Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative October 2026 news and views

Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this. 

Oct. 27

Top Headlines

• New York Times, The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference, Richard Fausset, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David W. Chen, Oct. 27, 2026. State and local plans for Election Day include how to react to potential I.C.E. raids, misbehavior by federal election monitors and attempts to seize votes or machines.

Special Reports: More On This Week's 11 Rape Allegations Against Trump

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The rape allegations against Trump: what we know and what is still being hidden, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 27, 2026. A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats contains new details about the Trump-Epstein relationship — and an alleged cover-up.
• Legal AF, Trump NIGHTMARE Goes to Print as Dems Issue Report Describing Trump as a Sex abuser Equal to Epstein, Michael Popok, right, Oct 26, 2026. Host Michael Popok reports on a devastating new 53-page report issued by the House Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Jamie Raskin that -- based on new evidence never disclosed before from sex abuse survivors of Trump --  Trump committed sex abuse alongside Epstein in dozens in cases. The Report calls for the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to go after Trump and others.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:Democrats Drop A Massive Epstein October Surprise On Trump And The GOP, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.

Special Report: Former Trump Appointee Launches "Corruption'" Documentary

• Defiance.org, We added up the corruption in Trump’s Washington. The number will blow you away, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.

News Roundups

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Wave Goodbye to a Republican Congress, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 27, 2026. Knock wood. Throw salt. Cross your fingers.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Alarm Bells Go Off as Trump Jr. Hunts With Russian Oligarch, Court Orders Release of Musk’s Election Emails, Trump has Brutal Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Election Day is one week away, and today’s news shows why the stakes have never been higher. Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with a Kremlin-linked oligarch who helped pay for his wedding celebrations. Former counterintelligence officials are sounding the alarm, and Trump’s Justice Department won’t investigate.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Third Time’s the Charge, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Donald Trump really wants to see James Comey go to jail, and he’s not about to let a little thing like “Comey never committing any crimes” stop him from trying. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Comey for a preposterous third time, now over threadbare old accusations that he ordered his staff to leak information to a reporter while serving as FBI director in October 2016.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 26, 2026 [Trump Hurts Republicans], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.
• Hope for America, Opinion: J.D. Vance told the truth, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 26-27, 2026. At 12:42 this afternoon (Monday), the Vice President of the United States stood at the podium inside an airport hangar in Belgrade, Montana, with bleachers full of supporters behind him and a much thinner crowd of people on the floor in front of him.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With Seven Days To Go The GOP’s Battlefield Keeps Deteriorating And Democrats Are Driving Deep Into Red States And Red Places, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 27, 2026. The people of Hungary chose wisely. The people of Serbia and Brazil also chose wisely. May the people of Israel choose wisely today, and let the American people continue to choose wisely in these final seven days of the 2026 Election.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Rubbing a Rabbit’s Foot, William Kristol, right, Oct. 27, 2026. We’re a week out from election day, and things continue to look good. In fact, I’ve got to say, they’re looking a little bit better every day. 
• New York Times, An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America, Eve Washington, Nate Cohn and Rumsey Taylor, Oct. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Which state has America’s worst gerrymander? After a year of redistricting battles, we have an answer.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer,Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. 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.

More Global News

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner). 

• New York Times, The Digital Army That Catapulted Lula to Victory in Brazil, Ana Ionova, Adam B. Ellick and Jack Nicas, Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won another term on Sunday, with the help of a seismic social media campaign that convinced Brazilians to reject his rival.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

• New York Times, Judge Temporarily Blocks Further Alterations at D.C.’s East Potomac Park, Zach Montague, Updated Oct. 27, 2026. A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from cutting trees and prohibited other changes at the park where the president has sought to overhaul a golf course.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets`New York Times,

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Problems, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 27, 2026. As the midterms loom, he’s finally admitting the obvious. If Republicans do implode as badly next Tuesday as the current polls suggest, there will be two main reasons. One is Trump’s epic corruption, which finally seems to be getting traction as a campaign issue, second only to the cost of living. The other is soaring energy prices, which are both a major cause of overall inflation and especially visible since they’re posted on big signs in front of every gas station across the country.
• New York Times, Inside the Billionaires’ War Against California’s Proposed Wealth Tax, Theodore Schleifer and Erin Griffith, Oct. 27, 2026. The latest Silicon Valley billionaire club is a $333 million political ad machine that is heavily engaged in next week’s elections.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• Robert Reich, Opinion: Musk Wants Me Imprisoned, Robert Reich, Oct. 27, 2026. I’m not worried, but I do worry about everyone who’s vulnerable to Musk, Trump, and the other bullies in this might-makes-right era. 

On Saturday’s “Coffee Klatch” podcast, I said: "Democrats ought to “defund Musk” and lay “the groundwork for nationalizing” Starlink and SpaceX." (My full Coffee Klatch argument is here.) This seems to have set Elon Musk off. He posted to his 241,700,000 followers: “Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”

Top Stories

President Trump frequently portrays himself on his Truth Social or via White House as an all-powerful king (as at top) or emporer annointed by God and backed by security forces and the military, as in this portrayal above by former Repubicans who organized the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. The political, military and economic chaos extends to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, selective tariffs helping insiders and Trump's transformation of U.S. longstanding alliances with Canada, Europe and NATO into adversaries whom he disdains while courting profitable deals from Russia, as newly documented this week, benefiting his family and allies.

New York Times, The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference, Richard Fausset, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David W. Chen, Oct. 27, 2026. State and local plans for Election Day include how to react to potential I.C.E. raids, misbehavior by federal election monitors and attempts to seize votes or machines.

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.

Special Reports: More On This Week's 11 Rape Allegations Against Trump

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The rape allegations against Trump: what we know and what is still being hidden, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 27, 2026. A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats contains new details about the Trump-Epstein relationship — and an alleged cover-up.

On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new staff report about President Trump’s alleged relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The report details allegations involving 11 women, including five of whom accuse “Trump of rape or sexual assault in Jeffrey Epstein’s close company or presence.”

The report is based on interviews conducted by Judiciary Committee staff, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records, released documents, and survivor accounts. While the majority of the allegations included in the report were already public, it includes a new allegation that Trump raped a young model at a 1993 pageant.

“The report concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s,” a press release states.

The report alleges that “Trump has lied about the nature and extent of his relationship with Epstein dozens of times.” For example, Trump has claimed that he kicked Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago. But according to the report, members of Congress reviewed a 2009 document that reveals that Trump “stated unequivocally that Epstein ‘was never asked to leave’ Mar-a-Lago.” The file is redacted in public documents. Trump has also denied ever being on Epstein’s plane, but files show that Trump is listed on the plane’s flight logs “at least eight different times” throughout the 1990s.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are now asking for a new independent investigation. The report calls for an independent special counsel to be appointed to investigate potential co-conspirators.

A press release argues that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) “conflict of interest and obstruction make clear that Trump’s appointees cannot be trusted to pursue accountability.” The report alleges that the DOJ “actively obstructed the Epstein investigation into any co-conspirators, attempted to prevent the release of the Epstein files, and then released an incomplete and heavily redacted set to the public.”

The report also reveals that documents in the Epstein files allege that Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Deputy Attorney General at the time, “likely knew about certain survivors’ claims against” Trump when he interviewed Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. According to a transcript, Blanche, on at least three occasions, “directed Maxwell not to discuss” an individual whose report to the FBI implicated Trump, but whose allegations were not yet public. The report alleges that by doing so, Blanche “may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice.”

“The bottom line: there is more than sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation,” the report states.

“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard, Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice,” Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said.

The White House has denied the allegations laid out in the new report. “None of these allegations are true. This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” a White House spokesperson told NBC News.“I will take care of you”

The report reveals new allegations against Trump from Beatrice Keul, a former Swiss model who participated in the Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant in 1993 at age 24.

According to an interview she gave to committee staff, both Trump and Epstein introduced themselves to Keul when she arrived and promised to take care of things like her travel and education. Keul said Trump told her “I will take care of you” several times. So, when a Trump representative asked her to come to his room later in the day, she assumed he was following up on his promises to get her a visa and a New York University education.

Instead, Keul alleges that Trump raped her in a “brutal” assault that left her bleeding and covered in bruises. She said she went through the rest of the pageant in a “daze” because her passport had been taken from her and she did not want to raise alarms. After the pageant, she got her passport back and returned to Switzerland. She declined to participate in another Trump-sponsored pageant a few weeks later, but Trump called her and repeated his offer to take care of her.

In 2024, Keul told a different version of this story to the Daily Mail. At the time, she said when she arrived in Trump’s room, he “jumped” on her and began “grabbing and touching” her, but that ultimately she was able to hold him off. “I’m very tall, that’s what helped me a lot,” Keul said to the Daily Mail. The report does not say why Keul changed her story.

The report also includes the stories of four other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault.

Stacey Williams, a swimsuit model who dated Epstein in the early 1990s, has accused Trump of groping her when she and Epstein visited Trump’s office in 1993. According to CNN, three friends of Williams have separately confirmed that she told them about the incident, which Williams later described as “trophy hunting” for the two men.

Jill Harth, who recruited young models for Trump’s pageants, filed a lawsuit against Trump in 1997 claiming that he had “forcibly kissed, fondled, and restrained” her at a Mar-a-Lago party in 1993 when she was 31. The lawsuit also claimed that the same year, Trump had demanded Harth provide him with access to an 18-year-old contestant “whom Trump referred to as a ‘sex object.’” Harth’s lawsuit was resolved as a part of a settlement by Trump in a separate contractual suit brought against him by Harth’s then-partner.

A woman identified by the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” filed a lawsuit against Trump in 2016 accusing him of raping and sexually abusing her in 1994 at a party hosted by Epstein when she was 13 years old. According to DOJ documents, Johnson “was asked to strip down to her underwear and give a massage to Epstein” and “massage the penis of Epstein’s guest, Trump, with her hands.” Johnson later dropped the suit.

In 2019, a woman described as Jane Doe 4 came to the FBI with claims that in 1983, when she was 13 or 14 years old, she “bit [Trump] while performing oral sex” and that he “hit [her] in the face after she laughed about biting [him].”

Although Jane Doe 4’s claims have not been substantiated, the report alleges that the DOJ may be “still withholding a huge number of documents related to the allegations,” stating that the Post and Courier reported that it had reviewed FBI agents’ notes that contained new details about Jane Doe 4’s interview, but that those notes have been withheld by the DOJ for being “duplicative.”

In addition to these five women who claim to have been abused by Trump, the report also details the accounts of three Epstein survivors who believe that Trump participated in Epstein’s crimes.

Maria Farmer, a former assistant to Epstein who was abused by him, has said that on one occasion she went to meet Epstein in his office and Trump approached her there. But Epstein told Trump, “No, no. She’s not here for you,” before taking Trump to a different room. Farmer believed that there was a different young woman in that room waiting for Trump. She has said that she urged authorities to look into Trump decades ago. According to the report, Farmer’s “reports to FBI appear to be unlawfully omitted from the files released by DOJ pursuant to” the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).

DOJ documents released under the EFTA detail other concerning incidents involving Trump. In one case, Trump was accused of agreeing with Epstein that one of Epstein’s victims, who was 14 at the time, was a “good one.” In another instance, a Jane Doe described how she was introduced to Trump by Maxwell and felt she was being offered to him for sex. She recalled Maxwell saying “things like, ‘Oh I think he likes you. Aren’t you lucky. This is great.’”

The report also provides three additional examples of women who seemed to have connections to Trump and Epstein. The first woman, Lauren Petrella, has never made accusations against Trump herself, but Harth’s lawsuit claimed that he sexually assaulted her. The other two women, Jane Does 5 and 6, spent time with Trump and Epstein during the 1990s, but have not accused Trump of any wrongdoing. 

