-Sayed and whose daughter is Mayor Mary Sheffield of Detroit. “And it’s all based on prejudice.”

Cayce Myers, a professor of political communication at Virginia Tech who studies negative ads, said the race in Michigan was a “test case” for how inflammatory a message could be and still help, rather than hurt, a candidate in 2026.

Negative ads typically are the most motivating, he said, and Republicans in Michigan and elsewhere appeared to be betting that their approach would help activate base voters more than it would alienate voters in the middle.

But, Professor Myers added, Republicans are “pushing up against the limit of what voters and the electorate have an appetite for.”

How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine

2026-10-31T07:52:56.435-04:00

How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine

Summary

“Trump’s agenda—including DOGE cuts, university pressure, and political control by Russell T. Vought—has strained federal science. Staff losses at the Pentagon, Energy Department, NSF, and NIH, plus grant delays, threaten U.S. dominance as rivals like China gain ground.

The system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United States a superpower is now under intense strain.

Oct. 31, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

Videos by Salwan Georges for The New York Times

The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.

The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.

The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened for their loyalty to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to “potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”

The turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.

Under Mr. Trump, the federal government is still spending roughly as much on research — about $200 billion this year — as the administrations that came before. Scientists across the country are still receiving grants; universities are still being funded. But beneath the surface, the system of federally funded science that helped make the United States a global superpower is under intense strain from Trump policies, jeopardizing the nation’s advantages in defense, medicine and technology, a New York Times examination has found.

The White House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and analysts and a review of documents and budgets.

The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.

One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.

A second is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands for ideologically driven policy shifts.

The third is a campaign by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further infusing politics into decisions around scientific research.

Michael Kratsios, Elon Musk and Russell T. Vought have played key roles in shaping the Trump administration's approach to science.New York Times photographs by Eric Lee, Haiyun Jiang and Kenny Holston

If not for the courts curbing the administration’s campaign against universities and lawmakers in both parties rejecting cuts to research funding, the impact on science would have been far deeper. Still, the effects of the broader agenda have rippled through nearly every facet of the nation’s research machine.

Aspiring scientists have seen their career paths thwarted, with fewer available spots for Ph.D. students. The number of Ph.D. applications from foreign students, typically a significant share of U.S. science programs, shrank by 21 percent this year at leading universities, according to data gathered for the Association of American Universities. Total Ph.D. admissions at those schools have dropped as universities try to make do with less resources.

Even the agencies working on topics that Mr. Trump and his aides have called priorities — including national defense, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear energy — have been depleted.

Taken together, the changes underscore how Mr. Trump’s policies have disrupted scientific research beyond the areas the administration has targeted more directly, such as vaccines and climate science, endangering U.S. power and pre-eminence.

By many measures, China is closing the gap with the United States as the world’s research leader. Some organizations that rank global universities show China’s best schools increasingly displacing American universities at the top. And the impact of Chinese research papers, as measured by citations from other scientists, has caught up with the United States, according to Clarivate, a data and analytics company.

By the time the full consequences of the administration’s actions become apparent, experts warn, it could be too late to fix. That’s because basic research funded by federal grants often takes decades to mature into the technology, medical treatments and consumer products that change American life.

Federally funded work on atomic clocks starting in the late 1940s, for example, paved the way for GPS technology. In 1976, federally funded research yielded a major discovery about the origins of cancer-causing genes, which led to a Nobel Prize and, two decades later, lifesaving cancer drugs. Some of the early precursors to artificial intelligence date to U.S.-backed research in the 1980s, which used an algorithm to teach neural networks to learn from mistakes.

Harold Lyons, right, explaining the operation of the atomic clock at its unveiling to Edward Condon, left, director of the National Bureau of Standards, and Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer in January 1949.Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

“Science is the long game,” said Marcia McNutt, who was president of the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body, until this summer. “By the time we no longer win any Nobel Prizes, we will have lost the capacity to ever recover.”

In response to The Times’ reporting, officials from the White House, Pentagon and other science agencies disputed that administration policies were hampering science. Rather, said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston, the administration is reinvigorating American science by transforming organizations in need of change.

“President Trump is ushering in a new golden age of American science by modernizing our research institutions, refocusing on ambitious national missions, and fully leveraging super intelligence for scientific discovery,” Ms. Huston said in a statement, using Mr. Trump’s preferred term for artificial intelligence. “Revitalizing our national scientific enterprise requires supporting the best American scientists and funding the best research based on merit.”

The White House said the administration has expanded a number of programs that support young researchers, and noted that the decision to reduce Ph.D. admissions this year was made by the universities themselves. The Association of American Universities said schools’ decisions to reduce admissions were largely the result of “federal research funding uncertainties.”

The White House also said that most of the scientists who have stopped working for the federal government since Mr. Trump came back to office were not fired, but instead left voluntarily. And it noted that the methodologies for ranking universities, such as comparisons between the United States and China, are limited.

The rest of the world now sees an opportunity.

Australia, for example, announced its “global talent attraction program,” calling it “an urgent and unparalleled opportunity to attract the smartest minds leaving the United States.” Canada dedicated more than $1 billion to bring in 1,000 international researchers, drawing American leaders in fields such as biochemistry and neuroscience.

Even China, a country not known for academic freedoms, has been luring researchers away. A winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry left the University of California, Berkeley, to lead an institute in Beijing using artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials — two fields the Trump administration has said it wants to dominate.

A Postwar System Shaken to Its Core

The roots of the United States’ science empire can be traced to a landmark 1945 report issued during the Truman administration, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” It described a vision, inspired in part by the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb, for how science would power U.S. dominance in the world.

The federal government went on to establish a network of science agencies with distinct missions. The National Science Foundation supports theoretical or experimental work, which often lays the groundwork for future technologies years or even decades later. The Department of Energy was established to pursue advances related to power generation, as well as managing the nation’s nuclear arsenal. NASA, created in response to Soviet advances in space, put a man on the moon. The National Institutes of Health, which traces its roots to 1887, funds biomedical advances.

The federal government also provides tens of billions of dollars each year to the nation’s research universities while funding national labs, private industry and other institutions — a system built up over 80 years by presidents and lawmakers from both parties.

For decades, the United States has funded research at top universities

American universities spent $65 billion in federal money in 2024, accounting for more than half of their total research and development spending.

Stimulus bill increases

funding for basic research

Federal research

and development

funding

End of

Cold War

Executive order

sends funds to

more universities

Internal

funding

End of

Korean

War

All other

funding

Note: Fiscal year numbers, adjusted for inflation. Numbers after 2009 include research and development funding for non-scientific fields, which represents a small amount of the total.Source: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Arfa Momin/The New York Times

In less than two years, Mr. Trump has shaken that system to the core.

The upheaval began early in the administration.

DOGE engineered staff firings, and encouraged others to resign across the federal bureaucracy. Within a year, N.I.H. staffing had shrunk by one-fifth. The N.S.F.’s ranks were reduced by a third. Even NASA, which shrank less than other science agencies, lost 20 percent of its employees with Ph.D.s. Those who left included its chief scientist, a climate science expert whose job the administration eliminated.

NASA said it will keep recruiting staff as needed. In a statement, Nicky Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the agency is working to get “more science into space for lower cost.”

DOGE and the White House directed agencies to search for terms in grant descriptions that might reveal science the administration viewed as liberal, including anything that appeared to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

The cuts cascaded through the country.

Ann D. Cohen, a neuroscientist who co-directs an Alzheimer’s research center at the University of Pittsburgh, had been working on a five-year study looking at how people’s exposure to stress and health problems earlier in life can affect their odds of developing the disease.

The research was critical to developing better treatments and health interventions, Dr. Cohen said. “If the triggering event is poor cardiovascular health in midlife, we can actually deploy public health strategies to improve those things, and potentially have an effect on Alzheimer’s,” she said.

Recruiting people from different backgrounds was difficult, because people who volunteer for scientific studies tend to have higher than average incomes and education levels. So Dr. Cohen and her colleagues recruited from rural Western Pennsylvania, whose residents were more likely to be white and low-income, as well as from Black communities in Pittsburgh.

This past August, the N.I.H. terminated the grant, effective immediately, on the grounds that the project was focused on structural racism — an argument that fundamentally misunderstood the work, Dr. Cohen said.

Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the N.I.H., did not comment on specific grants. In a statement, she said N.I.H.’s commitment to Alzheimer’s research has not decreased.

“N.I.H. is focused on funding innovative projects led by a new generation of health researchers, and on allocating funds for research that will lead to better health for the American people,” Ms. Hilliard said.

Some researchers who lost funding acknowledged having framed their projects in the language of D.E.I. But, they argued, that was what the Biden administration had emphasized.

Jessica L. Rosenberg, director of education for the Quantum Science and Engineering Center at George Mason University, had received N.S.F. funding to research ways to encourage more American students to seek careers in quantum technology, an emerging field that has led to innovation by vastly expanding computing power.

The N.S.F. canceled the grant last year, about four months after the project started. Dr. Rosenberg said she suspects the grant was targeted because her application mentioned students from diverse backgrounds.

“That was what we were supposed to be doing at the time,” she said in an interview.

Trump administration officials argue that the push to incorporate D.E.I. degraded science, and that scientists who embraced the approach had themselves to blame for losing support.

“We cannot afford for America’s scientists to be in the business of scoring points for an ideological agenda,” Michael Kratsios, Mr. Trump’s science adviser, told a meeting of scientists last year.

A Dilemma for Universities

Harvard sued the administration after its federal funding was frozen.Sophie Park for The New York Times

Mr. Trump and his aides returned to the White House wanting to punish elite schools like Columbia and Harvard, ostensibly for transgressions like tolerating antisemitism.

But when cuts to research funding became the White House’s weapon of choice, professors and administrators had to decide whether to fight or acquiesce.

Harvard sued. Other schools negotiated. And even at universities that were not explicitly targeted, researchers made changes in hopes of keeping federal money that was foundational to their work — softening the language in their proposals, narrowing their projects and debating the line between fair-game government oversight and improper political interference.

The cuts fell across disciplines. Projects on epilepsy, Lou Gehrig’s disease, tuberculosis and even astronomy outreach and education sputtered. Work on cancer and heart rhythms was imperiled.

The administration ultimately restored billions of dollars in funding, either because of court orders or settlements with universities. But researchers said the interruptions and changing priorities delayed or derailed experiments.

“You can’t run a research operation when you have to constantly pivot,” said Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, vice chancellor for research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which was swept up in the administration’s funding cuts and participated in more than a dozen legal challenges.

“The current state of affairs is that it’s really very hard to plan long term,” she added, “and research is a long-term kind of enterprise.”

May Mailman, a former White House aide who helped lead the pressure campaign against universities, said the administration wasn’t overly concerned about the effects on research. Funds taken away from one university could eventually make their way to other schools whose behavior and ideology the White House approved of, she said. In the meantime, Ms. Mailman said, the administration tried to minimize the disruption to fields of research it supported, including artificial intelligence and some types of energy.

But much of the work coming out of universities, she said, may not have merited the taxpayer money going into it.

“There’s a feeling that there is more spent on research than comes out of it — that the system is a little bit broken,” Ms. Mailman said.

The Hunt for Woke

The administration also sought deep funding cuts to federal science agencies. Last year, when Mr. Vought presented the administration’s annual budget request to Congress, he called for reducing research funds at the National Institutes of Health by 41 percent; cutting the National Science Foundation by 55 percent; and reducing NASA’s budget for science by almost half. No previous administration, from either party, had sought such deep cuts.

Congress rejected those cuts. But Mr. Vought began finding novel ways to slow grants and redirect funds.

One of the offices that Mr. Vought targeted in his budget request was the N.S.F.’s “woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences” — an apparent reference to an N.S.F. division that funded social science. Not long after, the division began reducing its grants.

An N.S.F. spokesman, Michael England, said in a statement that the agency’s funding decisions “reflect a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.”

The loss of those funds affected researchers like Priti Shah, chair of the University of Michigan’s psychology department. Dr. Shah had applied for a grant to study how people evaluate and make decisions based on scientific information. In the summer of 2025, the N.S.F. told her that her application had been put on hold because of funding issues. It was later rejected entirely.

“It is so important to understand what people assume and what errors they make when they’re thinking about science,” Dr. Shah said. “People are very poor at reasoning about scientific evidence.”

An Innovation Engine ‘at Risk of Stalling’

The administration’s actions also hurt agencies central to its political agenda.

The Defense Department’s assessment of science and research capabilities published this summer said changes during the first year of the Trump administration had degraded the department’s highly regarded network of research laboratories, due largely to DOGE cuts and obstacles to hiring.

“Without a swift and sustained reversal of these policies,” the report warned, the Defense Department’s “innovation engine is at risk of stalling.”

The labs lost about 14 percent of their staff, the report found. Among those mentioned were the Naval Sea Systems Command, charged with developing ships and weapons; the Air Force Research Laboratory, which helped develop stealth aircraft and laser systems; and the Army’s Aviation & Missile Center.

External research laboratories, which are funded by the Pentagon but staffed by civilian researchers and develop technology for use by the military, were also suffering from the administration’s policies, the report said.

Much of the work at those labs, some of which are attached to major research universities, is classified, and the report did not disclose specific examples of research that has been affected. But it warned that staff departures inside the labs and among agency employees who coordinated with them “jeopardized the execution of critical defense research.” Without key points of contact between the agency and the labs, the report said, efforts that support “time-sensitive, real-world operations are in some cases at a standstill or delayed.”

Because the labs aren’t financially connected to defense contractors, they play an added important role helping the Pentagon objectively evaluate contractors’ claims about new technologies, said Heidi Shyu, who oversaw the Pentagon’s research operation as under secretary of defense for research and engineering in the Biden administration.