• Legal AF, Trump NIGHTMARE Goes to Print as Dems Issue Report Describing Trump as a Sex abuser Equal to Epstein, Michael Popok, right, Oct 26, 2026. Host Michael Popok reports on a devastating new 53-page report issued by the House Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Jamie Raskin that -- based on new evidence never disclosed before from sex abuse survivors of Trump --  Trump committed sex abuse alongside Epstein in dozens in cases. The Report calls for the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to go after Trump and others.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:Democrats Drop A Massive Epstein October Surprise On Trump And The GOP, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.

Special Report: Former Trump Appointee Launches "Corruption'" Documentary 

Defiance.org, We added up the corruption in Trump’s Washington. The number will blow you away, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.

We added up the corruption in Trump’s Washington. The number will blow you away.

Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.

Nobody in Washington ever bothered to add it all up, so we did. The volume of alleged corruption in Donald Trump’s Washington is now roughly $377 billion.

In fact, we put it on a map. That’s what the CORRUPTIONLAND ledger came to when we analyzed 100 documented episodes of alleged corruption and abuses of power since Donald Trump was re-elected. Each of those episodes was built from court filings, government records, congressional documents, or reporting by established news organizations. And we released them today alongside a documentary film about all of it: CORRUPTIONLAND.

Before you go look, I want to tell you about that figure and why it surprised me.

First, $377 billion is a measure of scale. It shows you how breathtaking the corruption has become and how the swamp Trump promised to “drain” has gotten deeper than ever. This includes public money, private benefit, and the transaction volumes tied to those 100 episodes. Some of it landed with the president’s family. But the bulk of the ledger is money that belongs to you that has been misappropriated, mismanaged, or used as a tool of political coercion. (Our friends at States United and Grant Witness Project have already documented the up-to $170 billion in taxpayer dollars wiped out by Trump.)

Second, as staggering as that figure is, it’s not even the full picture. We only picked 100 alleged instances of corruption to measure. And fifty-nine of those entries have no dollar figure at all, because you can’t put a price tag on a fired inspector general or a presidential critic thrown in jail or the many thousands of federal employees fired or pushed out of their jobs. What’s more, the figure excludes hard-to-measure acts of corruption, which nonetheless have seismic economic implications. For example, Trump’s retaliatory tariffs surely add up to untold billions in costs for Americans and the global economy, yet they’re excluded from this tracker because of that immeasurable magnitude.

We’re living in one of the gravest periods of corruption in American history.

And here’s what surprised me most in filming CORRUPTIONLAND and researching these cases. The individual scandals aren’t really the story. Yes, they’re shocking — from the ballroom and the jet to the Trump-branded monument arch and the fishy pardons — and any one of them would have consumed a normal presidency for months. But when you put it all on a map you see that it’s become systematized.

When I first started working in Washington, I learned that there are five basic layers, or “corruption filters” as I call them, designed to catch wrongdoing before it happens or gets too far. That includes ethics lawyers in the White House… prosecutors and agents at Justice and the FBI… “inside watchdogs,” like inspectors general and whistleblowers in the agencies themselves… “outside watchdogs,” like a free press and the groups that sue a law-breaking government in court… and finally Congress. The film walks through these layers and shows how the filtration system has been deliberately sabotaged. The result is a seemingly endless stream of filth — wrongdoing, self-enrichment, weaponized power — into our republic.

But something else changed while we were making this film. Americans caught up.

We were the first to observe that all of this “corruption” has set a record in the eyes of the people. Never before has the issue been the number-one voting issue headed into an American election, at least not since polling began in the 1930s. Yet today it is. Survey after survey finds that supermajorities of Democrats and Republicans are furious about corruption in the United States, even more so than economic conditions, and it’s led to a hyper-populist, anti-incumbent mood across the nation. The president’s own approval has sunk to 30 percent in Pew’s latest survey, which only happens when millions of his own voters walk away in disgust.

I hope you’ll use this documentary and the data for what they are: alarm bells for our democracy. Last night, we premiered CORRUPTIONLAND for thousands of DEFIANCE.org Members, and we heard from Rep. Jason Crow and other people from the film. This morning, all Americans get a chance to see it, and hopefully they will be stirred to action.

So here’s my ask, one week out from the election:

Watch it. It’s 35 minutes and it’s free at corruptionland.org as of right now.

Send it to one person who needs to see it. The point is to wake more Americans up to the fact that our republic is in danger from grift, graft, and the people perpetuating it.

Then vote. Early voting is open almost everywhere. Four of the five corruption filters have been nearly destroyed. The fifth one is on your ballot, and you can actually do something about it.

They kicked us out of the Washington Monument for filming this (true story). But they cannot stop you from watching it. 

News Roundups

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Wave Goodbye to a Republican Congress, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 27, 2026. Knock wood. Throw salt. Cross your fingers.

Can Bibi Netanyahu hang on? Israel’s six-term prime minister faces a stiff challenge in Israel’s elections today. Polls show the bloc led by Netanyahu’s Likud party neck and neck with the bloc led by former military chief Gadi Einsenkot’s Yashar party, and voters are turning out at levels not seen in Israel for half a century.

Meanwhile, Yair Golan of the Democrats party faced an apparent assassination attempt at an election-day campaign stop just hours ago. Happy Tuesday.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Alarm Bells Go Off as Trump Jr. Hunts With Russian Oligarch, Court Orders Release of Musk’s Election Emails, Trump has Brutal Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Election Day is one week away, and today’s news shows why the stakes have never been higher. Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with a Kremlin-linked oligarch who helped pay for his wedding celebrations. Former counterintelligence officials are sounding the alarm, and Trump’s Justice Department won’t investigate.

In Texas, a former Republican House speaker says his party is “freaking out” about losing the state for the first time in more than 30 years. Trump also had a bad Monday. A federal judge blocked his D.C. golf course project after his own posts contradicted his administration’s sworn testimony, and a heckler at his Mississippi rally told him exactly what to do with his ballroom. Overseas, Israelis are voting today in an election that has become a referendum on the war with Iran and Netanyahu personally.

The Trump Jr. story isn’t happening in a vacuum. We went back 50 years and documented exactly how Donald Trump is connected to the Russians, from Soviet spy operations to Trump Tower. We named the names, followed the money, and laid it all out. We don’t have corporate owners or billionaire backers telling us what to cover, and we won’t back down when the stories get uncomfortable for powerful people.

It’s just the beginning. Some people want us to stop. We’re only going to push harder. One more thing: I’m scheduled to interview Kamala Harris this afternoon. Stay tuned, because you won’t want to miss it.

Let’s get into the news.

Counterintelligence Officials Sound the Alarm After Trump Jr. Goes Hunting With a Kremlin-Linked Oligarch

Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with Umar Kremlev, the Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch who helped bankroll his wedding celebrations, according to the Financial Times. The trip took place in late August, after the wedding, at a remote camp in western Mongolia. Kremlev flew in on a charter from Kazakhstan with Arthur Martirosov, a partner in Voskhod, a venture fund under U.S. sanctions. One participant said Trump Jr. and Kremlev took care not to be photographed together at the camp. Trump Jr. also killed an endangered Altai argali mountain sheep and had dinner with Mongolia’s president, while the U.S. Embassy paid $18,715 for hotel rooms tied to a Secret Service “visit” during the trip. A spokesperson for Trump Jr. said the two have “a personal friendship, not a business relationship,” built on their love of hunting, and said it “shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that they went hunting together.”

Former counterintelligence officials warn that Russia will try to exploit the relationship, whatever Trump Jr.’s intentions. “It really doesn’t matter if people have the most above board intentions,” said Holden Triplett, who served as director of counterintelligence on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term. “The moment the Russian security and intelligence services figure out someone has a relationship with anyone of high value, they will try to weaponize that.” Intelligence experts consulted by the FT said relationships like this create favorable conditions for manipulation. Kremlev is a close Putin ally who has traveled in Putin’s official delegations, and ProPublica reported last month that he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump Jr.’s post-wedding celebrations. Kremlev later said Trump Jr. paid him back, while President Trump said he had “no idea who Umar is.”

Despite the concerns, Trump’s Justice Department has signaled it won’t investigate. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has indicated he won’t open an investigation into the wedding payments. That leaves Congress: the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee opened an inquiry after ProPublica’s report, and Democrats have promised a broader investigation if they win the House. The trip adds to a pattern of Trump family ties to Russia that critics say deserve scrutiny. A New York Times report in August, based on FBI memos released by the White House, showed that a 2017 FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s own ties to Russia was effectively shut down before it got going. Trump has always dismissed claims that he was compromised by Russia as baseless smears, and no publicly known investigation found he acted at Russia’s direction.

The revelations land as Mitch McConnell blasts Trump’s approach to Putin as “factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Republican senator, who chairs the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee, said Trump’s “obsequious accommodation of Russia” won’t persuade Putin to stop. He criticized Trump’s claim that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine,” his diesel deal with Putin, and his sanctions relief, warning that threatening to cut off Ukraine’s intelligence and satellite access “could prolong the war, not shorten it.” McConnell also mocked envoy Steve Witkoff’s description of Putin as a humanitarian: “Mr. Putin is many things, but he is no humanitarian.” He warned that “ending the obeisance to Mr. Putin may be table stakes” for the year-end defense bill. “The president should plan accordingly,” he wrote.

Texas Republicans Scramble as Trump Rallies in the State and a Judge Orders Abbott to Hand Over His Elon Musk Emails

A judge has ordered Gov. Greg Abbott to let his Democratic challenger, Gina Hinojosa, see his office’s unredacted communications with Elon Musk. Travis County Judge Catherine Mauzy issued a temporary restraining order Monday giving Hinojosa, a state legislator, access to the records by 10 a.m. Thursday. The dispute centers on 1,374 pages of communications that Abbott’s office gave to The Texas Newsroom, all but about 200 of which were redacted or completely blacked out. Abbott’s office had argued that some of the withheld material was “intimate and embarrassing” and not of legitimate public concern. Hinojosa, who must sign a confidentiality agreement and can’t publicly release the contents, points to billions in state incentives for Musk’s companies, including a reported $1.66 billion tax break that followed a $500,000 Musk donation to Abbott’s campaign. Abbott’s spokesperson called the lawsuit “baseless” and “an act of desperation,” and Abbott is expected to appeal, with a hearing set for Nov. 2. Here is Hinojosa’s response:

Trump is heading to Texas for the fourth time in recent weeks as Republicans fight to hold a state they’ve dominated for decades. He’s holding rallies Tuesday in Lubbock and Corpus Christi, while Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico campaigns in nearby Midland. Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton by less than three points in the Decision Desk HQ polling average, in a race that is also a test of Trump, who backed Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn in the primary. The Corpus Christi stop is aimed at Hispanic voters, who helped Trump make big gains in South Texas in 2024. But a Cook Political Report and TelevisaUnivision poll finds Talarico leading Paxton 63 percent to 30 percent among likely Hispanic voters, with the economy ranked ahead of immigration as their top concern. Abbott, who has won every previous race by double digits, is now running neck and neck with Hinojosa, according to Texas Monthly.

Former Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan says his party is “freaking out” about losing statewide for the first time in more than three decades. “It’s real. People are freaking out. You see it in their faces. There’s serious concern like I’ve never seen before,” Phelan told Texas Monthly. He blamed the economy, saying the Trump administration “just did not deliver” and calling it “a bust” on gas, diesel, and groceries, along with an Iran war he called “grossly unpopular.” He said Hispanic voters, suburban women, college-educated voters, and voters under 45 who backed Republicans last cycle “are not with us this cycle.” Phelan warned that if Talarico wins by six or seven points, “it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot.” He said it took “half a billion dollars to defend Texas,” which “tells you where we are as a party.”

Phelan, who led the impeachment of Paxton, says he won’t vote for him and that other Republicans are telling him the same. “There’s not a world in which I can vote for a Ken Paxton,” Phelan said, adding that he’s skipping the race for now and has never voted for a Democrat. He called Talarico a friend who has run “a better job than any Democrat I’ve seen in thirty years.” Phelan said Fort Worth Republicans have approached him at football games saying they’re skipping the race or “may actually vote for a Democrat the first time ever,” something he said no one told him about Ted Cruz in 2018. He also criticized his party’s messaging, saying Republicans have spent “$100 million, $125 million in ads” on issues like transgender athletes that swing voters “don’t even know what you’re talking about.” “This is either going to be the worst polling that I’ve seen in modern history or I think Democrats can actually win a seat or two or maybe more,” he said.