A Pentagon official acknowledged that, during the first year of the administration, there was a “retraction in the number of scientists and engineers across the research enterprise.” But, the official said, the agency has “hired to fulfill the mission and mitigate any impacts from the loss of personnel.”

Defense Department funding changes also affected university researchers.

Randall Engle, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was working on ways to help the Navy select air traffic controllers, pilots and other applicants for complex jobs.

The Navy needs to train roughly 1,000 new air traffic controllers each year, Dr. Engle said, at a cost of about $100,000 per trainee. But because the job requires intense focus in difficult conditions, nearly a quarter of trainees typically fail.

So he received funding to develop diagnostic tests to determine a person’s ability to maintain focus.

Dr. Engle tested his new approach at the Navy’s air base in Pensacola, Fla., and found that it did a better job identifying people likely to succeed as air traffic controllers. He was in the midst of refining those tests, when the Office of Naval Research told Georgia Tech that the grant was canceled.

Dr. Engle said he believes the grant was canceled simply because it was happening at a university.

“There was no wokeness,” Dr. Engle said of his project. “There was no diversity, inclusion.”

A New Agenda

The uncertainty over the future of American science is reflected in the events that have unfolded at the Department of Energy.

The agency is a critical engine for research in the physical sciences, and it houses the Genesis Mission — a marquee Trump administration initiative that officials say will drive discoveries across a range of topics, from quantum computing and particle accelerators to microchips that can operate in outer space. In an executive order, Mr. Trump called it a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery.”

But the Energy Department’s central role on a Trump-driven project came with a glaring contradiction: It was also hammered by DOGE.

The agency has lost about one-quarter of its staff since the start of the administration, according to a Times analysis of federal data. And the amount of grant money awarded by its two major science offices dropped by more than one-quarter during the administration’s first year, before Genesis began — a reduction of more than half a billion dollars.

Darío Gil, the agency’s top science official, rejected the idea that its science mission has suffered, noting that much of the department’s work is done by 17 national laboratories, where most staff are not federal employees and so not affected by DOGE’s staff-reduction programs. He said the agency is hiring.

“Staffing is always a challenge” Dr. Gil said. “We continue to recruit good people.”

He added that the goal of Genesis is to double the productivity of America’s science industry within a decade. The program has selected almost 300 projects to fund at universities, private companies, national labs and other research organizations.

“The outcome we seek,” Dr. Gil said, “is that this transformation impacts the entire American economy.”

In July, just a few weeks after the Pentagon published its warning about defense labs, Mr. Kratsios, the White House science adviser, issued a report of his own.

The document emphasized many of the administration’s goals: Increasing the role of private industry in federal research. Bypassing the traditional peer-review process for deciding who gets research grants, instead giving individual reviewers the chance “to make bold scientific bets” on researchers of their choosing. Redirecting more money toward younger researchers.

Mr. Kratsios barely mentioned a crucial part of the administration’s agenda: a proposed rule issued by the Trump administration this past May, which would require that Mr. Trump’s political appointees approve which researchers get funding — taking power away from nonpartisan science officials who have typically been the deciders.

Under the proposal, researchers seeking funds “should commit to complying with administration policies.” Officials would screen and reject applications for projects that “promote anti-American values.”

The day after Mr. Kratsios released his report, he appeared before the House science committee to discuss it. Some committee members seemed perplexed by his promise to usher in a scientific golden age, given the tumult over the previous year and a half.

“All I see is tarnish and deterioration,” said Representative Gabe Amo, Democrat of Rhode Island. “Do you commit to not leaving our scientific apparatus in shambles?”

“I don’t think, sir, I would be doing my job if I wanted to leave the scientific enterprise in shambles,” Mr. Kratsios responded. “So I will commit to not doing that.”

The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff.Salwan Georges For The New York Times

Reporting was contributed by Mark Arsenault, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Sarah Kliff, Ryan Mac, Katrina Miller, Brad Plumer, Tony Romm and Theodore Schleifer. Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett, Alain Delaquérière, Georgia Gee, Sheelagh McNeill and Kirsten Noyes.

Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter covering how President Trump is transforming the federal government.

Irena Hwang is a data reporter at The Times, using computational tools to uncover hidden stories and illuminate the news.

Adam Sella covers breaking news for The Times in Washington.

Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg is a correspondent based in Washington for The Times, covering Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump’s health agenda.

Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.“

Donald Trump knows Republicans are about to get washed

2026-10-30T15:41:07.508-04:00

Buckingham Palace Pays Moving Tribute to Sir Patrick Stewart 🕊️

2026-10-30T13:41:55.690-04:00

On Cam: Jon Ossoff's Speech Interrupted With This Loud Chant… He Reacts & Says…| Midterms| Georgia

2026-10-30T09:35:20.563-04:00

Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds

2026-10-30T08:11:37.660-04:00

Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds

Summary

“Government corruption ranks second to cost of living in the Harris poll, with 76% of voters believing officials prioritize self-enrichment. Republicans are seen as more corrupt than Democrats, and 32% favor limiting corporate influence.

Harris poll for Guardian finds 76% believe officials care more about self-enrichment than helping everyday Americans

Lauren Aratani

A polling station in Atlanta, where early voting has been taking place. In the poll, corruption was the next top issue for voters after the cost of living. Photograph: Cristóbal Herrera/EPA

Government corruption has emerged as a top issue in the upcoming US midterm elections, with an overwhelming majority of Americans saying US government officials use their public office for personal financial gain, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.

Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.

Three-quarters (76%) of voters said that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people. Voters were more likely to say that government corruption (65%) is more concerning than corporate power (29%). Just under 10% said that neither concerns them.

The rising cost of living is still expected to drive the election, with 36% of voters saying it is the single most important issue to how they plan to vote in the midterms. But in a slate of other issues including immigration, housing costs, abortion, crime and safety and AI, corruption was the next top issue.

The results come after nearly two years of Donald Trump’s second term, where the president has both figuratively and literally reshaped Washington.

The president demolished the historic East Wing of the White House to make way for a $400m ballroom – $335m of which he said is coming from private donors, including companies such as Apple and Nvidia. The federal government is down more than 420,000 workers after Elon Musk was given the power to introduce massive jobs cuts after donating nearly $300m to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are running the family’s lucrative cryptocurrency business that has made Trump $1bnsince returning to the White House. And Trump himself accepted a $400m private jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.

These actions have not gone unnoticed. Voters in the Harris poll were twice as likely to say that Republicans have a bigger corruption problem than Democrats. Forty percent of voters, including 29% of Republicans, said the GOP has a bigger corruption problem. A third (32%) of voters said that both parties have the problem equally, while 21% said that Democrats have the bigger problem.

Independents, whose votes will be key in swing races across the country, were much more likely to say that Republicans have more of a corruption problem, with 34% saying that Republicans have the bigger issue and 13% pointing to Democrats. Most Independents (42%) said that both parties share the problem equally.

The economy as experienced by everyday Americans has been vastly different from the portrait painted by Wall Street. The stock market has been soaring on the back of never-ending AI spending. In early October, both the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq stock indices hit record highs.

The gains have been a boon for a relatively small group of Americans. Americans in the top 1% of wealth own half of the stock market while the bottom 50% own just over 1% of the market.

Armed with more funds than ever, America’s wealthiest people have been driving even more donations into elections. After the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United case removed limits on campaign contributions, each election year has brought in new records of cash. The midterms have already cost $11.2bn in ads, according to NBC News, the most ever for a midterm cycle.

A chunk of these donations are coming from the ultra-rich. Just 40 donors have already contributed $2.5bn to races this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Last week, billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced he was contributing $80m in last-minute funding for Democratic candidates, while Donald Trump said he is personally contributing a total of $400m to Republicans.

For everyday Americans, this flood of cash has changed the motivations of elected officials, who many believe will ultimately prioritize themselves and their donors over their constituents. A majority of voters (78%) in the Harris Poll agreed that “elected officials care more about enriching themselves than helping people like me”.

“Government corruption has shot up to become the second most important issue in the midterms after cost of living. Americans are triggered by leaders they now see as both responsible for and profiting off their growing economic hardship,” said John Gerzema, CEO of Harris Poll.

Regardless of who ends up controlling Congress after the midterms, voters across the political spectrum are expecting solutions to address the ongoing affordability crisis that is impacting their lives.

Out of a slate of policies to address the cost of living, a third (32%) of voters said that there should be limits on the influence of companies and lobbyists on government decisions. The second most popular policy was removing tariffs (29%), followed by limiting how much companies raise prices on goods (24%).

On Tuesday, voters in California will decide on a ballot measure that could place a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires in the state. Tech billionaires have been spending an estimated $1m a day, altogether more than $340m, to fight the measure. Half (50%) of voters in the new poll, including 56% of Independents, said that billionaires do not pay their fair share of taxes. Just 28% of Republicans said the same.

Some in corporate America are catching onto the discontent. Last week, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in an interview that he supports a national wealth tax, a comment that got him backlash from some Republicans.

“We should have a national wealth tax – it won’t work by state because people will just move,” he said. “And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100% at some level. I would pay them.”

U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War

2026-10-30T08:02:28.002-04:00

U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War

Summary

U.S. oil companies earned over $130 billion during the Iran war, nearly triple 2025 profits. Refiners like Valero Energy, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron benefited from higher fuel prices; excess cash is being used for debt reduction or dividends.

That was almost three times as much as what businesses producing and refining oil in the United States made in the same period in 2025.

Oct. 30, 2026, 6:35 a.m. ET

Quarterly Profits for U.S. Oil Companies

Notes: Totals represent the sum of net income for the constituents of the S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Select Industry Index. The total for the third quarter of 2026 combines actual results and estimates. Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence, FactSet (analyst estimates).

The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel.

That is a conservative estimate based on the performance of more than 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies, most of them producers or refiners, in the six months from April through September. It does not reflect profits earned in March, the first month of the war, or in October.

These companies earned less than $47 billion collectively during the same period in 2025, a challenging stretch when oil was cheaper and companies were navigating the early fallout from President Trump’s trade war.

The blockbuster oil profits this year highlight longstanding concerns about who gains, and who pays the price, when wars interrupt the flow of energy. As of this week, Americans had spent an extra $147 billion on gasoline and diesel since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. That amounts to more than $1,100 per household.

Some companies are benefiting more than others. U.S. refiners have fared especially well because fuel-making plants have been badly damaged by hostilities in the Middle East and Russia. With fewer refineries available to meet global demand, profit margins soared for those that remain online.

Refining Company Profits

Valero Energy

$6.83 billion in Q3 2026

Phillips 66

$5.62 billion in Q3 2026

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The wartime boom has extended to American producers, most of which are reaping greater income from higher prices without having to contend with the danger or cost of operating in conflict zones. That said, their profits generally remain below 2022 levels, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused oil and natural gas prices to soar. U.S. oil prices averaged around $90 a barrel from April through September of this year, compared with roughly $100 during the same period in 2022.

Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the biggest U.S. oil companies, reported their highest third-quarter earnings in years on Friday, buoyed by their refining businesses.

“We certainly acknowledge that the higher fuel prices put pressure on families and businesses,” Neil Hansen, Exxon’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “But this is one of those situations and type of business where you can’t invest your way out of these conditions overnight. The decisions that matter today were made years ago.”

Chevron

$9.92 billion in Q3 2026

Exxon Mobil

$15.41 billion in Q3 2026

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence, company reports.

Exxon’s third-quarter profit more than doubled. Chevron’s almost tripled.

“The cash is going on the balance sheet,” said Eimear Bonner, Chevron’s chief financial officer. “That’s an asset that obviously we lean on in hard times and we strengthen in times when we see higher prices.”

Dozens of other U.S. oil companies will report third-quarter results in the coming weeks. The New York Times analysis relied on a combination of financial results and, if those were not yet available, analyst estimates compiled by FactSet, a financial data firm. The review did not extend to pipeline companies or service providers, whose performance has been less directly affected by the global oil shock.

For now, many companies are following a similar playbook, paying down debt and parking their extra cash rather than investing in producing more oil than they originally planned or expanding refining capacity.

“We’re not going to change our approach to capital investments just because we have a lot of cash,” Homer Bhullar, chief financial officer of the refining giant Valero Energy, told Wall Street analysts last week. Valero’s third-quarter profit soared more than sixfold.

“Over time, all the excess cash we’re accumulating will ultimately be directed toward our owners,” Mr. Bhullar said. He did not discuss specifics, but that usually involves increasing dividends or buying back company stock.

Average Monthly U.S. Refining Profit Margins

Note: Figures represent the average monthly gross profit margin, through Oct. 23, that refiners earn from turning oil into gasoline and diesel. Source: Argus Media.

U.S. refiners have performed especially well because a lot of the oil they process is delivered by pipeline, insulating them from sky-high shipping costs. These companies are a vital link between oil producers and consumers because they transform the crude oil that is pumped from the ground into usable fuels like gasoline and diesel. Some companies, such as Exxon and Chevron, produce oil and refine it, but many specialize in just one of those businesses.

Large European companies reported bumper profits, too. Shell earned $12.06 billion in the third quarter, more than doubling its profit from a year earlier, partly because refining was so lucrative. The French oil major TotalEnergies’ third-quarter profit also more than doubled, to $8.26 billion.

United Refining, a privately held fuel maker in western Pennsylvania, plans to use this year’s windfall to pay down debt, said John Catsimatidis, the company’s chief executive and a longtime Trump ally. Or, perhaps, to buy a new corporate plane.

“I am serious,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in an interview. “You know why? I’m 78 years old. If I don’t buy a new airplane now, when am I going to buy it? When I’m dead?”

Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.