Trump Takes Two Personal Hits as a Judge Blocks His D.C. Golf Course Project and a Heckler Mocks His Ballroom

A federal judge has blocked Trump’s pet project to rebuild a public golf course in Washington and said his own Truth Social posts contradicted sworn testimony from his administration. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a preliminary injunction that bars the Interior Department and the National Park Service from removing or damaging any more trees at East Potomac Golf Links. Her order also requires 10 business days’ written notice before any “irreparable modification” to the park while the case continues. Reyes had already found that the government acted in “bad faith” when it cut down more than 400 trees over the Columbus Day weekend. In her 70-page opinion, she found the government likely violated federal environmental law by taking a “chop-first, review-later approach.” “The Court still does not speak for the trees,” she wrote. “It speaks only for the rule of law.”

Trump’s own words sank his case, with the judge writing that his Justice Department was effectively asking the court not to believe the president. DOJ lawyers told the court there was no renovation plan and that the tree removal was routine maintenance. But Trump posted that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and an architect had “developed a plan to build a World Class Championship Golf Course,” then said work would begin “IMMEDIATELY!” “Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President,” Reyes wrote. “And yet, here we are.” She also rejected the administration’s argument that her order infringed on presidential power, writing that “’Separation of powers’ is not a talismanic incantation that permits the Executive to run amok, unchecked.”

Trump lashed out at the ruling in a late-night post and vowed to close the course anyway. Shortly before midnight, he wrote that Reyes “has absolutely no right to hold up this very important and beautiful Project” and called the notice requirement “time-consuming, unnecessary, expensive, and unconstitutional.” He said his administration would “immediately appeal” and would still close the course on Nov. 15 for renovations. The fight had already gotten personal: last week Trump called Reyes, a Biden appointee, “a crazed lunatic” and suggested she “may be insane.” He also posted overnight photos of debris and flooding at the course, claiming it had earned the nickname “Trash Island.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs, called Monday’s ruling “a big win” against the administration’s “greed and lawlessness.”

On the same day, a heckler at a Mississippi rally interrupted Trump to mock his White House ballroom. Speaking in a noticeably hoarse voice in Corinth while campaigning for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump was cut off by a protester who shouted, “Shove that ballroom up your fat a**!” Trump snapped “Oh, go home. Go home. Go home,” and then claimed without evidence that protesters are paid “$250” and that “they think it’s Soros.” It is the latest in a string of hecklers at his midterm rallies, including in Republican strongholds, as his party faces grim polling heading into November. Trump also fired back at Barack Obama, who mocked him over the weekend by saying, “Guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House.” The ballroom, which required tearing down the East Wing, has faced legal and political opposition from the start.

Israelis Vote as Netanyahu Pushes to “Finish the Job” in Iran and Trump Weighs Whether to Restart the War

Israelis went to the polls Tuesday in a tight election that has turned into a referendum on the eight-month war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has campaigned on his security record. He says only he can “finish the job” against Tehran and argues that his main challenger, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, “will not strike Iran.” Defense Minister Israel Katz urged voters to back the government, saying Israel had “struck Iran twice” and needed to continue on “this path in order to finish the job.” Eisenkot has accused Netanyahu of playing politics with national security on the eve of the vote. President Trump has endorsed Netanyahu enthusiastically, and Netanyahu told him last week that they have “a job to finish” in Iran. Iran’s foreign ministry said the outcome “makes no difference” to Tehran. We will have first results today at 4 PM EST. Netanyahu is appearing nervous today:

Trump says he is deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or “finish them off,” and observers warn the weeks right after the midterms could be especially dangerous. “I have a decision to make: Do I finish it off, which would be very easy to do, or do I make a deal?” Trump told Fox News on Sunday, after suggesting Friday that the U.S. “may do another little Epic Fury.” The U.S. has sent more forces to the region, including a third aircraft carrier group. At the same time, CBS News sources say the overall American military footprint in the Middle East is being quietly reduced. According to CBS, some observers believe the period between next Tuesday’s midterms and the start of the new Congress could be especially fraught. Iran’s foreign minister said renewed strikes wouldn’t change Tehran’s position: “They have already done so twice and have seen the results.”

There are signs of a rift inside Israel’s own military over the timing of new strikes, even as Netanyahu dismisses the reports as “rubbish.” Israel’s Channel 12 reported that army chief Eyal Zamir clashed with Netanyahu over an unspecified new directive on Iran. According to the report, Zamir demanded a detailed discussion, legal guarantees, and the signatures of political leaders before he would carry it out. A senior Israeli source says the report seems credible, noting that it passed Israel’s military censor, which would normally block a false national security story. The source said Zamir is not opposed to renewed attacks on Iran but objects to the timing, and that the military doesn’t believe anything requires a response before the election. Netanyahu and Katz have both denied any gap between the army and the government.

Across the region the war keeps spreading, with Egypt sending troops to Saudi Arabia and oil holding at around $116 a barrel. Egypt’s parliament authorized President el-Sisi to deploy forces to defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi missile and drone attacks, and a Houthi official called the move a “declaration of war.” Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan sent top officials to Tehran on Monday to try to keep the war from reigniting, and Iran called the talks “very good,” though they produced no concrete agreement. Air defenses at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shot down two drones on Tuesday, according to Al Arabiya, and an oil slick from an attacked tanker has reached UAE beaches and is threatening desalination plants. In Britain, two men were charged over an alleged Iran-linked plot targeting RAF Fairford, the base the U.S. used to launch strikes on Iran. U.S. Central Command says the naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue.

Other news:

The Trump administration is asking Washington state to set aside ballots from more than 400 people it claims are noncitizens, less than two weeks after making a similar demand in California. The Justice Department says it found 1,500 votes cast by 405 people in past elections, and the acting U.S. attorney in Seattle called that “the tip of the iceberg.” Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said one person on the list last voted in 1994, and he said the timing a week before the election “is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.” This is the third time this month the DOJ has challenged a state with competitive races while voting is already underway, after California and Alaska, where a lawsuit seeks to delay certification if the Republican incumbent loses. Washington’s third district, where Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is defending a seat Trump has won, is one of the most competitive House races in the country. In California, an appeals court panel questioned the timing and constitutionality of the DOJ’s demand and declined to fast-track it, and Los Angeles County found the federal list included inactive registrations and voters who appeared to be born in the U.S.

Former officials and scientists warn that Trump’s cuts to NOAA have left the country exposed to a potentially historic El Niño this winter. NOAA has lost more than 3,000 staffers since January 2025, about 20% of its workforce, and has hired only 525 replacements. The National Weather Service has about 10% fewer meteorologists heading into the fall, with hundreds of positions still vacant across its 122 forecast offices. This super El Niño is expected to supercharge storms in the West, raise sea levels in California by up to a foot, and set the stage for landslides and flash floods. “The system has not really been tested since all the cuts happened,” said former NOAA climate scientist Tom Di Liberto. Trump has proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by another $1.6 billion next year, and a former top NOAA official warned that if this is a real test, “we’re going to flunk.”

Jay-Z will headline the 2027 Super Bowl halftime show after years of producing it through his company, Roc Nation. The NFL, Apple Music, and Roc Nation announced Monday night that he will perform at Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. “From Reasonable Doubt to standing on the Super Bowl Halftime stage, this has been a journey,” the 56-year-old rapper said. Commissioner Roger Goodell said his only request when the NFL partnered with Roc Nation in 2019 was that Jay-Z take the stage himself one day. Jay-Z has won 25 Grammys and just wrapped his Jay-Z 30 tour at SoFi Stadium over the weekend. He follows Bad Bunny, who headlined last season’s show with guests including Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, and Cardi B.

China’s stock markets have lost $2.4 trillion since May, according to Bloomberg, as anxiety grows over the country’s AI race with the United States. The STAR 50 index, which tracks tech companies in Shanghai, has plunged 40% since June. AI stocks make up more than 40% of market value in China and Hong Kong, according to Goldman Sachs, so the slide is dragging down the whole market. Beijing has poured money into AI, including a new 60 billion yuan state-backed fund, but weak consumer demand means many tech companies struggle to turn a profit. U.S. bans on Chinese technology, including humanoid robots, are adding pressure, and shares of the leading robot maker Unitree have halved since they began trading in August. Meanwhile, Anthropic filed paperwork Monday for an IPO that could raise as much as $100 billion, and China has no blockbuster listings of its own on the horizon.

Flávio Bolsonaro was banned from leaving Brazil and ordered to surrender his passports just hours after losing the presidential election to Lula. The order came from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same judge who oversaw his father Jair Bolsonaro’s trial for attempting a coup. The ruling cites a federal police investigation into whether he was involved in a money-laundering scheme tied to betting companies suspected of laundering about £680 million. Bolsonaro blamed his brother Eduardo, who told a U.S. podcast that Flávio should leave Brazil if he lost, and insisted “I never said that.” Like his father four years ago, he has not conceded, though his party said it recognizes the result. Folha de S.Paulo reported that allies and lawyers talked him out of trying to annul the election because the argument was legally weak, and he will lose his immunity when his Senate term ends early next year.

Owners of Apple’s new $2,000 iPhone Duo say its folding screen is cracking, sometimes within hours, in what users are calling “crackgate.” Photos of cracked screens spread across social media within hours of Apple’s first foldable going on sale last week. “Maybe folded it four times, hinge got tight and then made a loud pop,” one owner wrote on Reddit. Apple told 9to5Mac it is “aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units” and told affected users to contact AppleCare for a replacement. The repair site iFixit suggested that dust and debris getting into the hinge could be one cause, and said the “hinge started crunching” when it tested the phone in fluorescent powder. The phone sold out within minutes of launch, and Apple had called demand “nothing short of extraordinary.”

International tourism to the U.S. kept falling in September, with overseas visitors down 5.7% from a year earlier. The National Travel and Tourism Office figures exclude visitors from Mexico and Canada. Visitors from Western Europe, the largest overseas market, are down 8.7% so far in 2026. The slump follows 2025, the first post-Covid decline, when 4 million fewer foreign visitors came than in 2024 and their spending fell by more than $8 billion. The World Cup gave only a brief boost, with arrivals up 2.7% in June. The U.S. remains well below its pre-pandemic level of more than 79 million visitors, and the World Travel & Tourism Council has warned that the country “is now at a crossroads.”

The FTC and 20 states are suing Dollar General, alleging it charged customers more at checkout than the prices on its shelves for years. The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in Tennessee, says the chain received at least 29,265 complaints about incorrect prices between January 2023 and March 2026, from all 48 states where it operates. Regulators say the overcharging hit low-income shoppers and people on fixed incomes especially hard. “Dollar General has betrayed the trust of millions of American consumers,” said Christopher Mufarrige, who leads the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. The suit follows an $8.5 million class-action settlement over similar claims and more than $6 million in penalties from seven state settlements since 2019. Dollar General said “occasional price discrepancies can occur” and vowed to “defend this litigation vigorously.”

Republican Rep. Randy Fine says the government should re-examine everyone naturalized as a U.S. citizen since 1990, and that even Melania Trump and Elon Musk should be deported if they lied on their paperwork. Fine made the comments on NewsNation while discussing the Oct. 12 raid by Homeland Security Investigations on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington. “I think Ilhan Omar needs to be the first. She certainly should not be the last,” he said. When asked about Melania and Musk, he said he knew of no allegations against them, but that “anyone who lied on their paperwork to become a citizen should be denaturalized and should be deported. Anyone.” The Washington Post reported that the Omar investigation concerns whether her father misstated her birth date on immigration paperwork, and she has not been charged. Omar denies any wrongdoing and says she has received death threats and is afraid to go back to her home after the raid.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Third Time’s the Charge, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Donald Trump really wants to see James Comey go to jail, and he’s not about to let a little thing like “Comey never committing any crimes” stop him from trying. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Comey for a preposterous third time, now over threadbare old accusations that he ordered his staff to leak information to a reporter while serving as FBI director in October 2016.