Keith Collins is a Times visual reporter and editor in the Graphics department.“

Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died

2026-10-29T16:05:35.196-04:00

Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died

Summary

“Patrick Stewart, 86, died from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia in Los Angeles. A Shakespearean actor, he gained fame as Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” starred in four films and “Star Trek: Picard,” and played Professor X in five “X-Men” movies.

The British actor was 86. He achieved pop-culture stardom as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Oct. 29, 2026Updated 3:57 p.m. ET

Patrick Stewart was Professor X in five “X-Men” movies, Macbeth on Broadway and, recently, the voice of a wise ram in “The Sheep Detectives.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.

With a commanding baritone voice — he had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student — Mr. Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Mr. Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.

Picard was said to have been born in France, but Mr. Stewart played the part with a British accent.CBS Photo Archive

Old and new fans embraced the balding, graying Picard and the members of his 24th-century crew, among them a pale-skinned android with deadpan comic timing; an intense, half-alien mind-reader; a gruff Klingon; and a blind human engineer wearing a vision visor. Over the show’s seven seasons, as it piled up 18 Emmys and a Peabody Award in first-run syndication, Picard became known for his preternatural calm and his trademark directives “Engage!” and “Make it so.” (Mr. Stewart titled a 2023 memoir “Making It So.”)

Mr. Stewart went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs — “Star Trek Generations” (1994), “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996), “Star Trek: Insurrection” (1998) and “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002) — before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 in a TV sequel that he could call his own, “Star Trek: Picard,” which ran for three seasons.

The Enterprise was neither Mr. Stewart’s first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch’s original film version of “Dune” (1984) as the weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he was Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X, in five “X-Men” movies, playing a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers. Those films, some of which also starred Mr. Stewart’s close friend Ian McKellen, included “X-Men” (2000), “X-Men: United” (2003) and “Logan” (2017).

By the time he became a screen star, Mr. Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in both classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors like Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.

In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).

To most American film and television fans, however, he was always Picard, even after the “X-Men” movies. And though in terms of substance the character may have been light years removed from his meatier roles with the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart continued to express pride in his work as that resolute ship captain, dismissing theater-world peers who had looked askance at him when he went to Hollywood.

“They used to ask me ‘Why, why, why?’ as if I was somehow slumming it,” he said in a 2003 interview with the London newspaper The Independent.

“What snobbery!” he said, adding: “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine. I really believe we created an admirable individual.”

A Grim Upbringing

Mr. Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire. (He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.) His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British Army, and his mother, Gladys (Barrowclough) Stewart, was a weaver at a textile factory. Patrick was the youngest of their three sons.

The family scraped by, living in a grim little house with no running hot water. The bathroom was outside, in a brick communal outhouse for the neighborhood, one stall to a family. Patrick used his family’s stall as a reading nook.

Much later in life, he wrote and spoke about the domestic violence that had shattered his childhood. His father was reduced to working as a semiskilled laborer after his military career, and became what Mr. Stewart described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years, sometimes in Patrick’s presence.

As Mr. Stewart recalled in a 2009 article he wrote for The Guardian, “I knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”

The family dynamic was complicated. Despite the abuse, Patrick’s mother remained with her husband until her death in 1977, and throughout his life Patrick regarded his father with a mixture of anger, fear, sadness and regret. Interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2023, after his memoir was published, he told a reporter, tapping the cover of a copy, “I wish my father could have seen this.”

Patrick was 12 when an English teacher, Cecil Dormand, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, handed out scripts for “The Merchant of Venice” and instructed him to read the part of Shylock. Patrick went on to work with local drama groups.

Graduating from secondary school at 15, he took a job as a junior reporter with the local newspaper but quit after a year; his editor had complained that he was spending too much time on his theater avocation. After that, he worked for a year as a furniture salesman to save money for drama school, though a local arts council ended up giving him a full scholarship so that he could enroll in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which accepted him in 1957, when he was 17.

Two years later, he made his professional acting debut, as the marooned pirate Tom Morgan in “Treasure Island,” with the Lincoln Repertory Company in Lincoln, England. In other early appearances, he took the title roles in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (1963), at the Manchester Library Theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” (1965), at the Bristol Old Vic.

As part of the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart played more than a dozen roles, mostly supporting, in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1969. He was the Player King in “Hamlet,” Grumio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” Cornwall in “King Lear” and Hector in “Troilus and Cressida.”

A Working Actor

By the age of 19, Mr. Stewart was already balding, a result of hereditary alopecia. (He wore wigs for many screen and stage roles.) And he was already frequently hearing the prediction familiar to many young character actors: The first 20 years of your career will be difficult; true fame, if it ever comes, may take a while. It was a forecast that was largely borne out.

Mr. Stewart continued to find work, including on British television series like “Coronation Street” and “Story Parade.” By the 1970s, he was winning substantial roles in BBC TV movies and mini-series.

He portrayed Lenin in “Fall of Eagles” (1974); the postwar prime minister Clement Attlee in “The Gathering Storm” (1974); John Thornton, a brainy mill owner, in “North and South” (1975); Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard, in “I, Claudius” (1976, seen in the United States on “Masterpiece Theater” in 1977); and the Soviet spymaster Karla in brief, nonspeaking appearances in two John le Carré adaptations, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982).

Mr. Stewart made his Broadway debut in 1971 in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He was Snout, the tinker who portrays the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe in the comedy’s lowbrow play-within-a-play. It would be 20 years before Mr. Stewart appeared on Broadway again, in a 1991 run of a solo production of “A Christmas Carol” he had developed a few years before. The holiday-season show, which he repeated on Broadway in 1992, 1994 and 2001, received a Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance.

He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.

A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.

Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?

After its run ended, Mr. Stewart continued his stage and television career, now with the power of Hollywood fame behind him. Between 1995 and 2013, he starred in a handful of Broadway productions, two of them Shakespearean: He was Prospero in “The Tempest” in 1995 and, in 2008, the title character in “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.

He also played a self-satisfied bigamist in Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” (2000); a desperate, possibly dangerous homeless man in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” (2003); and a veteran actor who has seen it all in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater” (2010).

Ian McKellen, left, and Mr. Stewart in Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” on Broadway in 2013.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In 2013, Mr. Stewart and Mr. McKellen co-starred in two plays in repertory, an offering that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “absurdly enjoyable.” Mr. Stewart was Vladimir, the cerebral one, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and the wealthy man of letters in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”

On American television, he portrayed a restless 17th-century spirit in “The Canterville Ghost” (1996); Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick” (1998); Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” (1999), this time with a cast of 50 or so; a wealthy rancher pointedly named Lear in “King of Texas” (2002); and Henry II, opposite Glenn Close, in “The Lion in Winter” (2003).

‘Being Silly’

Though his rock-steady Picard only rarely seemed to lighten up, Mr. Stewart was, in fact, no stranger to comedy.

He “got rather good at being silly,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote. He played King Richard in Mel Brooks’s 1993 film spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” parodying Sean Connery with a thick Scottish accent. He appeared in about 120 episodes of the animated series “American Dad!” as Avery Bullock, a C.I.A. deputy director with too many character flaws to count.

When asked to name the most distinguished moments of his career, Mr. Stewart often mentioned — not altogether facetiously — his appearances on “The Simpsons,” in 1995 and 2013, and “Sesame Street” (1996), on which he performed the soliloquy “B or Not a B.”

When he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1994, one of his sketch characters was an erotic-cake baker with a fetish even his customers couldn’t deal with. And the legion of projects for which he served as narrator included “Ted,” Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 movie comedy about a teddy bear with the soul of a frat boy.

After hundreds of screen and stage roles, Mr. Stewart — Sir Patrick since his 2010 knighthood — gave one of his final performances in the “The Sheep Detectives” (2026), in which he was the voice of Sir Richfield, a wise old Boreray Blackface ram in a flock of crime solvers.

Mr. Stewart and Sheila Falconer, a choreographer, married in 1966, had two children, and divorced, almost a quarter-century later, in 1990. His marriage to Wendy Neuss, an American producer, also ended in divorce. The trigger in each divorce, he acknowledged in his memoir, was an affair with a younger woman. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” he wrote, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”

In 2013, he married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior, in a makeshift ceremony in a Mexican restaurant after a performance of “No Man’s Land” in Berkeley, Calif. His co-star Mr. McKellen, donning a cloak for the occasion, officiated, having been licensed by the Universal Life Church.

Mr. Stewart’s survivors include Ms. Ozell; his son, Daniel, who is also an actor; and his daughter, Sophie.

For Mr. Stewart, acting was a compulsion, he said, something he was driven to do. In 2011, a BBC interviewer asked him to describe the experience of being onstage. Mr. Stewart answered, “It feels like being a giant.”

And he saw no reason to quit, even in his later years.

“Acting was the thing that made me happy when I was 13 years old,” he wrote in his memoir, “and that is still the case 70 years later. I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I still have so many characters inside me that I need to let out.”

Lawrence: Trump tried to crush Cassidy Hutchinson. He failed.

2026-10-29T10:46:52.008-04:00

Who gets to be an American?

2026-10-29T10:32:20.134-04:00

The Trump Era Is Fading

2026-10-29T08:53:26.046-04:00

David Wallace-Wells

Summary

“Republicans pull funds from North Carolina and Texas races suggest a fading Trump era. MAGA shifted from Rust Belt resentment to Elon Musk’s influence, while Christian nationalism persists. Historically red states become battlegrounds amid whiplash politics and anti-incumbency.

Oct. 29, 2026

The Trump Era Is Fading

Ibrahim Rayintakath

You’re reading the David Wallace-Wells newsletter. The best-selling science writer and essayist explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it.

Nobody wants to jinx it. The election is still days away. But Republicans are pulling money out of North Carolina, assuming they will lose there, and spending in Mississippi, where they hope to save a Senate seat. A Democrat could win the governorship of Texas. Polling suggests the biggest margin of victory in any congressional election in nearly two decades, and Republicans desperate to save their seats are repudiating each major item on President Trump’s second-term agenda: tariffs, war, and ICE. All the signs we have suggest that, historic or not, these midterms are likely to mark the end of a political era.

So — what was the Trump era and what might it tell us about what comes next? Some of that story is pretty familiar, 10 years on. But here are 12 perhaps more surprising, or counterintuitive, takeaways.

1. MAGA defined the epoch, but the movement — and its leader — was always weak.

It may seem ridiculous to say, given Trump’s domination of the American political landscape for the last decade and the concrete damage his movement has done to American institutions and the country’s faith in them. But over three presidential campaigns, Trump won eight million fewer votes than his Democratic opponents. Add up the days when more Americans approved of him than disapproved of him since he descended the golden escalator, and you get about two weeks.

During the 2016 primaries, Trump’s rise looked like a sign of Republican Party weakness — how had it lost so much institutional strength that this interloper could waltz in and take right over? In retrospect, the weakness looks more general and enduring. A haphazard demagogue who never managed to achieve a majority mandate nevertheless commanding power and attention for so long and to such consequential ends — this is not the sign of a healthy republic.

Perhaps nobody but Trump could’ve mobilized the mass of national discontent the way he did. Even so, he never approached the popularity of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, let alone Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. Which does raise the question: Is this about as good as anyone can manage, now? Are we doomed to weak leaders pretending to be strong? Or will one era of constrained possibility give way to something else?

2. MAGA doesn’t mean what it used to.

In 2016, conventional wisdom held, Trump was carried to victory by a resentful anti-elite coalition — in particular by surprising strength across the deindustrializing Rust Belt in the upper Midwest.

Out of power during the Biden years, MAGA nursed professional-class grievances against various tools of inclusive liberalism — first raging against C.R.T. and later D.E.I. and lamenting the loss of test-based standards in college admissions and the rise of what it saw as anti-white racism in corporate hiring practices.

Once it returned to power in 2025, the movement looked like it had been reshaped once again, this time in Elon Musk’s image — a mix of moralistic social Darwinism, anti-woke retribution and acquisitive tech accelerationism, pay-to-play access for billionaires and a kind of corruption free-for-all in the White House.

Ten years ago, Trump could somewhat plausibly claim to be giving voice to the American voiceless. Now, he is speaking largely for a different constituency, when he isn’t speaking for himself.

3. But the influence of Christian nationalism endured — even grew.

The class portrait for Trump’s second term is conspicuously full of performative macho libertines from the manosphere. But the strongest part of the Trump coalition has always been its committed white evangelical base.

In each of Trump’s three elections, religiosity was the single best predictor of voter preference, even more than it was in the George W. Bush years. As MAGA stares down a possible midterm endgame, it’s notable that Mike Johnson, an evangelical and a social conservative, is the speaker of the House — and that despite looking like such a strange match temperamentally, he is the longest-serving Republican leader of this era. Less than a week out from the election, Trump’s most loyal voters remain evangelical Christians.

4. The traditional Republican heartland is looking pretty purple all of a sudden.

The midterm map now looks like an entirely new political world, one in which Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia are solid blue, in Texas and South Carolina are tossups and in Florida and Mississippi are contested. Add in close governor’s races in Nevada and Arizona and you get a battleground band stretching through the Old South, Deep South and Sun Belt.

Not so long ago this was the spiritual heartland of red America. And in almost all these races Democrats appear to be either winning handily or competing seriously. (As they are in Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, and Alaska, among other places.)

All of these races are obviously shaped by disenchantment with President Trump and don’t necessarily signal lasting partisan shifts — wave elections tend to set a high-water mark for a new majority. But the reality that each of these historically red states is in play tells you something about just how much things have changed — and how much less secure the Republican Party’s legacy claim on the heartland has become. The upper Midwest looks redder than you might expect in a year like this, but head a little ways east and Gov. Josh Shapiro is very likely to win re-election in Pennsylvania by 20 points or more.

Where, then, are the true G.O.P. strongholds?

If Ohio, Kansas, Iowa and Alaska can be pulled into play, as they have been this year, the pretty empty states of the Great Plains and the Mountain West are the obvious answer. But even there it’s not at all clear whether the Republican Pete Ricketts can hold off the liberal-minded independent Dan Osborn. The race for the South Dakota Senate seat isn’t exactly up for grabs, but the Republican margin of victory could easily stay within single digits, too. As John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster, has taken to saying, all of America is a battleground state now — at least in this midterm.

A few years ago, you heard a lot about the possibility of a Democratic crisis given the population exodus from blue states and coastal capitals to red states and start-up cities (thanks not just to weather but also to more affordable housing, a friendlier business and regulatory environment and perhaps some frustration with liberal governance in places like San Francisco and New York).

A few years later, many of red places are still thriving, but they are also growing more Democratic. Whatever the legacy politics of those states, this probably shouldn’t come as such a surprise — in general, when places grow denser and richer they get bluer, too. The gains of this year will likely recede, but the stories about the rightward lurch of the country look much more questionable. We might’ve thought red states were winning a demographic tug of war, but the same forces are tugging leftward, too.

5. We have entered an era of whiplash politics.

After the 2020 election, many liberals believed that some natural-seeming order had been restored and the accident of Trump’s first election had been somewhat expunged. In 2024, it looked briefly like Trump and MAGA had engineered a new generational majority, poised to reduce the Democrats to the kind of rump party they had been through the 1980s. Two years later, it looks increasingly silly to extract lasting ideological meaning from any of these elections.

It also looks increasingly intuitive that we should conceptualize this period — perhaps beginning with Trump or the 2010 election — as being marked by the same serial anti-incumbency backlash visible in so much of the rest of the world. In any given election, one party seems up and the other down, but the consistent pattern is voters’ wanting change almost regardless of who is in power. Maybe most distressing is the self-reinforcing nature of the pattern: When parties are given only slim legislative majorities for a very brief period, it’s extremely hard to persuade voters they’re anything but ineffective embodiments of a broken status quo. Which makes it much easier to imagine a big blue wave next Tuesday than an enduring Democratic majority lasting long enough to pull the country out of political despondency.

6. MAGA is often framed as a reaction to progressive overreach. Maybe it’s the other way around.

It’s almost hard to believe, given how frequently they are characterized as a phenomenon of imperious liberal excess, but the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 took place under Trump, as, in part, a response to his rule. The #MeToo era began, as well, in 2017 — in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape and the Women’s March. These were not the Obama years or the Biden years.

In fact, by the time Joe Biden took office in early 2021, the phenomenon had by many measures already crested and begun its decline. And it is remarkable how little oxygen liberal race politics now takes up in the national discourse.

The climate awakening and protest movement began in Trump’s first term, too, when the United States announced its intention to quit the Paris agreement at a news conference where “Summertime” played in the Rose Garden. Bernie Sanders had made his mark on Democratic politics in 2016, of course, but it was in the Trump years — and particularly the first years of his second term — that the Democratic Socialists of America became a national political force. (Its national star, Zohran Mamdani, first really introduced himself to New Yorkers as a candidate for mayor by interviewing Trump voters on the street and asking what he could do to win their votes.)

Public health grew tribal partly in response to Trump’s supervision of the pandemic. And though it looked for a time as though MAHA would be the lasting political legacy of Covid, it now seems quite possible that liberal former public health officials will be elected in Michigan to the Senate and the governorship of Ohio — and perhaps that measles-stricken South Carolina, too, will elect to the Senate a Democratic pediatrician who began her campaign running against Kennedy and MAHA.

7. Abortion has largely disappeared from the political landscape, but the gender wars remain.

As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, outrage about that year’s Supreme Court decision to end the federal right to abortion was seen as one driving force behind Democrats’ surprisingly good electoral performance. These days, you can find abortion ranking as low as 36th on surveys of national political issues.

But you can see the lasting legacy of the Trump-era gender wars in other ways. The number of Republicans saying women should return to their traditional role in the home nearly doubled in just a few years, and the number of Republicans who say gay sex is morally acceptable has fallen from 56 percent to 35 percent in just three years. The fight over trans rights has taken a more ambiguous turn — hysterical Republicans made it the centerpiece of their closing argument in the last election cycle, but just two years later Americans appear to trust Democrats more on the issue.

There’s been a lot of talk, over the last decade, about the crisis of the American male, but the Trump years just seemed to steer those in crisis toward gambling and crypto. Almost every job created anywhere in the country in Trump’s second term has gone to a woman, and employment is growing only in sectors traditionally coded as female. Which is all to say: These gender issues are probably not going away soon, however poorly Republicans may do with young men on Tuesday.

8. Trump’s two biggest political legacies are problems the country must solve.

One of these is a practical challenge for any future Democratic administration, with Trump responsible for more than a quarter of the national debt. The other is a political challenge: The country disapproves of ICE and mass deportation programs, but it’s not at all clear what immigration policy Americans actually want to see or to what degree they would protest a return to the old liberal consensus.

9. Trump turned China into America’s foil.

In 2016, Trump’s constant invocations of China became such a joke that you could watch supercuts mocking his pronunciation of the word. Obama had tried to shift the country’s foreign policy attention in that direction with his “pivot to Asia,” but the rise of a new geopolitical rival still lived primarily on the outskirts of public discourse. By the time Trump left office in 2021, it was central enough to a new bipartisan consensus that it served as the basis of Biden’s entire policy agenda and has shaped liberal conversations about A.I., abundance and industrial policy since.

10. And he torpedoed America’s reputation around the world.

As the sun sets on MAGA, the actual state of global status competition is a bit ambiguous. China is struggling with economic slowdown and demographic decline, but racing past the United States in green technology, robots and, increasingly, science — and now can claim to be a more popular diplomatic partner, too.

The U.S. economy has proved pretty resilient, though much of the country’s strength comes from financial firms and A.I. companies that increasingly seem to lie outside the realm of the state and operate instead almost as autonomous city-states. And in Iran, Trump has tried to impose his will militarily — only to be humiliated on the world stage in an episode of imperial comeuppance that has doubled as a lesson that the American way of war is now a thing of the past.

11. The Silicon Valley “vibe shift” may have been primarily about A.I.

In explaining their sudden lurch to Trump in 2024, the tech chief executives told a variety of stories, mostly about the excesses of Biden-era liberalism: that administration officials had gotten too involved in policing public health information on social media, that regulators had gone too far in trying to control and tax Big Tech, that the culture of the country had grown too feminine and we needed an injection of new masculinity, which happily coincided for the tech leaders’ with a hands-off approach to corporate oversight (as everyone knows, there’s nothing more masculine than a tech C.E.O.).

Then, the argument seemed shortsighted — how sure were any of these people that the new Trump era would actually last? In retrospect, the answer may be that they weren’t thinking as much about the next election cycle as about the high stakes for tech policy in the short term, given that the A.I. age seemed to be dawning.

12. Trump violated the politician’s code when he declared the country broken in 2016. Now, everyone seems to agree.

“America is already great,” Obama declared in 2016. “America never stopped being great,” Hillary Clinton echoed. Meanwhile, Trump declared that the country was a “dumping ground,” a “third-world country” and a “laughingstock” around the world. “We never win anymore,” he said again and again on the campaign trail.

At the time, Americans were somewhat evenly divided on the question of whether the country’s best days were ahead of it or behind it, according to polling by Pew. When the question was asked again last year, the gap had grown from -5 to -19. Among Democrats, almost two-thirds of the country now says our glory days were in the past.

Partly, this was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: Trump stripping the country for parts, exposing longstanding hypocrisies and dropping the pretenses that for so long sustained our sense of American exceptionalism. Partly it reflected just how heavy a blow his re-election had been to liberals, a vote that made the national character look far uglier to them than they might ever had acknowledged before.

But this shifting sentiment has also paralyzed the Democratic Party, which has retreated on many commitments from the previous cycles that it now considers controversial or alienating without offering much in the way of a successor vision. In 2020, Biden dreamed of a Franklin Roosevelt-scale presidency, and his party is heading for power again. But while Democrats are now much less likely to defend the status quo, they don’t exactly have an ambitious plan to remake it, either.

Many on the left have framed an expanded horizon of political possibility as the silver lining of Trump’s norm-breaking presidency. But at least at the national level, the ambitions of liberals seem to have narrowed, not widened. Even among those competing for office and national leadership positions, the rhetoric is more defiant than optimistic: “It’s the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it,” Jon Ossoff recently declared on the campaign trail. “I refuse to leave my girls a world as dark and dangerous and cruel as this one threatens to become.”

And yet that generational note contains its own message of hope. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born in 1946. Joe Biden was born even earlier, in 1942. Ossoff is a child of the 1980s, as are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Abdul El-Sayed and JD Vance. Marco Rubio and Josh Shapiro were born in the 1970s. Among everything else, the last decade of American politics has often looked like a gerontocracy. The close of the MAGA era may bring an end to that, too.“

Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot

2026-10-29T08:24:56.008-04:00

Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot

Summary

“Surveillance identified Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, as a Chinese intelligence asset linked to Jensen Huang; Trump was briefed and took no action. Nvidia denies risk, while Megaspeed investigates.

A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.

Oct. 29, 2026

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is influential at the White House on technology policy and has developed a close relationship with President Trump.Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.

A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.

But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.

Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.

This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts.

American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips.

But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models.

Mr. Huang attended a luncheon at the White House with other tech industry leaders last month.Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.

The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.

Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”

Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” Mr. Rizzo said. Customers like Megaspeed, he added, “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”

The White House, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency all declined to comment. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its “current leadership” takes the matter “extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations.” It added that “outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating.”

Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump.

Ms. Huang did not respond to requests for comment. It is not clear how closely she is still connected to Megaspeed. A person familiar with Megaspeed’s operations said that Ms. Huang had become less active in the company in the wake of the American investigations.

Asked about the American conclusion that Ms. Huang has been collecting intelligence on behalf of Beijing, Liu Chang, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was pursuing a campaign of “groundless smears and slanders” against China.

When Mr. Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Ms. Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. It is unclear whether intelligence officials have since updated their assessment, but some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Mr. Huang could have remained unaware of what they had concluded was her intelligence-gathering role for China.

Questions about whether Megaspeed was providing A.I. chips to China became public through articles published last year by The New York Timesand Bloomberg News.

Mr. Huang has successfully lobbied the administration during Mr. Trump’s second term to loosen regulations on artificial intelligence companies and roll back tighter restrictions on the sales of Nvidia’s chips to China. He also negotiated a deal with Mr. Trump that allowed the U.S. government to take a 25 percent stake of certain Nvidia chips that the government allows to be sold to China.

The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said. They described some investigations and proposed trade sanctions involving China or Nvidia as having ground to a halt within the Commerce Department, the agency in charge of regulating chip exports.

Nvidia has said that it complies with the law and that there is no evidence of its chips being smuggled to China. Mr. Rizzo said China’s government has “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.”

Many questions about the situation remain unanswered, at least publicly.

It is unclear whether concerns about protecting the surveillance played a role in the decision not to inform Mr. Huang. Telling him could have alerted Ms. Huang that she was being watched, which is a common reason intelligence officials hesitate to give defensive briefings.

It could not be determined which intelligence agency or agencies have been involved in monitoring Ms. Huang, or what prompted them to start. It is also not clear under what circumstances Ms. Huang began gathering information for Beijing, what information she passed along or its value to China.

The previous reporting about Ms. Huang by The Times described her meteoric and somewhat mysterious rise. A Chinese businesswoman and investor, she eventually became a top official with Megaspeed, which the Commerce Department, toward the end of the Biden administration, began to suspect was helping China evade U.S. prohibitions and gain access to the computing power of Nvidia chips.

The U.S. government has been investigating Megaspeed since late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visited its data center in Malaysia and found the site to be suspicious. The Nvidia equipment was still packed in boxes, suggesting it was being shipped in or out rather than installed there.

Singapore has conducted its own investigation into Megaspeed. In 2025, Singaporean authorities brought Ms. Huang in for questioning, but subsequently released her.

The Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed was handed over this year to the Justice Department, administration officials said.

While the U.S. government has restricted companies from exporting the most advanced Nvidia chips into China since 2022, some firms have been found to illegally smuggle them over the Chinese border. Other companies have legally set up businesses that buy large numbers of chips to build data centers in Southeast Asia that serve Chinese firms.

Some U.S. officials and lawmakers consider this to be a problematic loophole, and the Biden administration restricted this practice. Mr. Trump rolled back those rules. The administration is weighing whether to tighten them again.

Megaspeed is among the firms in Southeast Asia that buy chips to build data centers and then rent their computing power to companies in China.

Megaspeed is essentially a middle man. It has bought Nvidia chips from the American arm of Inspur, a Chinese server maker. The U.S. has blacklisted Inspur’s parent company for funneling technology to the Chinese military, though the U.S. firm remains free of sanctions.

Megaspeed has then provided that computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. U.S. officials believe the firm is one piece of a sprawling international effort by Chinese companies to access the chips needed to build and run A.I. Investigators suspect that some Nvidia chips acquired by Megaspeed are also finding their way illegally into China.

Megaspeed’s sister company in Malaysia bought at least $4.8 billion worth of advanced A.I. equipment containing Nvidia chips and technology between June 2024 and February 2026, according to trade records obtained from ImportGenius, a trade platform. It was an exceptional amount of money for a small, obscure company.

Nvidia and Megaspeed have continued to do business this year. The limited data available for most of this year shows that Megaspeed and its affiliates kept buying Nvidia products, often through intermediaries.