The filing, called a “criminal information,” isn’t the same thing as an indictment. To indict someone, prosecutors typically need to get the approval of a grand jury convened for the purpose. And while that’s usually a trivial barrier—prosecutors, they say, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich—the DOJ hasn’t met it yet here. Instead, the “information” is DOJ’s attempt to get around a deadline: The ten-year statute of limitations for the crime they want to charge Comey with, which expired earlier this month.

Even this is a major procedural stretch. “Typically an information must be agreed to by a defendant—and Comey did not consent here,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN yesterday. “It therefore likely cannot extend the statute of limitations.” Not that the charges would be likely to stick anyway: If Trump’s DOJ mooks thought this was a more promising route to jailing Comey than the “86 47” charges that were already laughed out of court, they would have gone with this one first. But the mooks don’t want to be the ones who have to tell Trump it’s a ridiculous prosecution; they’d much prefer to leave that task to a judge.

The new case, Comey said in a video posted online, “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.” His lawyers have already asked a judge to dismiss the charges.

Trump himself denied knowledge of the case. “I don’t know much about it. I just heard about it,” Trump said, adding a minute later: “I know nothing about it.” Not all of these statements can be true at once; in all likelihood, none of them are.

Meanwhile, other Comeys keep slipping through Trump’s fingers. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Comey’s daughter, former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, was unlawfully fired by the Justice Department last year.

The younger Comey, who has since taken a private-sector job, will not return to Justice. But Judge Jesse Furman granted her a retroactive reinstatement anyway, ordering the administration to give her back pay covering the period from her firing last summer through the end of last year. The court also declared that the government had violated her Fifth Amendment due process rights in firing her, as well as some other laws.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 26, 2026 [Trump Hurts Republicans], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.

On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.

Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.

So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.

The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.

On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.

As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.

California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.

On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.

It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.

But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.

Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.

This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”

Hope for America, Opinion: J.D. Vance told the truth, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 26-27, 2026. At 12:42 this afternoon (Monday), the Vice President of the United States stood at the podium inside an airport hangar in Belgrade, Montana, with bleachers full of supporters behind him and a much thinner crowd of people on the floor in front of him.

For nearly 30 minutes, he made racist remarks and bizarre accusations, engaged in fearmongering, complained about the weather, and shared how excited he was that a congressman had complimented his “beautiful blue eyes,” adding that the president, too, had been “noticing a lot about the physiques of everybody lately.” Then he said something he might not have meant to about the direct correlation between gas prices and Donald Trump: “They skyrocket every time some tin-pot dictator decides to throw a tantrum.”

What he said was even odder when you consider what CNN just reported: American forces in the Middle East are prepared to launch new, potentially major, military operations against Iran “within 96 hours of receiving” an order from Donald Trump. “It will be a big effort,” one U.S. official said, and the plans reportedly include strikes on a range of infrastructure, including nuclear sites. Officials in the report noted it was a question of when, not if, it would happen and said it could come any time before the end of the year. According to an Israeli security source, “The plans are ready, waiting for Trump’s approval, could be after the midterms.” The same reporting says Benjamin Netanyahu tried to convince Trump to launch a joint attack before the elections, and Trump did not give him the green light. Netanyahu’s office has called the report fake news, and Trump has reportedly not made a final decision. But it sounds like the next fuel increase could be right around the corner, maybe soon after the midterm elections, so the worst of the impact wouldn’t be felt until after Americans have cast their votes and the ballots have been counted.

The preparations being made are not being limited to the Middle East, either. Over the weekend, Fox News Digital reported on a Pentagon initiative called FORTRESS, which would require every major military installation in the continental United States to be able to sustain essential operations on its own for at least 90 days in case of a major war, with backup power, strategic reserves of munitions and fuel, and plans for civilian factories to shift to defense production. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Fox, “The next conflict will likely be fought on multiple fronts.” The timing is concerning, and we have to ask the question of whether these preparations have anything to do with the military operations reportedly being considered against Iran.

Vance spent the rest of his half hour telling Americans who they should be afraid of. He repeatedly used the word “sovereignty” while talking about everything from immigration to housing and jobs, invoking America’s right to govern itself while making ordinary political disagreements sound like threats to our country’s freedom and independence. By using the word this way, he suggested that anyone who disagrees with his policies is somehow against America itself. He declared that “we have ended the tyranny of DEI and racial discrimination in jobs and in universities,” later describing diversity programs as “the bureaucracy of DEI and racial hatred.” He attacked transgender Americans, telling the audience, “In this state, we believe there are men and we believe there are women. And anybody who tells you that one can change into the other is a damn fool.”

But one of the strangest moments was when he declared, “I want a healthy two-party system. I want a system where people of different viewpoints can sit across the aisle because they believe in America and they can compromise on how best to serve it.” Less than ten seconds later, though, he accused congressional Democrats of not believing “in the United States of America” and spending decades teaching children to be ashamed of their country. Near the end, he warned Montana about “the crazy Democrats who are going to tear it down.”

The people he treated with the most contempt today were the ones who did the most American thing that there is; they protested. At one point, a woman in the crowd yelled “liars” before law enforcement officers escorted her out. Reports say three protesters were removed from this event, and that it was the sixth time this month protesters had interrupted one of his public appearances. Vance’s response to the increased discord was to tell the crowd, “You are going to have a few yahoos who pretend that the Democrats aren’t who they already have shown themselves to be,” and then to warn them, “Don’t judge them by the yahoos they send to protest our events.”

What I took away from this speech was what he said near the end: “the greatness of this place is something we inherit and something we have a sacred duty to preserve for our own children.” He then spoke about the generations of “ordinary men and women who took extraordinary risks on behalf of people they would never meet because they loved this country and they had faith in its people.” If only he were invoking those words for good rather than turning them into a weapon against his fellow Americans.

When those words are spoken by people who truly care about our country and what we will leave for the next generations, they remind us of the sacrifices made by those who came before us, the ones who crossed oceans chasing America’s promises and the ones who were enslaved and still fought for a freedom this country denied them. We are claiming the same inheritance. The difference is what we believe it requires of us. He uses it to draw the circle of who counts as American smaller and smaller, until it no longer includes Democrats, transgender people, protesters, or anyone who refuses to fall in line. We believe it demands the opposite. This country is big enough for us all. We, as a collective, are what truly makes America great. The Vice President does not get to stand in a hangar and declare that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in their own country, because loving America has never meant loving the people in power. It has always meant holding them to what this country is supposed to be and never surrendering it to the perverted version of America they want it to be.

Thankfully, more people are standing up and refusing to hand it over. A social media creator named Nick Pringle went out onto the streets of Michigan and asked voters a simple question about their state’s Senate race: Abdul El-Sayed or Mike Rogers, and why? What he was told, over and over again, was that this race is about the heart of America. “It’s just more about my morals and values, you know,” one voter told him after saying he would be voting for El-Sayed. Another said choosing El-Sayed was simply “the right thing to do.” Another explained that El-Sayed “cares more about Michigan and represents my values better,” and wanted “competent policies and things we actually want to see get done.” When Pringle asked one young woman which issue she cared about most, she answered, “All of them, including human rights.”

This focus on voting according to their conscience isn’t just happening in Michigan among Democrats and liberal-leaning independents. It is happening in Texas, too. Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, announced that he voted for Democrat James Talarico over Ken Paxton. “I have been deeply troubled by Paxton’s conduct as Texas Attorney General,” he wrote, adding, “My concerns about his judgment and conduct are hardly mine alone.” He pointed to Paxton’s 2020 lawsuit to overturn the presidential election, writing, “I believe that effort was an affront to our democratic institutions and the peaceful transfer of power.” His niece, Barbara Bush, the former president’s daughter, gave $2,500 to Lone Star Rising PAC, a super PAC supporting Talarico. These are people with deep roots in the Republican Party who are making it clear that their loyalty to their country and its democratic institutions matters more than their loyalty to a political party.

There are eight days left before Americans decide what kind of country we are going to be for years, and maybe decades, to come. We must shift our country back to one of decency and compassion, and that starts with voting according to our conscience and reminding others to do the same. We can’t live in a country or a world divided by hate coming from the very people who are supposed to lead it. America belongs to its people, including those who love it enough to tell the truth about what is happening to it, who keep showing up, and who refuse to give up on what this country is supposed to be. That has never mattered more than it does tonight. So vote, and bring someone with you. Drop off your ballot, call your friends, and talk to the neighbor who isn’t sure yet. We still have time to change the direction of our country, but that is going to take us standing together and never letting a president or vice president scare us into abandoning our values, our compassion and care for each other, or our responsibility to the generations who will inherit this country after us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With Seven Days To Go The GOP’s Battlefield Keeps Deteriorating And Democrats Are Driving Deep Into Red States And Red Places, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 27, 2026. The people of Hungary chose wisely. The people of Serbia and Brazil also chose wisely. May the people of Israel choose wisely today, and let the American people continue to choose wisely in these final seven days of the 2026 Election.

I sat down with Greg Sargent of The New Republic late yesterday afternoon to talk about Trump’s closing struggles, our opportunities, and what we are seeing in the early vote. You can find our discussion here, and also catch me talking in recent days to Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen over at The Contrarian and with Alex Wagner for her Substack, How The Hell.

With just seven days to go I remain very bullish on our chances this year. Trump is ending the campaign in places like Mississippi and South Carolina, fighting to hold on to Senate seats that one ever imagined would be in play this cycle. The Senate GOP SuperPAC just announced buys in these four states:

Trump and his regime continue to produce a deeply negative vibe each day, as the media is full of stories of their corruption, the failed war, the crap economy, their infighting and chaos, and his rancid ramblings from his rallies. As Greg and I discuss the early vote looks promising, as Democrats are running ahead of 2024 at this point by 11 points:

turnout is outpacing 2022, and the electorate that has voted so far is much younger and less white than our last midterm. Here’s this morning’s update on the demos we are tracking. This is very encouraging stuff:

But as we enter this final week we must keep this data from the 2024 Exit Polls in mind. We won September and October in 2024 but lost the final week of the election:

And while we lead in all these critical Senate races, and Rs are acting panicked and scared, all these Senate races are close, and we need to learn from 2024 by winning this final week and closing strong. A new poll of Michigan has El-Sayed up 3 today, and another in Maine has Troy Jackson up 2 - things are close! Yes, we can win all these Senate races and have the election we all want to have but we need to keep the pedal to the metal, brothers and sisters, keep driving the early vote, run up the score, and win this thing in October. No letting up!Subscribed

In our discussion with Leon Krauze and Maria Cardona this afternoon we will be talking about the implications of the restoration of Dem margins with young and Hispanic voters, margins that we see in recent polling, and the clear intensity both groups are bringing to the election right now. For the last time we saw a structural shift of young people and Hispanics to the Democratic Party was in 2006 and 2008, and look what it did - it produced our best national popular vote run of the post WWII era, and a majority of the vote over the last five elections, even including 2024:

The restoration of our pre-2024 margins with young people and Hispanics is an essential piece in making us the majority party again, as is our deep drive into red places and red states throughout the country. More on all this with Leon and Maria at 230pm today, and in the days ahead. We will also be taking a look at what we are seeing with Black voters in the South later this this week. For in states like Louisiana and South Carolina we are seeing a very elevated and encouraging black voter turnout so far, and Republicans are clearly worried by what they are seeing.

A few other things we are tracking today…..

Signaling that a new era of accountability is coming House Judiciary Democrats released a 50 page report yesterday about Trump and Epstein. Here’s more from MS Now:

House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.

“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”

The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.”

In Brazil Trumpist Flávio Bolsonaro has functionally conceded the election while the Supreme Court ordered him to surrender his passport and barred him from leaving the country due to an ongoing corruption investigation. He may soon be joining his father in jail.