To prevent chips from being smuggled to China, Nvidia evaluates buyers before approving a chip purchase and sometimes checks later whether the buyer still has the chips. The company continues to list Megaspeed on its website as a cloud partner. Megaspeed advertised the relationship as recently as this month. In a job ad, Megaspeed’s Indonesian branch called itself “a premier business partner of Nvidia.”

Megaspeed has continued serving its primary client, Alibaba, according to that person and other tech industry analysts.

In June 2024, just weeks before Megaspeed began its purchases, photos posted to LinkedIn showed Mr. Huang alongside Ms. Huang at a bar in Taipei following a local technology trade show. They drank whiskey with other A.I. executives.

One year later, in May 2025, they were seen together again, leaving a restaurant in Taipei after a business dinner with other A.I. suppliers. She waited behind Mr. Huang as he spoke to Taiwanese journalists outside the restaurant.

Those details were described in a Times article last October. But the deeper intelligence involving Ms. Huang remained closely held inside the administration.

People with knowledge of the matter said U.S. agencies had been conducting electronic surveillance of Ms. Huang. That surveillance showed that she was in contact with an American citizen.

U.S. intelligence agencies generally cannot legally surveil American citizens without a court order. But when communications involving Americans turn up in surveillance, citizens can be identified to government agencies who can show a need for the information through a process known as unmasking. In this case, the unmasking process identified Mr. Huang as the U.S. citizen.

Before 2025, Mr. Huang seldom visited Washington and stayed out of politics.

But as the Trump administration was considering a ban on sales of Nvidia chips to China, Mr. Huang and his wife traveled to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Florida, to meet with Mr. Trump at a high-end donors’ dinner and sell him on the idea of allowing chip companies to do business with Beijing.

At the event, according to people briefed on the discussion there, the Nvidia executive appeared to wow the president with his descriptions of his own rise.

Nvidia later donated at least $20 million to Mr. Trump’s ballroom fund, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The company also pledged to invest $500 billion on manufacturing in the United States.

And when the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, visited the White House for a state dinner last month, Mr. Huang was at the head table.

Last year, Mr. Trump approved the sale of an older generation of Nvidia chips to China in return for a cut of the revenue. As the president sought warmer ties with China ahead of his meeting with Mr. Xi, he entertained a push by Mr. Huang to sell the Chinese even more powerful technology, rankling some administration officials and Republicans in Congress, before ultimately deciding against it.

People who have watched the two men interact say Mr. Trump has been won over by the lavish praise Mr. Huang has given the president in public, and his immense wealth and success.

It is not clear when Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang of Megaspeed first met. Before The Times reported last year on her role in purchasing Nvidia chips, Ms. Huang posted photos of herself with Mr. Huang on her social media feed, according to a person who viewed it.

Ms. Huang has a slim profile on the Chinese internet. She has described herself as Megaspeed’s chief executive, and the company listed her as its managing director for its first eight months before removing her from that role in its corporate paperwork. Megaspeed’s current director is from Singapore but has recently lived in Shanghai, according to business records and his social media accounts.

According to information posted online by a Chinese investment fund where Ms. Huang worked, she was formerly employed in China as a TV reporter, but The Times could not find any information to verify that. She later worked at several major Chinese banks, then joined a Shanghai-based fund, Hexi Capital, which has invested in a variety of semiconductor- and A.I.-related firms, according to WireScreen, a data platform.

According to tech investors familiar with the company, Ms. Huang and her associates bragged about her connections to Mr. Huang and used it to raise funds and promote their fast-expanding network of businesses, which has invested alongside the Chinese government in data centers around China. In Southeast Asia, Megaspeed has continued to pitch new data centers, hire employees and trumpet its close connections to Nvidia, according to industry analysts, online job posts and other records.

Megaspeed is pushing ahead with construction of a large data center in Johor, the Malaysian state across the border from Singapore, where new A.I. facilities have risen between palm oil plantations. In a stock filing last month, a Malaysian property developer said it had received the final payment for the 53-acre plot where a Megaspeed subsidiary has promised to build the data center.

When a Times journalist visited recently, rows of construction materials sat between the skeletal frames of partially built data centers. Outside the park, backhoe loaders dug into the reddish brown earth as workers installed concrete pipes.

The company had already secured the chips necessary for the build out, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.

Pei-Lin Wu and Zunaira Saieed contributed reporting.

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul.

Tripp Mickle reports for The Times on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about tech industry trends like layoffs and artificial intelligence.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.“

LIVE: Obama attends Ossoff, Bottoms rally ahead of Georgia election

2026-10-28T18:34:25.225-04:00

LIVE: Obama attends Ossoff, Bottoms rally ahead of Georgia election

White House Has Tight Grip Over FBI in Pursuing Trump Targets, Agent Says

2026-10-27T23:41:17.597-04:00

White House Has Tight Grip Over FBI in Pursuing Trump Targets, Agent Says

Summary

Agent Bryan Witt testified that FBI director Kash Patel ordered investigations into Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides following President Trump’s directives. Witt called the inquiry a “witch hunt,” noting Patel’s aggressive oversight. Judge Zia M. Faruqui criticized the Justice Department’s unprecedented amended complaint.

Oct. 27, 2026Updated 8:52 p.m. ET

White House Has Tight Grip Over F.B.I. in Pursuing Trump Targets, Agent Says

In court testimony, the agent outlined the willingness of Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to take orders from President Trump to investigate his perceived enemies.

Bryan Witt, an F.B.I. agent, said the inquiry mandated by Kash Patel, the bureau’s director, was generally viewed inside his office as a “witch hunt.” Alex Kent/The New York Times

By Alan Feuer

Reporting from the Federal District Court in Washington

In mid-July, President Trump gave a prime-time speech in which he raised concerns about a disputed F.B.I. report that China had tried to interfere in the 2020 election in an effort to defeat him.

At the heart of his address was a bitter complaint: that some of the bureau’s intelligence officials had purposefully sought to play down the report to undercut his claims about the race.

One day after Mr. Trump attacked those officials on TV, calling for their prosecution, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, sent a letter to the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas City ordering that some of them immediately be investigated for obstruction and conspiracy, one of the agents assigned to the case testified on Tuesday.

The agent, Bryan Witt, said that even though the inquiry was generally viewed inside his office as a “witch hunt” and that he himself had concerns it was “political,” it nonetheless moved forward. And last week, one of the intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump had complained about was charged along with a colleague with lying to Congress about the roles they had played in another one of the president’s longstanding obsessions: the investigations into Hunter Biden, the former president’s son.

Mr. Witt’s explosive testimony, offered at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, was the latest account of just how tight a grip the White House has on decision-making at the F.B.I. and just how willing Mr. Patel has been to take orders from the president to go after people he believes to be enemies.

A veteran agent, Mr. Witt asserted from the stand that he had never before worked on a case where instructions came directly from the F.B.I.’s director. He added that Mr. Patel and his deputies often checked on his progress, pressing him and his colleagues to move as aggressively as possible.

The daylong hearing was nominally held so that lawyers for the two defendants — Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides — could question the basis of the criminal complaint that was filed on Friday. It accused them of lying to the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 when they were questioned about the roles they had played in the F.B.I.’s investigations into Mr. Biden and his ties to foreign nationals and companies.

But as the day went on, the proceeding gradually turned into something more substantial as the lawyers got Mr. Witt to expose the ways in which Mr. Trump had directed Mr. Patel to use the power of the F.B.I. to investigate people he believed had cast doubts on both his lies about the 2020 election and his unsubstantiated claims that his opponent in that race, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine while Hunter Biden had been working there.

Mr. Witt testified that he was originally instructed by Mr. Patel to investigate Ms. Floris and other F.B.I. intelligence officials after they had questioned a report from an informant developed by the bureau’s Albany field office that China had sought to tip the 2020 election in Mr. Biden’s favor.

But after he and his colleagues were unable to find evidence to support the claims, he said the inquiry quickly pivoted toward the testimony that Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides had given three years ago in front of the House committee, which had been looking into Hunter Biden’s business dealings overseas.

Both Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides served on the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, a group created after Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It helped intelligence agencies monitor clandestine efforts by foreign governments to manipulate American politics, including by issuing warnings about covert foreign meddling to politicians and social media companies.

Members of the task force had relayed warnings from the intelligence community about a covert Russian disinformation operation aimed at helping Mr. Trump win re-election in 2020 by amplifying claims that the elder Mr. Biden had engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine, where his son held a board seat on an energy firm, Burisma.

The case against Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides is largely based on discrepancies between what they told Congress about their participation in the Biden investigations, what witnesses have said and what documents emerging from the inquiries have shown. Their lawyers spent much of Tuesday trying to persuade the magistrate judge handling the case, Zia M. Faruqui, that their clients had not lied to Congress and that the statements they had made had not materially affected the work of the House committee.

From the start, the prosecution has been marked by a series of unusual procedural maneuvers — including the fact that Ms. Floris and Mr. Benavides were charged in a criminal complaint, not an indictment. Complaints are typically used when prosecutors need to act quickly or have fears that defendants might flee. But Judge Faruqui said in court on Tuesday that both of the defendants are well-respected former agents and that the underlying facts of the case are more than three years old.

Judge Faruqui also expressed concern about another unorthodox tactic the Justice Department has used in the case. Late Monday night, prosecutors filed an amended complaint, adding a new charge of obstruction of Congress. But in an extraordinary break from standard legal practice, the prosecutors issued the new complaint without first seeking judicial approval, effectively asserting that they could accuse the defendants of additional crimes without the traditional checks and balances.

One of the prosecutors on the case, John Borchert, acknowledged it was a “novel” move to seek a criminal charge without first getting the approval of a jurist or grand jury. But Judge Faruqui said it was far more serious than that.

“It’s not just novel, Mr. Borchert,” he said. “It’s never been done before.”

Alan Feuer is a reporter for The Times who covers the effects President Trump has had on the courts, the Justice Department and the broader rule of law.“

Blue Wave for WAR CRIME impeachment? Hegseth eyes EXIT as Dems ready probes

2026-10-27T23:19:12.350-04:00

Israel Election Live Updates: Rivals Strike Tone of Triumph, but Outcome Is Far From Clear

2026-10-27T23:11:52.740-04:00

Israel Election Live Updates: Rivals Strike Tone of Triumph, but Outcome Is Far From Clear

“Addressing supporters after midnight, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot, who leads a bloc of opposition parties, both expressed confidence that they will lead Israel’s next government. Vote counting could take days.

Updated

26 minutes ago

Current time in

Jerusalem5:08 a.m. Oct. 28

Israeli exit polls showed early Wednesday that the opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, was roughly even with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc, with neither winning a parliamentary majority.By Alisa Shodiyev Kaff

Pinned

Israelis voted in the largest numbers in a generation on Tuesday, and exit polls suggested that a bloc of opposition parties was roughly even with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alliance in what many described as a make-or-break moment for the nation.

The election did not appear to immediately determine who would lead the country next, even as the leading candidates — Mr. Netanyahu and the leader of a coalition of opposition parties, Gadi Eisenkot — struck tones of victory in late-night addresses to supporters. Vote counting was expected to last days, followed by a potentially lengthy effort by the blocs to assemble a parliamentary majority.

The exit polls, if accurate, suggest that neither Mr. Netanyahu’s bloc nor the one led by Mr. Eisenkot, a former military chief whose son was killed in the Gaza war, will be able to form a government without relying on two Arab parties that were projected to win as many as 17 or 18 seats in Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu effectively ruled out including them in a governing coalition, and Mr. Eisenkot and his partners have balked at the idea, too.

One option analysts are already weighing is whether Mr. Netanyahu, who has led the most far-right government in Israeli history, could join with Mr. Eisenkot or others in the opposition to form a unity government. But a unity government would face major obstacles, given how deeply Mr. Eisenkot’s voters despise Mr. Netanyahu, and because the two would have to agree on which of them would serve as prime minister. Mr. Netanyahu is unlikely to give up control, while Mr. Eisenkot has called the prime minister unfit to lead Israel.

Much remained unclear early Wednesday morning in Israel. Making matters even murkier, Israel’s exit polls have a spotty history of accuracy, particularly in tight races.

Mr. Eisenkot appeared onstage past midnight at his post-election party and attempted to strike a tone of triumph — as well as defiance toward Mr. Netanyahu.

“Tonight we got the answer: The public wants change,” he said.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed his supporters a few hours later, invoking his relationship with President Trump and repeating his pre-election talking points about removing the threat of Iran. He sounded triumphant, saying it was clear that Likud had emerged as the largest party in Israel and mocking months of pre-election polls that showed his party trailing behind that of Mr. Eisenkot.

“We must form a strong right-wing government,” he declared.

In the coming days, after official vote totals are released and parliamentary seats are allocated to parties, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will invite the party leader he thinks has the best chance to assemble a governing coalition. Such a coalition would usually have to be made up of at least 61 lawmakers, though Mr. Eisenkot has floated the idea of forming a minority government.

One factor not reflected in exit polls are the hundreds of thousands of votes cast by Israelis at special polling stations, including at military bases, hospitals, prisons and embassies. In the previous election, those votes tended to favor the coalition of Mr. Netanyahu and his allies.

Here’s what else to know:

Arab parties: The exit polls pointed to at least one surprise in projecting that two Arab parties would win as many as 17 or 18 seats in the 120-seat Parliament. That would be their strongest showing ever, and potentially give them an important role in forming the next government. Read more ›
War fears: Amid reports that Mr. Netanyahu has been pushing for renewed attacks on Iran, Mr. Eisenkot warned him in his speech to supporters not to abuse his power as caretaker prime minister to influence the process of forming a new government. “Netanyahu, don’t dare use Israel’s security for your political needs,” he said.

Oct. 27, 2026, 9:55 p.m. ET1 hour ago

It’s nearly 4 a.m. in Israel, and there is no clear winner. News is expected to slow down in the coming hours, but pick up again in the morning, when party leaders are expected to begin discussing potential alliances. The official results are still a long way off: Election authorities have so far counted nearly a million votes, about a fifth of the total votes cast.

Oct. 27, 2026, 9:40 p.m. ET1 hour ago

In a nod to the fact he is now a caretaker prime minister pending the formation of a new government, Netanyahu said the exit polls were only a preview and he was waiting for official results. Yet he sounded triumphant, if not quite saying he had won the election. He said it was clear that his Likud party had emerged as the largest party in the Parliament, and he mocked months of pre-election polls that showed Likud trailing behind the party of his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot.

Four Ways Israel’s Election Could End. Eventually.

No party is expected to achieve a clear victory, which means the election will likely only be the first step in determining who will form the next government. Here’s how that might unfold.

Oct. 27, 2026, 9:37 p.m. ET2 hours ago

Listing Israel’s enemies who have now been killed, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, Netanyahu declared, “Iran is weaker than ever, Israel is stronger than ever.”

“But it’s still not over,” he said, adding that with his “friend” President Trump, it would be possible to remove the threat from Iran once and for all, repeating his pre-election talking points.

Oct. 27, 2026, 9:35 p.m. ET2 hours ago

Netanyahu showed no hint of extending a hand to the opposition as he addressed supporters early Wednesday. Arriving onstage at 3:15 a.m., looking reinvigorated and in an ebullient mood, he declared, “We must form a strong right-wing government.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 8:52 p.m. ET2 hours ago

One updated exit poll has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc a small edge over the opposition. The exit polls by Israel’s three largest television networks at first projected a small lead for Gadi Eisenkot’s anti-Netanyahu alliance, but now one has Netanyahu and his allies ahead, and the other two show the two blocs even. Exit polls have not always been reliable indicators of the result, and the official count is far from complete. But it appears that neither side has a clear path to forming a government without the help of the Arab parties, unless one or more parties defects from one of the main blocs.

Oct. 27, 2026, 7:53 p.m. ET3 hours ago

Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main rival, took the stage in the early hours of Wednesday morning like a winner, embracing members of his Yashar party who were waiting for him there and waving to an enthusiastic crowd of flag-waving supporters who hailed him as the next prime minister.

Although Eisenkot’s path to forming a government is far from clear, he gave what amounted to a victory speech for the opposition bloc, declaring, “We’ve made history.” Describing the election as a referendum on who should lead Israel in the coming years, he added: “Tonight we got the answer. The public wants change.”

In an unusual and pointed message, Eisenkot told the country’s security chiefs and public servants that Netanyahu now heads a transitional government that has lost the confidence of the people. “Stand strong and firm against any attempt to challenge you,” Eisenkot said. “You have my clear backing.” Amid reports that Netanyahu has been pushing for renewed attacks on Iran, Eisenkot said, “Netanyahu, don’t dare use Israel’s security for your political needs.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 7:53 p.m. ET3 hours ago

Two Israeli news channels have recently updated their exit polls, which now show a tie between the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that of his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot. Neither bloc, however, has enough seats to form a government without the support of Arab parties. Earlier versions of the same exit polls had shown small leads for the opposition alliance. The official vote count is still too preliminary to draw any conclusions, and counting will take days.

One of the most striking results from the election in Israel on Tuesday was the unusually strong showing by two leading Arab parties, whose voters turned out in record numbers to express their opposition to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The final results have not been announced, but a range of exit polls conducted by Israeli broadcasters suggest that two of the parties — the socially conservative United Arab List, or Raam, and the left-wing Joint List — may have won a historically large number of seats in parliament and an important role in the formation of the country’s next government.

Oct. 27, 2026, 7:38 p.m. ET3 hours ago

Scores of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters and lawmakers from his Likud party are gathered at the party’s election-night headquarters, in a conference hall in Jerusalem. It’s past 1:30 a.m., and some of the crowd here is ecstatic, waiting for the prime minister to come and speak onstage. Activists are wearing “Make Israel Great Again” baseball hats and throwing the party’s voting slips like confetti. But others, including party officials, acknowledged to me their path to forming a coalition is narrow, and feelings here are mixed.

Natan Odenheimer/The New York Times

Oct. 27, 2026, 7:10 p.m. ET4 hours ago

Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister and leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, focused his post-election speech on delegitimizing the predominantly Arab parties whose support could help the anti-Netanyahu bloc form a government. “Parties that are unable to condemn the massacre of Oct. 7 and are not willing to declare Hamas as a terrorist organization are not legitimate actors in Israeli politics,” Smotrich told his supporters.

Oct. 27, 2026, 7:04 p.m. ET4 hours ago

Naftali Bennett, who leads a party in the alliance opposing Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc, said the sitting prime minister had lost the election. In a fiery televised address to a gathering of supporters, he tied Netanyahu to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s worst security failure in decades. “The government of Oct. 7 will go home,” he said.

He said the anti-Netanyahu parties “will do everything, setting ego aside” to form a government that will insist on conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military. He did not address whether that might include Netanyahu’s Likud party, or one or more Arab parties.

Oct. 27, 2026, 6:30 p.m. ET5 hours ago

Not reflected in exit polls are hundreds of thousands of ballots cast at special polling stations, including on military bases, in hospitals, prisons, and embassies. In the previous election, those votes leaned toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. This year, the election authorities estimated that roughly 600,000 such votes would be cast, accounting for about 10 percent of eligible voters. Results from those ballots are not expected to be announced before Thursday.

Oct. 27, 2026, 6:01 p.m. ET5 hours ago

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, was the first leader of a party in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to speak following tonight’s exit polls. He neither declared victory for his bloc nor conceded defeat. “The night is still young,” he told supporters at a televised gathering. He said he hoped that the bloc led by Netanyahu “was close to forming a right-wing government.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:47 p.m. ET5 hours ago

The leader of the Democrats party, Yair Golan, declared victory on Tuesday night for the opposition bloc, which includes his party, and asserted that the exit polls showed that the Israeli public had “fired Netanyahu and Likud.” Addressing supporters, Golan urged opposition leaders to swiftly form a “change government” without letting ego or political calculations delay the process. “From tonight, Israel can breathe,” he said. “Tomorrow, we begin rebuilding.” He expressed a willingness to rely on support from outside the opposition alliance to secure a parliamentary majority, an apparent reference to the Arab parties.

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:44 p.m. ET5 hours ago

Another surprise in the exit polls was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent surge on Election Day. While the most recent pre-election surveys showed his Likud party with about 20 seats in Parliament, the exit polls show Likud winning 24, more than any other party. That is an important symbolic victory for Netanyahu, and one that few could have foreseen for the prime minister who was in charge on Oct. 7, 2023.

It suggests that Netanyahu’s hair-on-fire appeal to voters on Election Day worked — but only so much. The extra four seats he picked up, according to the exit polls, came at the expense of his allies, not the opposition bloc.

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:42 p.m. ET5 hours ago

Judging by exit polls, one major suprise in this election is the high turnout among Israel’s Arab citizens, who were furious at the current government over its housing policies and its failure to curb violent crime in Arab communities.

Pre-election surveys suggested that the two main Arab parties would win about 13 seats, but the exit polls suggest they will end up with closer to 17 or 18 seats. In the past, Arab parties have never won more than 15.

Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Raam party, told a television interviewer on Tuesday night that the turnout showed that “frustration and despair” in Israel’s Arab society had “turned to hope.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:42 p.m. ET5 hours ago

Mansour Abbas, the leader of an Arab party that could prove pivotal to the opposition’s efforts to form a majority coalition, said he wanted to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “in every possible way.” In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, he said his immediate priority was to “ensure that there is a chance of forming a government” opposed to Netanyahu. “And then, we will discuss the details,” he said, “and address the challenges.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:27 p.m. ET6 hours ago

Initial exit polls suggest that Arab parties are likely to win a historic number of seats in Israel’s Parliament.

The polls released by Israeli TV channels gave Raam and the Joint List, the two major Arab parties, either 17 or 18 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

“The Arabs feel this government did everything to marginalize them and even incite against them,” said Thabet Abu Ras, an expert in Arab-Jewish relations and an Arab citizen of Israel. “They understood they needed to fight for their citizenship and play the political game fully.”

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:22 p.m. ET6 hours ago

Israel’s Central Election Committee just updated the country’s turnout rate to 77.7 percent, the highest since 1999. Israelis headed in large numbers to the polls on Tuesday, particularly among the country’s Arab minority, who were spurred by a desire to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline coalition.

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:19 p.m. ET6 hours ago

In 2021, Israel’s short-lived anti-Netanyahu government included for the first time an independent Arab party, Raam. The backlash to that catapulted anti-Arab politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich into the next government. According to exit polls, the backlash to that government appears to have resulted today in a record showing for Israel’s Arab parties.

Oct. 27, 2026, 5:05 p.m. ET6 hours ago

The exit polls suggest Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition may well be deadlocked with his Jewish opponents, and neither would be able to form a government on their own without relying on Arab parties. One option already being weighed by analysts is whether Netanyahu and his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, could form a unity government of Israel’s right-wing and centrist parties. Such an alliance might be hard for Eisenkot to accept given how deeply his own voters despise Netanyahu. And then there’s also the question of who would run the government. Netanyahu is unlikely to give up control, and Eisenkot has vowed not to join a government run by someone he has called unfit to lead Israel.

Oct. 27, 2026, 4:53 p.m. ET6 hours ago

There have been precedents in the past where the party with the most seats in Parliament does not end up forming a government. In Israel’s 2009 election, Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party won 28 seats, narrowly beating Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud, which won 27. But Netanyahu had more support from allied parties and came back as prime minister after a decade spent out of politics or in the opposition.

Oct. 27, 2026, 4:52 p.m. ET6 hours ago

A few activists were celebrating at the Likud Party’s election headquarters in Jerusalem even though most exit polls suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alliance of parties had won fewer seats than the bloc of parties seeking his ouster. “Bibi is the king! The king is Bibi!” they shouted, using a nickname for the Israeli leader.

Natan Odenheimer/The New York Times

Polls have closed in Israel, and initial exit polls by Israeli broadcasters are expected to be released shortly afterward. But it will be hours before the definitive results are known, and it could be weeks until a new government is formed.

Here’s what to know:

Early indicator: Exit polls in Israel can be useful to get a sense of each party’s relative strength, but they are not considered a reliable gauge of precise results — particularly in a tight race like this one.
Vote-counting: Votes are tallied in Israel by hand, with ballot slips tabulated at more than 12,000 polling places across the country. The counters are monitored by camera-toting election observers.
First results: After the hand count is completed, paper tallies are taken to regional hubs where the results are recorded electronically. The whole process takes hours, and the authorities begin to release the results once they are completed.
Possible delay: Israel is a parliamentary democracy, and no party is expected to win anywhere near an outright majority of the votes. Once the results are in, the process of forming a government will begin. That could take weeks or even months.
Next government: The party with the most votes and the most seats in the Parliament may not be the one to form a government. In 2021, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party won the most seats but was unable to assemble a majority coalition. Instead, after months of wrangling, an eclectic coalition of anti-Netanyahu forces cobbled together a single-seat majority in Parliament.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition has the distinction of surviving for a full four-year term in office, something no government in Israel has achieved for more than 30 years. Since first taking office in 1996, he has tallied 19 years in power and become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by far.

On Tuesday, he is seeking a seventh term, in Israel’s first parliamentary election since the deadly Hamas-led attack in 2023 that prompted its devastating war in Gaza.

Days before Tuesday’s pivotal Israeli election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked his country by offering a bleak economic forecast that critics said could make Israel more like Iran, Russia and North Korea.

Mr. Netanyahu told an Israeli financial journalist on Friday that he was preparing for international sanctions against Israeli banks by drawing up plans for a “bypass economy” based on cryptocurrency. He also told Israelis to prepare for the end of billions of dollars of annual American assistance.

The stakes of the Israeli elections are high for Palestinians in the West Bank, but they do not have the right to vote in them.

In interviews, some Palestinians voiced objections to not being allowed to vote, especially as they felt Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was becoming more permanent.

The election in Israel on Tuesday is unlikely to yield quick answers about who might lead the next government.

Voters don’t directly pick a prime minister in Israel’s proportional parliamentary system. They choose a party or slate, the first step in determining who may be selected to try to form a government. The process is not guaranteed to succeed and can lead to another election if it does not. Here are four things to watch for.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Arab citizens of “trying to steal the elections” on Tuesday, as he repeatedly used brazen and overtly racial appeals to push his right-wing base to vote.

“There are buses heading to the polls and long lines in Arab towns. Meanwhile, right-wing strongholds have yet to wake up!” he said on social media. “If we don’t go vote now, we will find ourselves with a government of Arab parties.”

Several people whose relatives were killed or taken hostage in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, are running for office in Tuesday’s election, the first national vote since the assault, which shook the country’s foundations and ignited its longest war.

The October 2023 assault looms large over this week’s vote. There are sharp divisions over who was to blame for failing to prevent the worst military, intelligence and policy disaster in Israel’s history.

For decades, Israel had virtually unanimous support among Republicans and Democrats in Congress, a reflection of a broader consensus in the United States in favor of strong backing for the Jewish state.

But that consensus began to fray several years ago and has recently threatened to unravel altogether as Democrats have shifted drastically and rapidly from unequivocal support for Israel, reflecting a sea change in Americans’ views.“

Donald Trump is forging new frontiers in presidential bigotry

2026-10-27T15:35:56.531-04:00

The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference

2026-10-27T13:50:39.834-04:00

The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference

Summary

“State and local officials are training for potential federal interference, including ICE presence, monitor limits, and ballot seizures. Concerns center on Trump administration actions, though courts and officials like Dana Nessel note legal constraints.