The NYT has a fascinating article about the importance of a raucous social media campaign to Lula’s surprise win.

Trump has announced that he will defying a Federal judge’s orders and proceed with stealing public land to build him and his friends a fancy golf course in DC.

The UN officially declares Putin, Trump’s buddy, a war criminal (via The AP):

Russia committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine by intentionally attacking energy infrastructure, leaving millions of people without electricity and heat in freezing temperatures, a U.N.-backed inquiry reported Monday.

The inquiry also found evidence that Russia recruited men from 29 countries into its armed forces “through deception or coercion” to fight in Ukraine in violation of international law. The men, age 18 to 60, “came mostly from vulnerable and marginalized communities, with a poor economic background and a low education level,” it said.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Rubbing a Rabbit’s Foot, William Kristol, right, Oct. 27, 2026. We’re a week out from election day, and things continue to look good. In fact, I’ve got to say, they’re looking a little bit better every day. The early vote—

[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER TO KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT OVER MY SHOULDER, AND, YES, PULL ON MY EARLOBE (THAT ONE’S NEW TO ME, TOO, BUTAPPARENTLY THEY DO THAT AS WELL IN SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD). I DO THESE THINGS OF COURSE TO PREVENT BEING JINXED AND TO WARD OFF THE EVIL EYE AFTER MAKING SUCH A HOPEFUL OR CONFIDENT STATEMENT. I WANT TO ASSURE ANY AND ALL JEALOUS DEITIES READING THIS NEWSLETTER THAT I’M NOT TRYING TO BE PRESUMPTUOUS. REALLY! I’M JUST TRYING TO TELL IT LIKE IT IS.]

Anyway, as I was saying . . .

Insofar as one can read the entrails of the early vote—and more than 30 million Americans, roughly a quarter of the likely overall turnout, have already voted—they seem to confirm the polls, which continue to signal a big blue wave.

For example, Reuters/Ipsos, which collected responses as recently as yesterday, has President Trump at 35 percent approval and 65 percent disapproval among registered voters, with 15 percent strongly approving and an astounding 53 percent strongly disapproving. Democrats lead the generic ballot among both registered and likely voters by 9 points. And Democrats say they’re more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll is no outlier. In the FiftyPlusOne polling average, the generic ballot now has Democrats ahead by 9.2 percent, up from 7.7 percent at the beginning of October, and 6.3 percent at the beginning of September. The trend remains Democrats’ friend, and the Republican spending onslaught hasn’t done much if anything to stop it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election subversion schemes have so far proven ineffectual (which doesn’t mean we won’t see lots of desperate efforts over the next week, and then perhaps after the votes are counted). And it’s hard to see any great surprise emerging in these last few days for the Republicans.

[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER ONCE AGAIN TO KNOCK WOOD, TOSS SALT, MUTTER HEARTFELT IMPRECATIONS TO THE GODS . . .]

Okay, back to business.

So the House is almost certain to flip, and the Senate seems likely—I’d say very likely—to do so. [WOOD KNOCKED, SALT TOSSED, IMPRECATIONS MUTTERED, ONCE AGAIN.] Since 1954, there’ve only been two occasions on which both chambers have changed hands in a midterm election: 1994 and 2006.

The 2006 precedent could serve as something of a warning. That midterm wave was followed by a big Democratic presidential victory in 2008 and further congressional gains. But the financial crisis of 2008 was so severe that the Obama administration had to spend an awful lot of time cleaning it up. The administration also made some political miscalculations. And the midterm elections of 2010 changed the country’s political momentum decisively.

In an economic and geopolitical environment as fraught as the one we’re now in, it’s going to be a real challenge not just to follow up a midterm victory with a presidential electoral victory, but then to govern in a way that succeeds in actually reversing the nation’s course and changing the country significantly for the better. As I suggested last week, the 1930–1932 sequence, which cleared the path for the New Deal, is probably the best precedent for that. But that was a long time ago, in a different nation and world. “Hardly a man is now alive” who remembers that era. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons from it.

So spend the next week obsessing over the reports from the various states and studying the polls and analyzing the early vote reports, and doing what you can to help to squeeze out every possible victory. But you might also begin to pull out your books about FDR and the 1930s. And you might want to take a look at an ever greater president, as well: Abraham Lincoln, who said in his second annual message to Congress, in December 1862:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Next Tuesday, Democrats will likely be given a chance—

[KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT, PRAY TO THE GODS]

—to begin to save the country. To do so, they’ll have to learn from, even rise to, the examples of Roosevelt and Lincoln. 

AROUND THE BULWARK

• SAVE THE DATE! We’re doing a pre–Election Day livestream this Sunday night! Join us for a Bulwark+ members-only livestream with Q&A starting at 8:30.
• Mark Cuban Goes Nuclear on America’s Health Care Giants… On Receipts, MARK CUBAN joins CATHERINE RAMPELL to discuss why he believes America’s health care giants inflate drug prices, bury hidden fees, and profit from a system that leaves patients paying the price.
• Trump Admits He Went Too Far in Iran And Doesn’t Know What to Do… WILL SALETAN uses Trump’s own words to expose the contradictions behind the Iran war.
• A Right-Wing Men’s Club Cracks Up Over Israel—and Trump… Detractors say the Old Glory Club has become the ‘Old Gloryhole Club,’ as WILL SOMMER reports in False Flag.
• George Conway Is Sickened by What Trump and Vance Have Become… Trump’s bizarre behavior, broken promises, and the voters who’ve had enough. SARAH LONGWELL joins GEORGE on the latest Psycho Politics.
• Beating Back the Authoritarians… There was good news over the weekend on the anti-authoritarian front in Brazil and Serbia, while our wannabe autocrat is ominously threatening to not accept midterm election results he doesn’t like. BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.

QUICK HITS

MISSISSIPPI CHURNING: The Senate race that has gotten the least amount of attention relative to how competitive it could be is almost certainly the one in Mississippi featuring Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith against Democrat Scott Colom.

Conventional wisdom holds that Colom simply doesn’t stand a chance, regardless of how big the state’s black population is. There are simply too many Republican voters. And that very well may be true. But in an eleventh-hour gambit, Democrats are making clear that they believe there is a contingency of Republicans in the state who will cross party lines.

A new ad by Government That Works PAC, a group supporting Democratic candidates across the country, is launching this week in Mississippi featuring Hyde-Smith’s Republican primary challenger, Sarah Adlakha, attacking Hyde-Smith. The ad isn’t a leftover of the primary, either. It’s a newly recorded spot, meant for a general election audience, with six figures behind it.

In the ad, which was first shared with The Bulwark, Adlakha calls herself a “lifelong Republican” who ran against Hyde-Smith because she believed Mississippi deserved a “true conservative.” Adlakha says Hyde-Smith “is just part of the club, paying for fancy trips with your money and taking hundreds of thousands from lobbyists” and accuses her of taking “reckless vote after reckless vote to expand the national debt.”

“This is what Nancy Pelosi would look like if she was from Mississippi,” Adlakha says. Notably, Adlakha doesn’t encourage voters to back Colom in the ad, nor does she say she will herself.

Still, Democrats are hopeful that if they can peel off enough GOP votes (or simply encourage a fair number to sit the election out) they might be able to score a major upset in Mississippi. The party’s main Senate super PAC announced last week that it would start spending money on the race. And a number of high-profile party leaders—including Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg—have visited the state to campaign for Colom.

Republicans, too, seem to believe that the race is competitive. Trump held a campaign rally in Mississippi on Monday night and the principal Senate Republican super PAC is spending more than $1 million to defend Hyde-Smith.

Whether voters will be moved by Adlakha’s ad is an open question. She isn’t a well-known figure in the state. She moved to Mississippi from Illinois thirteen years ago. And there were questions about her motivations for running in the GOP primary. The Magnolia Tribune reported during the primary that “some Republican insiders have speculated that Adlakha is a ‘Democratic plant’ or ‘coordinating’ with” Colom’s campaign” in the hopes of forcing Hyde-Smith to spend money that she otherwise would have saved for the general election.

Still, in the Republican primary, Adlakha received 19 percent of the vote.

PREPPING FOR CLAUDE’S CLOSE-UP: Are we still living in an AI bubble? Will it burst at some point, and if it does, how much of the U.S. economy will it bring down with it? Even if it doesn’t burst, will AI ultimately crash the economy anyway? These are just several of the fun and interesting questions tied to the upcoming IPO of AI giant Anthropic—in advance of which the company laid out a remarkable financial prospectus yesterday. Bottom line: They’re making a ton of money, and spending it way, way faster than they’re making it. Here’s the New York Times:

Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of the year and its net loss was $80.7 billion, driven largely by a one-time charge. Stunningly, the company has committed up to $807 billion in contracts for data centers, chips and computing power, many of which cannot be canceled, over the next 10 years, according to a tally by The New York Times. Many of the contracts span different lengths of time, and the terms have yet to be finalized for some.

The numbers underscored how much Anthropic is betting that its future business will justify its outlays. Even its public offering, which could raise more than $100 billion, may not provide the company with enough money to fund its intense infrastructure needs, as it warned that it might need to seek additional financing sooner than anticipated.

Hey, what’s another trillion or so among friends? Read the whole thing.

New York Times, An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America, Eve Washington, Nate Cohn and Rumsey Taylor, Oct. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Which state has America’s worst gerrymander? After a year of redistricting battles, we have an answer.

We’ve ranked all 44 states with more than one district by the fairness of their congressional maps. Many of the most notorious gerrymanders are ranked near the top of the list. But there are also some oft-derided maps that we judge to be fundamentally fine.

A gerrymander is as much art as science, with plenty of room for critics — or different statistical measures — to disagree about which map’s twisting lines are most offensive. But this list is not simply a matter of taste: We’ve based our ranking on the results of thousands of computer simulations that draw compact districts without any consideration of partisanship or race.

These simulations are a broadly accepted way to measure gerrymandering, including by courts. We compared each state’s map with the simulations, then sorted them according to two equally weighted measures: 1) How many more seats the map gives one party, over the simulated estimates; and 2) How aggressive the gerrymander is, meaning how close the map is to the most extreme gerrymander we can cobble together out of the simulations. (A more detailed description of our methodology is at the bottom.)

Because the simulations don’t take partisanship into account, some states are considered fair even if the map appears tilted toward one party or another.

Whether a map should ignore partisanship or reflect it is a hotly contested subject in redistricting. We accept both ways here: If a map does reflect the state’s partisan balance, even if it diverges from the simulations, we consider it fair, too. But the most gerrymandered states, as you’ll see below, fail no matter how we look at it.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer,Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. 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.

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.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

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.”

More Global News

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner). 

New York Times, The Digital Army That Catapulted Lula to Victory in Brazil, Ana Ionova, Adam B. Ellick and Jack Nicas, Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won another term on Sunday, with the help of a seismic social media campaign that convinced Brazilians to reject his rival.

It started with a WhatsApp channel with a few thousand followers. It exploded into a digital army of 10 million people that helped swing Latin America’s biggest election.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil staged a stunning comeback on Sunday, achieving an unexpected victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing challenger whose father tried to stage a coup after losing the last election.

In winning, Mr. Lula did what no other presidential candidate has accomplished in Brazil’s history — he won election after finishing second in the first round.

His victory rested, to a significant degree, on social media. A tidal wave of messages, memes and reels flooded Brazil, a chronically online nation of 214 million, and rallied millions of Brazilians with diverging views around a single task: barring the return of the Bolsonaro family to power.

Mr. Lula’s win delivered a powerful rebuke to a right-wing movement barreling through Latin America that has been applauded by President Trump. It also deals a blow to Washington’s plans for economic and military dominance in the region, extending the reign of the only leader in Latin America — and one of the few globally — who has defied Mr. Trump.