State and local plans for Election Day include how to react to potential ICE raids, misbehavior by federal election monitors and attempts to seize votes or machines.

Oct. 27, 2026Updated 12:51 p.m. ET

State and local election officials across the country have been redoubling training efforts to prepare for the potential for federal interference.John Locher/Associated Press

State and local elections officials regularly plan for floods, fires and computer glitches.

This year, they are teaching poll workers what to do if immigration enforcement officers show up. They are drilling them about the statute that bars federal agents from voting places. They are running through the limits of what federal monitors may and may not do on Election Day.

Much of the preparations for Nov. 3 can be distilled into one overarching concern — that the Trump administration will somehow attempt to meddle with the voting process or the results. The tricky part, officials said, is predicting what shape that interference might take while also recognizing that it might not materialize at all.

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” said Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state in Maine. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

It remains to be seen whether any of these scenarios will play out. Many federal officials have dismissed the idea that agents or soldiers could be sent to the polls, and the courts have blocked most of President Trump’s efforts to insert the federal government into state and local election administration.

And some of the country’s most prominent voting advocates have sought to assure the public that election administrators are well-prepared to protect the vote. David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department, said the most chilling possibilities are unlikely to come to pass because the courts would likely block them.

“But election officials feel more comfortable to know they’ve thought about this, and discussed it,” said Mr. Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works to support election officials in both parties.

Even so, the Trump Administration has already taken significant steps to try to shape the voting process this year. Mr. Trump has sought to sow doubt about the security of elections. His administration has demanded that states turn over voter lists, and has tried unsuccessfully to change mail voting rules. Last week, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in Alaska seeking to pre-emptively block the certification of the Senate race there if the Republican candidate loses by a narrow margin.

With one week until Election Day, officials around the country say that they are bracing for even more unwanted and potentially undemocratic federal intervention — even as they can’t be sure what, if anything, the Trump Administration might do. To prepare, secretaries of state and other state and local officials have met with lawyers and local law enforcement agencies, trained poll workers and held meetings to consider what could come next.

Among their top concerns: that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the integrity of American voting systems could form the basis for challenging the legitimacy of the results. Along with that unease comes the worry that any federal intervention could further undermine public confidence in elections and cause voters to stay home.

The next step is a guessing game, they said.

Could federal officials try to seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Ga., as part of a criminal investigation that thus far hasn’t resulted in any charges?

Could Mr. Trump deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel or other federal agents to polling sites, even though his homeland security chief has said I.C.E. will not patrol polling stations and would be deployed to such an area only to investigate “specific threats?”

Might he invoke the Insurrection Act and somehow summon the military in connection with the election? Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility.

“We really are shadowboxing here, because we don’t know when or if the blow is going to land,” said Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state. “We don’t know the character of, or content of, what might be headed our way.”

Mr. Trump, who has long claimed without proof that U.S. elections are rigged, sought to overturn his 2020 election loss. Earlier this year, he said the federal government should “get involved” in elections, even though the Constitution empowers the states and Congress — not the executive branch — to govern elections.

Ms. Bellows and Mr. Simon are Democrats. But Republican election officials have also planned for the possibility of federal intervention. Deidre Henderson, the lieutenant governor of Utah and a Republican, recently saidthat while she did not “necessarily expect” such interference, officials in her state were still planning for it.

In a statement, Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, said the bipartisan concerns about election interference were unfounded.

“The only ‘worries’ about election security are caused by radical Democrats who refuse to enact basic election security measures, supported by the majority of Americans, including voter ID and citizenship verification to ensure only Americans are electing America’s leaders,” Ms. Bis said. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”

Several voting advocacy groups have offered training and advice to election officials to help them get ready. One organization, the Government Counsel and Election Officials Network, explains to election administrators the legal basics that could be helpful in the case of federal action, whether civil or criminal, such as the seizure of machines or documents.

The group’s website provides samples of what federal grand jury subpoenasand search warrants look like. It also advises how to respond to a federal investigation, including what to do when agents show up with a search warrant.

“Step 1,” the site says: “Stay calm.”

Tina Barton, the co-chairwoman of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, said her team has helped run about 140 training sessions for officials with local government and law enforcement this year, up from 67 such sessions in 2024.

Some of those officials, including law enforcement leaders in Northern Virginia, said they were concerned about how immigration enforcement might affect the election process. Although Mr. Trump’s homeland security chief has said ICE will not patrol polling stations, Some congressional officials nonetheless expressed concern about the possibility. She said she helped lead a training scenario in which ICE enforcement was near a polling location.

Ms. Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, said her team introduced a new slide this year into its training presentation for law enforcement. It provides the text of the federal statute that bars armed federal agents from polling places.

“It’s sad that we’re in this posture,” Ms. Bellows said in a phone interview. “But it’s just the way it is in 2026, given the administration’s rhetoric, and their actions.”

Barb Byrum, the clerk of Ingham County, Mich., said she was already concerned by some actions of the Trump administration, including the Justice Department’s deployment of federal election monitors to her county during the August primary. She said it was the first such deployment of federal monitors to her county in her nearly 14 years as clerk.

“The feds suggested that there were long lines, voters were not offered provisional ballots and clerks and precinct workers failed to use the qualified voter file to check voters,” she said. “All of which is simply not true.”

After the primary, Ms. Byrum put her election workers through additional training on what federal monitors were and were not permitted to do under state law.

“They can watch the process,” Ms. Byrum said. “They can’t touch anything, they can’t ask any questions. They can literally just watch — monitor.”

Ms. Byrum said she found it disheartening that she now considered the federal government a potential threat to the election.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, formerly worked on voting rights for the Biden administration. He said nearly everywhere across the country, Justice Department observers must adhere to the same rules of behavior at polling places as any other member of the public.

Earlier this week, Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, said the Justice Department’s civil rights division had sent notices to seven Michigan municipalities that election monitors from the department would come to their polling places on Election Day. In a statement, Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, sought to quell anxiety about the plans.

“It’s important for residents know that D.O.J. monitors are a standard part of our election process, and we anticipate they will comport with state and federal law,” she said.

Some officials are hesitant to share granular details of their preparations, for fear of giving the federal government a tactical advantage if legal skirmishes arise.

For Democrats, the politics of discussing preparations are also complicated. By having an open discussion about pre-election planning, they said, they show their constituents that they are taking the threats seriously. But they also recognize that such discussions could intimidate voters from going to the polls.

In an interview, Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general and a Democrat, said he and Mr. Simon, the secretary of state, have been working in tandem to prepare for election threats.

Asked how concerned he was about the threats to the Nov. 3 election on a scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Ellison said: “I’m at a seven.” He added: “It’s as high as it’s ever been for me.”

During a recent online forum, Lisa Lyons, the clerk and registrar of deeds in Kent County, Mich., said her staff regularly communicated with her government’s legal team about potential troubles.

“We’re going to follow the law,” she said. “We’re going to follow the Constitution. We’re going to protect our election equipment.”

Richard Fausset is a national correspondent for The Times who writes about the way Americans live in a polarized country.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

David W. Chen is a Times reporter focused on state legislatures, state level policymaking and the political forces behind them.”

Michigan Senate Race Drives Anxiety Among Jewish and Muslim Voters

2026-10-27T13:45:02.226-04:00

Michigan Senate Race Drives Anxiety Among Jewish and Muslim Voters

Summary

Michigan’s Senate race between Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed heightens anxiety among Jewish and Muslim voters over U.S. policy toward Israel. Both communities fear hate crimes; El-Sayed faces Islamophobic rhetoric and accusations of stoking antisemitism.

More than elsewhere in the country, U.S. policy toward Israel is at the forefront of the race between Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed.

Oct. 27, 2026Updated 12:47 p.m. ET

The Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism held an event at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Mich., this month. Synagogues and mosques alike have security concerns.Rosem Morton for The New York Times

By Jennifer Medina

Jennifer Medina interviewed more than two dozen voters in Southfield, West Bloomfield and Farmington Hills, Mich.

Just north of the highway that runs through Southfield, Mich., is Congregation Shaarey Zedek, a soaring modern synagogue that has been an anchor for Jewish life in suburban Detroit since the 1960s. On the other side of the road stands Umma, a Muslim congregation that opened this year and regularly attracts hundreds to Friday afternoon prayers.

The two congregations, both worried about the hate that has permeated the national political atmosphere, share a quiet but persistent fear that they could be victims of hate crimes at any time.

This year’s high-stakes Senate race in Michigan has inflamed those tensions and heightened their anxiety.

The Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, would be the country’s first Muslim senator if elected, and his candidacy has drawn ugly Islamophobic rhetoric from agitators at campaign events and from high-profile supporters of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, including President Trump. At the same time, Dr. El-Sayed has been accused of stoking antisemitism with his relentless criticism of Israel. Some who have spent a lifetime voting for Democrats are considering casting a ballot for Mr. Rogers — or not voting at all.

Some longtime Democrats are considering voting for Mike Rogers, a Republican former congressman, left, instead of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.Emily Elconin for The New York Times; Nick Hagen for The New York Times

“Somehow we’re suddenly arguing about which candidate we are most afraid of,” said Andy Bocknek, a financial planner and a former president of Temple Israel in nearby West Bloomfield, the site of a violent antisemitic attack in March.

“It’s a sad statement when we’re hoping for a candidate who will do the least amount of damage,” Mr. Bocknek, 46, said. “There’s a lot of pain in this current moment for us.”

Just north of Northwestern Highway in Southfield, Mich., is Congregation Shaarey Zedek, a soaring modern synagogue that has been an anchor for Jewish life in suburban Detroit since the 1970s. To the south stands Umma, a Muslim congregation that opened this year inside a towering office building.Rosem Morton for The New York Times

Urgent and personal

In Southfield and across Oakland County, where Yemeni coffee shops sit next to kosher butcher shops, Muslim and Jewish voters make up a significant slice of the electorate. The sprawling front lawns of many homes blend into each other, much like the suburban communities themselves. Many move to the area for top-tier public schools, including the one Dr. El-Sayed attended in Bloomfield Hills.

For decades, the area has been the heart of Jewish Detroit, home to dozens of large synagogues. When Dr. El-Sayed was growing up in the 1990s, Muslims had begun to plant roots too, and the community has grown exponentially since. The same neighborhoods are also home to the country’s largest community of Chaldeans, Iraqi Catholics who emigrated to the United States over the past two generations.

The area can feel like a microcosm of the country and yet entirely singular. Like everywhere, voters are frustrated with the cost of gas and groceries. But more than in most American communities, foreign policy and local politics here are intertwined — urgent, personal and visceral.

Many Jewish voters worry about a repeat of the attack on Temple Israel, in which a man drove his truck through the synagogue, narrowly missing the preschool classrooms where 140 children were playing. Muslim voters, worry about Islamophobic attacks, fearing that either they or Dr. El-Sayed could be targeted.

Michigan has been politically divided for decades, especially in the Detroit suburbs. But the current fault lines are defined by a raw mix of fear, anger and resentment over U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

In 2024, feeling forsaken by the Democratic Party, which they had traditionally supported, some Arab and Muslim voters organized the “Uncommitted” campaign during the presidential primary, withholding their support from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to signal their dissatisfaction with his backing of the Israeli government.

This year, some Jewish voters — also a mainstay of the Democratic coalition — have expressed their own feelings of abandonment as sentiment within the party has shifted sharply against Israel.

The Senate campaign has played out against this fraught backdrop. Dr. El-Sayed has linked U.S. aid to Israel to domestic problems, arguing that the money sent there could instead fund schools and health care here. And he has argued that Israel’s military operations in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack on Israel have amounted to genocide. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s leading pro-Israel lobby, has spent millions of dollars to try to defeat him.

Both Muslims and Jews feel deeply vulnerable. They worry that their children will see political advertisements that portray Dr. El-Sayed as un-American or blame U.S. support for Israel for Americans’ struggles to afford the price of eggs. They fear the heightened rhetoric will encourage violence against both communities.

‘As if your life depends on it’

Even amid their worry, Muslims in Michigan have a sense that the election of Dr. El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, could represent an important shift in American politics. They regard him as the first national politician who shares their fervor for a Palestinian state.

“We were never this close to making this big of a difference,” said Asim Khan, a 59-year-old engineer and local leader who has helped establish several mosques in the area. For months, he has helped register voters during Friday prayers, hoping to get as much as 85 percent of the Muslim community to vote. Volunteers at Umma, which means community in Arabic and is also an acronym for the United Michigan Muslim Association, have also handed out voter information.

“I keep saying, work as if your life depends on it,” he said. “Because you never know when we will get another chance like this.”

Fatima Salman, 48, was a young adult in Oakland County during the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks. Back then, she said, she could never have imagined that Michigan would be on the verge of electing a candidate like Dr. El-Sayed. She could have hardly imagined the possibility even two years ago.

Ms. Salman is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her father often helped new arrivals settle into the area through his work at a local mosque.

Mr. Trump’s first election in 2016, and especially his anti-immigrant rhetoric, had frightened many Muslim Americans, but in some ways the aftermath gave Ms. Salman hope. Many non-Muslim acquaintances were eager to protest the new administration’s “Muslim ban” barring people from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

She worked with interfaith groups for several years. But those relationships began to fray in early 2024, amid the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

“I was seeing everyone so behind Israel and whatever it did,” she said. “I thought, we can’t continue this relationship. We broke bread and now you can’t even see the humanity of Palestinians? What was all of that for?”

Across Oakland County, where Yemeni coffee shops sit next to kosher butcher shops, Muslim and Jewish voters make up a significant slice of the electorate. Rosem Morton for The New York Times

She began to think that the reported rise of antisemitic incidents was overstated. When she read through some media reports, she said, she was taken aback by complaints that involved people shouting insults on the street. “I just thought, I deal with this happening to me every day as a hijabi,” she said.

Ms. Salman began to focus on pushing for change within the Democratic Party, organizing with Uncommitted. While the movement had some success, organizers were enraged by the party’s refusal to allow a Palestinian speaker to address the Democratic National Convention from the stage.

Ms. Salman is stunned by how much has changed in two years.

“What’s happening now is heartening, but I can’t believe it — it’s shocking to see in my lifetime,” she said.

Still, for others, the spotlight on Dr. El-Sayed has reminded them that Muslims are still viewed with suspicion.

Sumaiya Ahmed Sheikh, 35, remembers the heightened security at her Islamic school after 9/11. This year, she cajoled other parents to pay for security guards at the Islamic school her two sons attend. “When you grow up knowing you have a target on your back,” she said, “you’re kind of used to it.”

Snipers on the roof

Rabbi Aaron Starr looks out over stained glass panels in Shaarey Zedek and winces when he thinks about the staggering sums the congregation spends on private security each year.

“We haven’t yet dug the moat and built the wall,” he said dryly. “But that might be coming next.”

Security cameras and armed guards are now an inescapable feature of Jewish communal life. For the High Holy Days this year, Temple Israel placed snipers on the roof.

For many Jews here, the attack on Temple Israel on March 12 irreparably broke their sense of security.

The next day, Dr. El-Sayed released a video on social media in which he condemned the attack but also declared that “hurt people hurt people,” referring to the fact that the attacker had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon. Many Jews were enraged, believing that he was making an excuse for the attack.

Dr. El-Sayed apologized, but the anger has lingered.

“That line felt to us like being kicked after we had already been attacked,” Rabbi Starr said. “Some people have forgiven him for that. Most of us have not forgotten.”

Some Jewish voters say Dr. El-Sayed’s candidacy has left them deeply discouraged about the election and the future of the Democratic Party.

Mr. Bocknek finds himself unable to bring himself to vote for either Dr. El-Sayed or Mr. Rogers. He is leaning toward writing in Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat who lost in the primary.

“It feels like an opportunity to make a statement that says there are still moderate Democrats here who aren’t so far left, but who also can’t justify voting for a Republican,” Mr. Bocknek said. “The push from the far left has been significant, and there is a definite slice of the community who feel politically homeless right now.”

In synagogue halls and on group texts, Jewish voters have engaged in intense arguments over how to navigate the election.

Rabbi Starr addressed the situation directly in his Rosh Hashana sermon.

“For us as Jews, for us as Americans, the world feels, quite simply, on fire,” he said that day. He added, “I am worried not only about feeling afraid, but about becoming a fearful person.”

He concluded with a startling rephrase of Dr. El-Sayed: “Hurt people help people.”

A few days later, another rabbi asked if he could use the quote on lawn signs, which now pop up around the neighborhood. (The signs infuriate Ms. Salman, who believes Dr. El-Sayed has apologized enough for his statement.)

Still, there is far from unanimous thinking among Jews. Jeremy Zeltzer, a local Democratic fund-raiser, recently organized a gathering for skeptical Jewish voters to speak directly with Dr. El-Sayed.

“There is nothing more quintessentially American than to listen, hear, and ask tough questions,” Mr. Zeltzer said.

Marcie Paul, a Democrat activist who attended the event, said she has been so consumed by the election that “it is in my dreams.” Every day, she said, she talks with friends who are weighing whether they are more worried about Mr. Trump or Dr. El-Sayed.

“I know I will vote for him,” she said of the Democrat. “And I will complain about it endlessly.”

Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says - The New York Times

2026-10-26T22:52:55.465-04:00

Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says

"The panel also accuses Israel of committing crimes against humanity in the West Bank. Israel condemned the report.

Oct. 26, 2026, 4:30 p.m. ET

An Israeli strike on a Gaza City mosque in July.Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

A commission of United Nations human rights experts said on Monday that Israel was committing genocidal acts against Palestinian civilians in Gaza despite a cease-fire agreement there and carrying out crimes against humanity in the West Bank.

The report by the U.N. Independent Commission of Inquiry, which comes on the eve of Israel’s first general election since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, is meant to look at the drivers of violence by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the panel said. It said that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian children and was using torture, rape and sexual violence as part of a broader attack aimed at displacing and subjugating the Palestinian population.

Israel immediately rejected the claims.

The report, delivered to the U.N. General Assembly, noted that between the cease-fire announced on Oct. 10, 2025, and the end of September 2026, Israeli airstrikes, artillery and gunfire had killed 1,431 Palestinians in Gaza, including 300 children. The report rejected a claim in May by the Board of Peace set up by President Trump that the cease-fire had “largely held.”

The combined findings of the U.N. commission, an independent panel of three human rights experts that has already released multiple reports, represent the most authoritative legal analysis of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza pending a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague on an allegation of genocide filed by South Africa.

“The intentional killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians and destruction of homes in the West Bank combined with Israel’s persistent denial of responsibility form part of a broader strategy to exterminate and displace Palestinians and impose conditions of life that are unlivable,” Srinivasan Muralidhar, an Indian lawyer who serves as the panel’s chairman, said in a statement accompanying the report.

The commission also includes Chris Sidoti, an Australian expert on international human rights law who has served on the panel since it was set up in 2021; and Florence Mumba, a Zambian judge who served on international criminal tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

The commission cited a series of Israeli airstrikes, artillery bombardments and sniper attacks in Gaza and said they “show that Israeli authorities and forces continue to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza.”

Israel’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva called the report misinformation and an attempt to demonize Israel.

Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador in Geneva, condemned what it called “efforts by actors such as the U.N. Commission of Inquiry to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and deny its fundamental right to exist and defend itself.”

The U.N. panel first asserted that Israel committed genocide in the war in Gaza in September 2025, when the commission was led by Navi Pillay, who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The new report said that Israel’s government and security forces had deliberately inflicted death, severe injury and mental harm on Palestinian children, amounting to “age-based persecution.”

It also said that since a report on sexual violence in March 2025, the commission had verified more cases against detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, including gang rape, groping, forced nudity and cavity searches. It also said the commission had investigated two cases of sexual violence against participants in a flotilla of about 50 boats that were apprehended in the Mediterranean Sea as they tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

The panel said Israeli forces were increasingly applying lethal force against Palestinians in the West Bank, killing 1,080 Palestinians since the cease-fire agreement.

The West Bank has experienced soaring levels of settler violence, but the commission said Israeli security forces were responsible for 95 percent of killings and 82 percent of injuries to Palestinians in this period.

The combination of Israeli military operations and settler violence “had formed part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population in the West Bank,” the panel said, committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The targeting of children by security forces and settlers was deliberate and intended to form part of the attack on the civilian population, it said.

Israeli military operations since January 2025 had driven more than 34,000 Palestinians from their homes by August 2026, in what the commission said amounted to the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967, when Israel captured the territory from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year.

The commission also said that the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, had used excessive force resulting in killings in the course of large-scale operations targeting Palestinians wanted by Israel and conducted in coordination with the Israeli authorities.

Over a period of about two years up to October 2025, such operations had resulted in the deaths of at least 14 Palestinians, the commission reported. The Palestinian Authority responded harshly to criticism of these operations, targeting journalists and human rights defenders in an attempt to silence dissent, it said.

Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations at Geneva, said in response: “We remain committed to ensuring that law enforcement respects the law and human rights, including freedom of expression and the work of journalists and human rights defenders. Any misconduct will be addressed.”"

Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says - The New York Times

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say - The New York Times

2026-10-26T22:49:48.356-04:00

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say

"Israel’s military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter.

Oct. 26, 2026Updated 9:34 p.m. ET

A campaign billboard in Tel Aviv depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump on Monday, the eve of Israel’s national election.Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Leer en español

In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter.

Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.

Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

The Israeli officials and the people briefed on the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale for pressing to attack Iran before the election was not clear, but a return to war could have potentially disrupted or even delayed the vote.

The behind-the-scenes tensions over a possible Israeli attack or other action against Iran come as Mr. Netanyahu has been publicly portraying the stakes of the election in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Over the weekend, he posted an A.I.-generated image on social media of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv and warned in a television appearance that the vote would decide “Israel’s existence.”

The appeals to Israelis’ fears are meant to get voters to see the conflict with Iran as the most urgent issue and to entrust him with continuing to lead the struggle against Israel’s chief regional adversary.

When Mr. Netanyahu pushed to heat up the conflict with Iran, General Zamir raised a number of objections and concerns and ultimately concluded that there was no immediate or urgent need for action, the officials and people briefed on the matter said.

Such a determination by the military chief carries special weight: It can make it harder to portray the timing as a military necessity.

While General Zamir was not opposed to taking action against Iran in principle, he objected to doing so before the election, according to an Israeli official and two people briefed on the matter. General Zamir and the Israeli air force commander, Maj. Gen. Omer Tischler, cited the political sensitivities and the difficulty of explaining to the public why it had to occur then, according to two senior Israeli defense officials.

In a statement, the Israeli military said its operational decision making was strictly based “on security considerations,” as well as “its responsibility as a national institution.”

The concerns about political motivations for an attack on Iran do not expire on Tuesday. According to three senior Israeli defense officials and two people briefed on the matter, a resumption of fighting with Iran in the weeks after the election could also have a large impact.

If Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents prevail in the election, they would likely have an opportunity to form the new government, but a return to war could hinder or even thwart their ability to assemble a governing coalition within the time allotted by law. Renewed fighting could also create political pressure to establish a national unity government that includes Mr. Netanyahu.

Reports of disagreement between Mr. Netanyahu and the military over a possible attack, first carried by Israel’s Channel 12, sparked outrage in Israel. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s rivals, Avigdor Liberman, demanded Monday that the attorney general open an investigation into whether the prime minister had committed treason.

“The attempt to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including sacrificing Israeli soldiers, just because of the fear of losing the elections, is a betrayal of the nation,” Mr. Liberman, a defense minister and foreign minister in earlier Netanyahu governments, wrote in a formal complaint.

Mr. Netanyahu, 77, is battling to keep his hold on power in the face of opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff.

Mr. Netanyahu’s appeals to voters became increasingly disturbing over the campaign’s final weekend, with the prime minister saying that his defeat could lead to Israel’s annihilation. He has also suggested that tougher times could be ahead for Israel regardless of the outcome.

On Friday, he said that Israelis should prepare for the end of billions of dollars in American military support from the United States, given the sharp decline of Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion. He also said the possibility that Israel will face “banking sanctions” arising from international condemnation could force the country in coming years to rely on cryptocurrency to circumvent the penalties.

The remarks prompted a wave of criticism. Israel’s nonpartisan central bank, the Bank of Israel, issued a rare warning, saying that cryptocurrency would not save the economy in the event of international sanctions. And a former governor of the Bank of Israel, Jacob Frenkel, said that turning away from the global financial system would make Israel into “a leper.”

Opposition leaders accused Mr. Netanyahu of essentially accepting that Israel would become a pariah state.

“He’s lost it,” said Yair Lapid, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s centrist rivals. “Israel’s prime minister, in an election campaign, is saying three days before the elections to vote for him and he’ll ensure that Israel stays isolated.”

For weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has also been saying that Iran might attack Israel in an attempt to sabotage the elections — statements that some military analysts consider destabilizing. His messaging became even more dire over the weekend.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Netanyahu posted the image of an A.I.-generated cloud from a nuclear blast mushrooming over Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest metropolis. He attached a quote from a supporter to the effect that the scandals dogging him — he is currently facing trial on corruption charges, which he denies — were a distraction from “the real and tangible existential danger” that Iran posed.

Iran denies that it is pursuing a nuclear weapon but has also repeatedly threatened Israel, which is widely believed to have its own nuclear arsenal.

Hours later, Mr. Netanyahu gave one of the final interviews of his election campaign to Israel’s Channel 14, a network that largely echoes the prime minister’s talking points. He warned that his right-wing bloc was facing possible defeat.

“It’s not in our pocket and it’s not a lost cause,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

The prime minister warned that Israel was at risk of joining the ranks of countries like Belgium, Britain and France that, he said, have been “ruined” by an alliance between “the left and radical Islam.”

Rising to his feet, Mr. Netanyahu likened himself to a Jewish leader warning 1930s European Jewry of the impending Holocaust. Mr. Netanyahu said Mr. Eisenkot and his allies would not do what was necessary and vowed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and topple its government.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly boasted of having destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, only to speak of it as if it remains an imminent threat. “We cannot live side by side with this bomb,” he said. “Either they will either destroy us or we will destroy that poisonous cult.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents also believe the future of their country is hanging in the balance on Tuesday. Many liberal Israelis fear that this election is their last chance to prevent their country from becoming an authoritarian state, under the sway of the religious right and shunned on the world stage.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Eisenkot made his own final pitch to voters, calling for the country to come together “to save our Israel.” He vowed to order an inquiry into the government’s failure to prevent the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, uproot Hamas’s rule in Gaza within 18 months and force Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies, now exempted from military service, to share the burden of conscription.

“At stake in the elections is nothing less than the security of Israel and the survival of the Israeli story as we know it,” Mr. Eisenkot said.

David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.

Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.

Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Adam Rasgon is a reporter for The Times in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporter covering Israel and Gaza. He is based in Jerusalem.

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Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say - The New York Times

Republicans should have to answer for Elon Musk

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2026-10-26T15:46:21.569-04:00

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Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says - The New York Times

Israel Has Committed Genocidal Acts in Gaza Since Cease-Fire, U.N. Human Rights Panel Says

"The panel also accuses Israel of committing crimes against humanity in the West Bank. Israel condemned the report.

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say - The New York Times

Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say

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