Mr. Lula won by about double the margin he achieved in 2022, when he narrowly defeated Mr. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro. The achievement is all the more remarkable because Mr. Lula, who entered the race as the underdog, received more than 10 million votes between the first and second rounds of the election, or roughly three out of every four new votes up for grabs on Sunday. The younger Mr. Bolsonaro captured roughly four million additional votes than he did in the first round.

“It was a very big victory for global democracy,” said Christian Lynch, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University. It was driven, he said, by an unprecedented mobilization of Brazilian voters. “We never saw anything like this.”

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

New York Times, Judge Temporarily Blocks Further Alterations at D.C.’s East Potomac Park, Zach Montague, Updated Oct. 27, 2026. A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from cutting trees and prohibited other changes at the park where the president has sought to overhaul a golf course.

A federal judge temporarily barred the Interior Department on Monday from carrying out a variety of major alterations at East Potomac Park, finding that the government had been taking steps to initiate President Trump’s vision for a championship-level golf course on the property while passing off the work in court as routine maintenance.

The ruling followed a confrontation between the Justice Department and Judge Ana C. Reyes, who throughout October called several Trump administration officials and government lawyers to account for what she described as misrepresentations about the plan.

The clash underscored what had been one of the president’s less visible plans for transforming the capital, compared to his efforts to seize control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and add a gilded ballroom to the White House. This, instead, was the overhaul of a municipal golf course and public park.

It culminated in a searing 70-page opinion issued on Monday, in which Judge Reyes wrote that much of what she had been told in court stood at odds with Mr. Trump’s public pronouncements about the golf course, which came even as officials were insisting that no long-term plan was settled.

“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting president,” she wrote. “Not to believe him that a cabinet secretary has ‘developed’ a federal land project. Not to believe him that the secretary’s agency will destroy a historic golf course already on the land.”

“And yet, here we are,” she added.

Mr. Trump railed against the ruling on social media late Monday, saying the course would be closed as scheduled. He vowed to “immediately appeal” the decision.

“The judge has absolutely no right to hold up this very important and beautiful Project,” he wrote. “We are asking the D.C. Circuit Court for immediate remedy.”

Judge Reyes marveled that a local dispute over a golf course had spiraled into a broader examination of the Trump administration’s tactics, requiring judges to anticipate when and where the federal government might abruptly move to carry out the president’s personal goals and projects.

“It now forces the court to reconcile assertions by President Donald J. Trump with the sworn testimony of multiple government employees and the argument of senior Department of Justice attorneys,” she wrote. “This morass of different accounts concerns the future of the East Potomac Golf Course, a historic landmark.”

A group that included two Washington residents and a preservation society that sued to block an overhaul of the existing site had asked the court to prevent the administration from cutting down more trees after 400 were felled in one morning earlier this month.

Judge Reyes granted the request and went further, barring other actions that could indirectly destroy trees, including staging heavy machinery. She went to great lengths to impart her instructions in detail, an apparent attempt to prevent the administration from citing confusion or ambiguity to act without her involvement.

She required the government to notify the court at least 10 days before closing the course or making any “irreversible modification to any forms or features” to East Potomac Park, where the current course is, including changes to “the park’s landforms, vegetation, course design, hydrology, pathways, and structures.”

“This is a big win that will rightly protect East Potomac Park from further irreparable harm,” said Skye Perryman, the president of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is representing the group behind the lawsuit.

The dramatic changes that Mr. Trump has made to Washington loomed over the lawsuit from the beginning.

Throughout early interactions with Justice Department attorneys on the case, Judge Reyes stressed that she wanted to avoid surprises, after the president acted without warning last year to demolish the East Wing of the White House before courts could review the legality of the project.

At the same time, she said the lawsuit placed her in a difficult spot, because she did not view it as the role of federal courts to police minor decisions about management of federal lands. While Mr. Trump had mused since last year about transforming plans for East Potomac Park. But earlier this year Judge Reyes repeatedly told the group behind the lawsuit that it was not yet clear that the federal government was implementing his vision, making court action premature.

Hesitant to issue any order that would prevent rank-and-file government workers from carrying out everyday maintenance on the course, she asked the Justice Department to provide early warning before workers started major work at the golf course.

Judge Reyes stressed on Monday that she stood by that approach, and she had not tied the government’s hands more than necessary.

“The events surrounding this case have become extraordinary,” she wrote. “The legal result is not.”

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets`New York Times,

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Problems, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 27, 2026. As the midterms loom, he’s finally admitting the obvious. If Republicans do implode as badly next Tuesday as the current polls suggest, there will be two main reasons. One is Trump’s epic corruption, which finally seems to be getting traction as a campaign issue, second only to the cost of living. The other is soaring energy prices, which are both a major cause of overall inflation and especially visible since they’re posted on big signs in front of every gas station across the country.

It’s a highly ironic situation because Trump’s promises to slash those prices were a key theme of his 2024 campaign. These promises were explicit: he cited numbers, asserting that he would cut energy prices in half within 12 months.

Disastrously for Trump and the Republicans, the opposite has happened, with gasoline and especially diesel prices way up, mainly because of Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran.

One measure of energy prices I find useful is the average price of the products refined from a barrel of oil — typically 2/3 of a barrel of gasoline and 1/3 of a barrel of diesel. I focus on refined products because those, not crude oil, are what people actually burn. And refined products are up in price both because crude prices are up and because the “crack spread” between crude and refined products has soared.

Here’s what has happened to the price of refined products:

Those prices are roughly back to their Biden-era peak, and far above the prices Trump inherited when he took office. Furthermore, Biden wasn’t responsible for that temporary surge in prices, which was mainly caused by post-Covid supply-chain disruptions. Trump, on the other hand, bears almost all the responsibility for current high prices: his war of choice has disrupted the flow of oil, both crude and especially refined products, out of the Persian Gulf. (Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries are also contributing, but the Ukrainians are only doing what they must — and Trump, who is effectively backing Russia, has no standing to complain.)

The cost to American consumers of the Trump spike in energy costs is remarkably high. The U.S. consumes about 7.5 billion barrels of petroleum products annually. As you can see from the chart above, Trump’s war has raised the price of these products by about $75 a barrel. So this war is costing U.S. consumers around $560 billion a year at an annual rate, which is a lot even in a $30 trillion economy.

But Trump claims not to care:

The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it — we’re making a freaking fortune.

The obvious response is, what do you mean “we,” white man?

It’s true that oil and gas companies are making a lot of money thanks to the fallout from the Iran debacle, and oil-company stock prices have soared. But this does nothing for ordinary Americans who aren’t big investors in oil-company stocks, such as workers paying more for their daily commute and farmers who need diesel for their tractors.

So when Trump says “We’re making a freaking fortune,” what he really means is that his policies are taking more than half a trillion dollars at an annual rate out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, and giving that money to the oil industry (which gave 88 percent of its 2024 campaign contributions to Republicans.) Some people might consider this a bad thing, but by his own account he “doesn’t give a damn.”

Remind me again why people call Trump a “populist”?

New York Times, Inside the Billionaires’ War Against California’s Proposed Wealth Tax, Theodore Schleifer and Erin Griffith, Oct. 27, 2026. The latest Silicon Valley billionaire club is a $333 million political ad machine that is heavily engaged in next week’s elections.

Every Tuesday for the last few months, two dozen of the world’s richest people or their advisers hop onto a conference call and plan for war.

The war is against a proposed tax, but not just any tax. It is against a “wealth tax” on California billionaires, one that Silicon Valley’s most affluent see as an existential threat that could usher in a new way of attacking them. So in confidential memos, WhatsApp and Signal chats and conference calls, they are banding together to battle back.

The calls are organized by Building a Better California, a nonprofit started this year to fight Proposition 40, the ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires if voters approve it next week. Each week, the nonprofit’s operatives brief donors or their advisers on polling, advertising and opposition research. Often, the calls include an ask: Would you consider giving a little more?

Eighty or so donors have provided more than $333 million to Building a Better California, state records show, making it among the best-funded political efforts in California history. The donor list is a who’s who of tech celebrities: the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt; the Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison; the legendary investor John Doerr.“The effort to beat it is nothing short of an Avenger-level effort,” said Trevor Traina, a Silicon Valley investor who knows many of the billionaires socially but is not involved with the group. “Like the Avengers, this is not a homogenous group of people, but rather heroes of different stripes who share the same goal of protecting California. I, for one, pray they prevail.”

Many are aware of how it looks. Fighting a billionaire tax as populist outrage grows over inequality requires finesse. In a recent memo circulated among donors and viewed by The New York Times, organizers stressed that other supporters — not the billionaires — must be “the ‘face’ of campaigns.”

This account of Building a Better California’s efforts is based on conversations with about two dozen of the group’s donors, people solicited by it, or others close to it, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the group’s mechanics are secretive. The Times also reviewed California campaign-finance documents and some of the nonprofit’s confidential presentations and internal documents.

“Our supporters have created companies, entirely new industries and hundreds of thousands of jobs here in California, and they want our state to remain the place where the future is built and where people can still afford to live, dream big and succeed,” said Abby Lunardini, a group spokeswoman. She said the wealth tax would “permanently damage the state’s budget, tax base and economy.”

The effort to fight Proposition 40 began with Mr. Brin and has swelled to include a wide cross-section of Silicon Valley power brokers. Donors have pressed business peers to consider giving to the organization and joining the Tuesday calls. Sometimes, the ask is for billionaires to consider donating a percentage of their net worth, a cheap commitment if it helps kill a 5 percent tax.

Mr. Doerr and Mr. Collison, or people who work on their political operations, have made many of the fund-raising calls. They are Building a Better California’s third and fourth largest donors, shelling out $40 million and $33 million, respectively. Each declined to comment.

Mr. Doerr, 75, is famous for having invested in Google and Amazon and leading the venture firm Kleiner Perkins before becoming its chairman in 2016. A longtime Democratic fund-raiser, he has a history of political engagement in California, including squashing propositions he viewed as damaging to Silicon Valley’s ecosystem.

Mr. Collison, by contrast, is still learning the ropes. The 38-year-old Irish citizen prides himself on a bookish disposition, and has invested money and time into arcane policy topics like housing reform and science funding streams.

The wealth-tax fight is Mr. Collison’s most serious campaign engagement to date. The tax could be particularly disruptive to him because most of his net worth consists of stock in Stripe, his privately held payments company valued at $159 billion, which is harder to sell. Mr. Collison has occasionally talked of his frustrations with the tax and tried to game out the politics of the ballot measure in private conversations, people who have spoken to him said.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

Robert Reich, Opinion: Musk Wants Me Imprisoned, Robert Reich, Oct. 27, 2026. I’m not worried, but I do worry about everyone who’s vulnerable to Musk, Trump, and the other bullies in this might-makes-right era. 

On Saturday’s “Coffee Klatch” podcast, I said: "Democrats ought to “defund Musk” and lay “the groundwork for nationalizing” Starlink and SpaceX." (My full Coffee Klatch argument is here.)

This seems to have set Elon Musk off. He posted to his 241,700,000 followers:

“Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”

I’m not particularly worried about being imprisoned — although Musk does have influence over Trump, and Trump has criminally charged Americans who have done no more than express opinions he dislikes (see: Ilhan Omar, Reid Hoffman, Brad Lander, et al.).

I assure you I’m not going to be intimidated by a tweet by Musk.

I’ll continue to criticize him for making decisions — such as squelching his Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — that should be made by people who are responsible for U.S. foreign policy rather than by an unaccountable tycoon.

I’ll continue to campaign like crazy for Democrats in the upcoming midterms, and urge voters to throw the Republican bums out.

I’ll continue to highlight the connections between great wealth and grotesque power during our Second Gilded Age — of which Musk has become Exhibit A.

Elon: You may be the richest and most powerful man in the world, but I’m tough as nails. I’ve stood up to bullies my whole life, starting with playground bullies who went after me because I was so short. You think I won’t stand up to you?

Okay, I’m aware of my privilege. I come with a platform. I’ve held high-level jobs in our government. And I’m an old person with little to lose, anyway.

I worry about what Musk’s impulsive bullying is doing and has done to others more vulnerable than I am — people who work or have worked for him, women he’s allegedly coerced into signing nondisclosure agreements, people he’s done business with, people he’s threatened and racially denigrated and pushed around his whole life, voters he’s deluging with TV ads for Republican candidates.

I also worry about the federal workers who have been hurt by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Americans who have been harmed by his wanton destruction of public services, and people around the globe who are worse off because of cuts to USAID pushed by Elon’s DOGE.

We now have a bully-in-chief in the Oval Office and the world’s wealthiest bully dictating American foreign policy — both of whom are now pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections in order to avoid accountability.

Will people speak out against these two consummate bullies, or remain intimidated into silence?

One week to go until the midterms. Maybe then we can begin to defund Musk.

Oct. 26

Top Headlines

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).

• New York Times, Lula Wins Brazil’s Presidency, in Stunning Blow to Latin America’s Right, Ana Ionova and Adam B. Ellick, Updated Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva triumphed over Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of the right-wing leader he defeated four years ago.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Oligarchs Lose a Big One, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Brazil refuses to be bullied. South America’s most populous nation has more than 200 million people, making its presidential election yesterday a momentous event. But beyond Brazil’s sheer size, yesterday’s election was also momentous because it was a harbinger for the rest of the world.
• New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer, Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. 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.

Special Report; New Trump Rape Allegations Drawn From Epstein Files, Survivors

• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:Democrats Drop A Massive Epstein October Surprise On Trump And The GOP, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.

New Book

• New York Times, A Damning Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit, Fintan O’Toole (author of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” and the advising editor of The New York Review of Books), Oct. 26, 2026. The new book by the reporter Matthew Cole connects $2 billion in slush funds from gulf state leaders to Trump’s son-in-law in an effort to influence U.S. policy.

Special Report: Ruling Helps Protect U.S. Civil Service, Prosecutors

Maurene Comey was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan when the Trump administration fired her in July 2025 ( New York Times photo by Jefferson Siegel).

• New York Times, Trump Administration Unlawfully Fired Maurene Comey, Judge Rules, Santul Nerkar, Oct. 26, 2026. Ms. Comey, the daughter of James B. Comey, was a trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, handling the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs. Ms. Comey’s victory could open a path for other government workers who were fired and are seeking to appeal their termination. She argued that neither the president nor attorney general had the authority to fire rank-and file prosecutors like her, who are protected under civil service law.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Democratic Early Voting Surges, Hegseth Fears Impeachment, Voter Intimidation Efforts Fail, Nicki Minaj for Press Secretary, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Today I speak to Dr. Amy Acton as nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. In the Senate battlegrounds, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters to Republicans’ 35 percent. In North Carolina, Democratic early voting is up 47 percent, while Republican early voting is up less than 3 percent. Trump is spending the final week rallying in states he won by 20 points, and he admitted the problem himself on Sunday: “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up.”
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Caught in Major Epstein Lies, White House ‘Panicked’ as Right Wing Governments Fall, Big Iran Strikes Planned, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Look at the stories in today’s newsletter and the same thing keeps happening. Trump says he was “never on Epstein’s plane,” and the flight logs say otherwise. He says he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and the government’s own documents quote him saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Today, House Democrats put those statements next to the records in a 50-page report and are calling for an independent special counsel. 
• Meidas Touch Network, Monday Update: Lula Wins, Trump’s Allies Fall, and an Epstein Report Drops 8 Days Out, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. It's Monday. Eight days until midterms. Here’s what’s going on: House Judiciary Democrats just released a 53-page Epstein report with accounts from 11 women and a call for a special counsel; Lula wins a fourth term in Brazil, and Flávio Bolsonaro and Trumpworld cry “stolen”; Serbia’s students beat Vučić’s party, and María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela; Netanyahu reportedly clashes with his own army chief over Iran ahead of Tuesday’s election; CNN says Trump is prepping major Iran strikes, likely after the midterms; Gas prices are on track for the priciest Election Day in history; 
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.

Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 25, 2026 [MAGA Doubles Down], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 26, 2026. And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign. As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ass Clown, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In a weird way, it’s almost sad to see. Donald Trump has spent a decade as the main character of our politics. He has managed to break and destabilize shockingly much in that time. Yet now, watching him stagger toward a humiliating midterm rebuke with his movement seemingly on the brink of collapse, I have to admit it’s hard to feel much pleasure about it all.
• New York Times, Ken Paxton’s State-Funded Jet-Setting Draws Campaign Scrutiny, Beth Reinhard and Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 26, 2026. Mr. Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Texas, has taken about 350 trips outside of the state since he was sworn in as attorney general.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Loses Big In Brazil And Serbia, More Encouraging Early Vote Data, Adam Hamilton Joins Us Live Today At 1:30 pm ET, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In what has been a terrible month of declining poll numbers, a deteriorating battlefield, soaring inflation, crappy job numbers, Brent crude hitting $116 a barrel, a widening war in the Middle East, an orgy of scandals, and escalating internal infighting, our failed, venal, sundowning leader got lots more bad news last night -- his allies in Brazil and Serbia got beat, and Marina Corina Machado returned to Venezuela to rapturous crowds.

These last twenty fours have been some of the most important in our grand battle against MAGA and the global right since Hopium was founded. Here we take the wins when they come and these were big, consequential wins, fellow patriots. Big consequential wins for the global democracy movement, and enormous, deflating, and consequential losses for Trump eight days before his own election.

• Huffington Post, Opinion: ‘Stick A Fork In It’: Ex-Trump Official Says 1 Move Could Mark The End Of Trump Presidency, Ben Blanchet, Oct. 26, 2026. Anthony Scaramucci advised the president to be “very careful,” or else lead to the death of the Republican Party.
• New York Times, Ex-Governors Give Rare Bipartisan Nod to Andrews in South Carolina, Annie Karni,Oct. 26, 2026. Former Republican Gov. David Beasley and Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges recorded a joint video throwing their support to the Democrat in the tight Senate race.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Mississippi Meltdown As Trump Gets Heckled In Front Of Tiny Crowd, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Donald Trump claimed 22,000 people attended his rally in Mississippi, but only 1,400 were there, and people in the crowd heckled the president.

GOP Strategies: Ohio, Wisconsin, Autocracy

• Public Notice, News and Opinion: Vivek Ramaswamy discovers that voters have their limits, Paul Waldman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy. What on earth were they thinking? It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Mailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in Oklahoma, Judd Legum, right,Oct. 26, 2026. The mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operation.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Bolsonaro . . . Trump? William Kristol, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In an 1823 letter from James Madison, the primary architect of our Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of our Declaration, Madison wrote of “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Our Founders understood that despite the relative success of their earlier efforts, the contest between liberty and despotism around the world—and even in the United States—had not ended.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption  

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is not invincible, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 25-26, 2026. At 3:29 this afternoon (Sunday), the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”
• Wayne Madsen Report, Historical Commentary: A future Trump Treason Truth Commission needed, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.

More On Middle East Wars 

• Drop Site Daily, Israel expels 3,100+ Palestinians in Hebron, Staff and Wire Reports, Oct. 26, 2026. Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday. 800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp. Israeli operation in Hebron forcibly displaces over 3,100 Palestinians as attacks continue across the occupied West Bank. Israel kills at least 14 Palestinians in Gaza over the weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in tight race against Eisenkot in Israeli elections tomorrow.
• New York Times, Flurry of Diplomacy in Iran as Regional Countries Try to Stave Off War, Erika Solomon, Vivian Nereim and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 26, 2026. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan made a rare joint visit to Tehran amid reports that the U.S. and Israel were drawing up plans to renew their attacks on Iran.
• New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.

More Global News

• New York Times, Israeli Jews Across the Spectrum Face an Election of Fears, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 26, 2026. Supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have expressed intense anxieties about isolation abroad, security at home and the future of Israel’s identity.
• New York Times, The Expat Voters Hoping to Swing Israel’s Election, Bethlehem Feleke, Alex Pena, Meg Felling and Monika Cvorak, Oct. 25, 2026. The return of thousands of Israeli expats to vote in their country’s tight election has set off debate over their political influence. We traveled to Tel Aviv to find out why.
• New York Times, Opinion: In India, I Saw Things That Should Scare Trump, Lydia Polgreen, Oct. 26, 2026. Narendra Modi, the barrel-chested strongman leader of India for the past dozen years, has finally met his match — and it looks a lot like Mohini Majumdar. Just 20 years old, slender and voluble, Majumdar is an English student at Delhi University: an unlikely antagonist for an omnipotent autocrat.
• New York Times, Brazilian Markets Convulse After Unexpected Election Result, Joe Rennison, Oct. 26, 2026.  President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election victory prompted a sharp reversal in financial markets that had expected his opponent to win

More On U.S. High-Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion 

• New York Times Magazine, A.I. Companies Want to Write the Rules Governing Themselves. Can They Be Trusted? Emily Bazelon, Oct. 26, 2026. Five experts on how best to limit a rapidly evolving technology.
• BIG: Monopoly Round-Up: What Happens When Cybersecurity is Bad for Business, Lee Hepner, Oct. 25-26, 2026. How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.
• New York Times, Owners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The $41 million lawsuit contends that the A.I. company used Presley’s music to train its models without permission. Anthropic disagrees with the claims.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

More On U.S. MidTerm Elections

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Who Has Already Won and LostI Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 26, 2026. 🚨 8 Days to the Midterms 🚨 We have been tracking “days to the midterms” — Nov. 3 — but early midterm voting has been underway and from all appearances looks more robust than it has been at this point in past years.
• Robert Reich, Opinion and Advocacy: Watch, Read, and Share, Robert Reich, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Obama said it as clearly as it can be stated. If you haven’t yet had a chance to see or read Obama’s speech in Cleveland Saturday night, please do both. And then share it as widely as you can.

Special Report: Fighting Fascism Globally

• Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: The West must embrace defensive democracy, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Democratic constitutions cannot be suicide pacts. Far-right fascist parties and movements that advocate violence against ethnic and religious minorities must be banned. 

Top Stories

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).

New York Times, Lula Wins Brazil’s Presidency, in Stunning Blow to Latin America’s Right, Ana Ionova and Adam B. Ellick, Updated Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva triumphed over Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of the right-wing leader he defeated four years ago.

Brazilian voters on Sunday handed the leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a fourth term in office and a surprise victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, his right-wing challenger, in a striking rebuke to a conservative surge sweeping Latin America.

Mr. Bolsonaro refused to accept the outcome and said it was the result of foul play, increasing the risk of unrest over the election result.

The rejection by voters of Mr. Bolsonaro, the son of a former president jailed for attempting a coup four years ago, is also a loss for President Trump, who had embraced the Bolsonaro family and the region’s rising right.

Mr. Lula, in contrast to many world leaders, has often and defiantly clashed with Mr. Trump, and his victory suggests that Latin America’s left-wing forces still wield influence despite a string of losses across the hemisphere. This is the first leftist victory following seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months.

“I would like to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” Mr. Lula said, during a victory speech in São Paulo, flanked by his wife, running mate and allies. 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Oligarchs Lose a Big One, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Brazil refuses to be bullied.

How many people in the United States realize how big Brazil is? South America’s most populous nation has more than 200 million people, making its presidential election yesterday a momentous event. But beyond Brazil’s sheer size, yesterday’s election was also momentous because it was a harbinger for the rest of the world.

For it was a contest between the progressive left of Ignacio Lula da Silva, the incumbent president, and the revanchist right of Flavio Bolsonaro — the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, who is in prison for his attempt to overturn Brazil’s last presidential election. The global right thought it had the election in the bag, and even the prediction markets indicated that Bolsonaro would win. Thus it came as a shock when Lula came out on top.

Having been gaslighted by the right, some of the global media appeared to have difficulty wrapping their minds around the outcome. Here was the headline in the Financial Times as I write this:

“Knife-edge vote”? Lula won by 3 percentage points, twice Donald Trump’s margin in 2024.

And he did so despite efforts by the right, in Brazil and elsewhere, to rig the election against him.

Voting was extended by two hours because widespread disruptions to public transportation had made it difficult for working-class voters to get to the polls. Lula’s campaign alleged that these disruptions were engineered by pro-Bolsonaro mayors, a claim that was clearly supported by the evidence in some cities, and was generally plausible given recent political history — specifically, Bolsonaro senior’s attempt to overturn the last presidential election.

And Brazil’s own right wasn’t alone in seemingly trying to rig the election for Bolsonaro. U.S.-based social media companies, Meta in particular, appeared to put their thumbs on the scale. After the first round of voting, Reuters reported that

Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian ​President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by ‌restrictions during the country’s election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.

The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile ​of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his ​WhatsApp channel, according to the report.

And in an article titled “Meta Unseats Musk as Tech Villain for Lula in Brazil’s Election,” Bloomberg reported that

Lula — who has attracted more than 10 million supporters to a WhatsApp channel dubbed “Lula’s Army” in recent days — has alleged interruptions to his account, restrictions on Instagram posts and unequal audience engagement. His campaign also said Meta AI, the company’s generative artificial intelligence tool, is refusing requests to create images related to Lula while generating campaign material favorable to his opponent.

Meta said that these incidents reflected “unrelated technical problems,” a claim that would be more credible if all of these supposed technical problems hadn’t tilted the playing field in the same direction.

Is it a mere coincidence that in the United States, Meta suspended the No Kings Day Instagram account right in the middle of the day’s protests? It later claimed that this action had nothing to do with politics, that it was an error because its automated security systems detected a possible rise in bot traffic.

Again, it’s funny how Meta’s technical problems always seem to tilt the political field in the same direction.

Can we prove that Meta deliberately tried to put the Bolsonaros back in power? No, at least not yet. But we aren’t in a court of law: We’re simply trying to figure out what happened.

Meta leader Mark Zuckerberg, second from the left, celebrates with fellow Trump-supporting American high-tech oligarchs (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and SpaceX-Tesla leader Elon Musk, near the right, along with kindred spirits in helping enforce the Trump Administration's agenda, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, all in the back row.

And the people in this photo, above, are not entitled to a presumption of innocence and good intentions: "A foto que exibe o 'bromance' dos barões das big techs com Trump | G1"

Although Meta’s denials lack plausibility, we can’t prove that Mark Zuckerberg deliberately tried to deliver Brazil into the hands of a right-wing authoritarian. However, there is no question that Elon Musk intentionally and strongly intervened on the side of Vladimir Putin in his efforts to conquer Ukraine. Musk keeps changing his story about what happened — first denying any involvement, saying that the order came from the White House, and now claiming that Ukraine violated its terms of service. But this charade is completely implausible because Musk has long made it clear that his sympathies in this war lie with Russia.

So let’s celebrate the Brazilian people, who have refused to be bullied by Bolsonaro, by the American oligarchs, and by Trump — who imposed high tariffs on Brazil in 2025 because it put a traitor and insurrectionist (Bolsonaro Sr) on trial. Let’s hope that in a little over one week’s time Americans will be equally clear-sighted and vote for democracy.

New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer,Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. 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.

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.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

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.”

New Trump Rape Allegations Drawn From Epstein Files, Survivors

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:Democrats Drop A Massive Epstein October Surprise On Trump And The GOP, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.

While everyone in the country was looking to Trump for an October Surprise, the real surprise came from House Judiciary Committee Democrats, who released a 50-page report that contains testimony that accuses Donald Trump of several counts of rape.

According to a statement from House Judiciary Committee Democrats:The report concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s.

Drawing on interviews conducted by Committee staff, survivor accounts, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the report traces striking similarities in the stories of women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.

With one exception, each assault or instance of sexual misconduct occurred between 1992 and 1997, in New York and Palm Beach, and many of the victims were closely tied to the modeling industry and Zampolli.

The conclusion is the tip of the iceberg.

Here are a few of the report’s findings:

• Trump and Epstein Shared a World Built Around Young Models. In the 1990s, both men moved through New York modeling agencies, pageants and parties where young women and girls were recruited and often exploited. Trump hosted Elite Model Management competitions for teenage models and had close ties to Elite founder and known pedophile John Casablancas and modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. FBI records describe multiple young models who had a sexual relationship with Zampolli or were connected to Zampolli’s agency who subsequently were sexually assaulted by Epstein.

• A former longtime Epstein assistant told the FBI that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump, contradicting Zampolli’s account.

• Women Describe Sexual Assault and Other Troubling Encounters Involving Trump and Epstein. Five women have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence. Three others describe encounters in which Epstein or Maxwell appeared to offer women to Trump or indicate that Trump was “in” on Epstein’s abuse.

Their accounts and stories, when told together, paint an unmistakable picture of a conspiracy to abuse and traffic women.

Dozens of women have come forward over the years to accuse Donald Trump of everything from sexual harassment to sexual assault to rape.The difference is that House Judiciary Democrats have evidence that directly connects Trump to Epstein’s crimes. Trump has done nothing but try to hide, diminish, and distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said:

Donald Trump says he knew Jeffrey Epstein ‘just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.’ Not exactly. Evidence involving 11 women tells a completely different and far more damning story about their relationship and the abuse of young women and girls that took place in their network. Five women have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence; others have indicated that Epstein or Maxwell attempted to traffic them to Trump. These women have spoken to investigators and, in some cases, testified under oath, yet Trump’s Justice Department has shut down investigations, deliberately withheld evidence and, through Todd Blanche, prevented Ghislaine Maxwell from discussing a survivor whose account implicated Trump—all while insisting there is no basis upon which to investigate

Epstein’s possible accomplices.

Trump’s Justice Department appears to be covering up these crimes to protect the President. The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard, Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.

If Donald Trump is an Epstein co-conspirator, he must be prosecuted, even if it happens after his term ends. If more evidence is uncovered against Trump, he must be impeached and removed from office.

Donald Trump will lose his congressional Republican protection if Democrats win back control of all or part of Congress.The report from the Judiciary Committee is just the beginning, as we are getting closer to finding out Trump’s darkest secrets.

Special Report: Ruling Helps Protect U.S. Civil Service, Prosecutors

Maurene Comey was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan when the Trump administration fired her in July 2025 ( New York Times photo by Jefferson Siegel).

New York Times, Trump Administration Unlawfully Fired Maurene Comey, Judge Rules, Santul Nerkar, Oct. 26, 2026. Ms. Comey, the daughter of James B. Comey, was a trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, handling the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs.

A Manhattan judge on Monday ruled that Maurene Comey, a former federal prosecutor and the daughter of one of Mr. Trump’s most well-known critics, was unlawfully fired last year.

In a 55-page ruling, Judge Jesse M. Furman of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote that the Justice Department had violated the separation of powers, federal administrative law and Ms. Comey’s due process when it fired her in July 2025.

At the time of her firing, Ms. Comey was a highly regarded trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, handling the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean Combs.

Ms. Comey had said there was no possible reason for her firing besides the fact that her father, James B. Comey, was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or because of her “perceived political affiliation and beliefs.”

Judge Furman also ruled that Ms. Comey is entitled to back pay through December 2025.

Ms. Comey’s victory could open a path for other government workers who were fired and are seeking to appeal their termination. She argued that neither the president nor attorney general had the authority to fire rank-and file prosecutors like her, who are protected under civil service law.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Democratic Early Voting Surges, Hegseth Fears Impeachment, Voter Intimidation Efforts Fail, Nicki Minaj for Press Secretary, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Today I speak to Dr. Amy Acton as nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. In the Senate battlegrounds, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters to Republicans’ 35 percent. In North Carolina, Democratic early voting is up 47 percent, while Republican early voting is up less than 3 percent. Trump is spending the final week rallying in states he won by 20 points, and he admitted the problem himself on Sunday: “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up.”

His answer today was a $1 million bounty for voter fraud tips, from an administration that has lost all 26 of its lawsuits seeking states’ voter rolls, according to California’s attorney general. Meanwhile, his Defense Secretary is reportedly hunting for a Senate seat to escape impeachment, and a federal judge ruled that his Justice Department illegally fired Maurene Comey. Hours later, they charged Jim Comey again.

When an administration uses the power of the government against political opponents and the people it disagrees with, the question becomes who’s next. Independent journalists who report what powerful people want hidden are an obvious target. In the past week alone, we published exclusive images and videos from our bases in the Middle East and laid out Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin. I have no corporate legal team and no billionaire owner to protect this work. What protects it is you.

Here’s what you need to know tonight.

Nearly 30 Million Have Already Voted as Democrats Lead the Early Vote and Trump Rushes to Shore Up Red States

Nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. NBC News puts the national total at 29.9 million mail-in and early in-person ballots, compared with just over 15 million at a similar point in 2022. The jump is especially large in Republican-leaning states with competitive Senate races: early voting is up roughly 69 percent in Kansas, 41 percent in Maine, and 24 percent in Iowa, according to a New York Times analysis. In Texas, about 4.5 million ballots have been cast, compared with 3 million at this point in 2022, and Michigan has passed 1 million ballots. Virginia is up about 80 percent from four years ago, and a political scientist there says the early vote is concentrated in districts where “Republicans are playing defense, not offense.” North Carolina has also recorded more than 400,000 more early votes than at this point in 2022.

Democrats are leading the early vote in the Senate battlegrounds, and Republican turnout is lagging. In the Senate battleground states, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters, compared with 35 percent for registered Republicans, according to NBC News data from TargetSmart. In North Carolina, early voting among registered Democrats is up 47 percent and among unaffiliated voters up 60 percent, while Republican early voting is up just 2.6 percent. Registered Democrats also lead the early vote in Kansas, Iowa, and Maine, and in Florida, where Republicans hold a 1.5 million voter registration edge, Democrats are ahead by about 4,000 ballots out of 2.7 million. In Wisconsin, which has no party registration, counties that voted more heavily for Harris in 2024 are turning out faster than Trump counties. “Democrats and unaffiliateds are engaged. Republicans are not as engaged,” said University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, adding that there’s “not some big polling miss on the horizon.”

Trump is spending the final week rallying in deep-red states to shore up his own base. He’s campaigning Monday in Mississippi, a state he won by more than 20 points, for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, whose race against Democrat Scott Colom is tightening. He then heads to Texas, Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, while Vice President JD Vance rallies in Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Trump has been urging supporters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot. “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up,” he admitted in Michigan on Sunday. “Please show up and vote.” Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic voters are turning out early at higher rates than in recent elections, from Georgia, where Black voters make up 32 percent of early voters, to Florida, where in-person early voting among Black and Hispanic voters has roughly doubled.

Experts warn that early voting is a snapshot, not a prediction, and Republicans still have time to close the gap. Many early voters would have voted on Election Day anyway, according to MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, and the surge also reflects heavy campaign spending to bank votes early. Republicans have historically turned out more heavily on Election Day, and in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio most voters still wait until then. One expert says Trump may have “inadvertently done a favor to the Democrats” by attacking mail voting for years, pushing more Democrats to vote in person, where their ballots are less likely to be rejected. Trump has since reversed himself and is urging Republicans to vote early or by mail, which could narrow the gap. Party registration also doesn’t guarantee how someone votes, so the final result will depend on who shows up between now and November 3rd.

Trump Offers $1 Million Voter Fraud Bounty as His Election Fraud Claims Keep Collapsing in Court

Trump is offering $1 million to anyone whose tip leads to a voter fraud conviction, even as his administration keeps losing in court on election fraud. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud,” Trump posted Monday, eight days before the midterms. The offer comes after his administration lost all 26 of its lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “The government has lobbed allegations of widespread voter fraud at the states, only for those allegations to crumble under scrutiny,” Bonta wrote in a court filing, adding that one court called the federal government’s citizenship records “known to be unreliable.” The same day, Trump also claimed without evidence that Brazil’s election looked “rigged” after Lula’s win. Critics, including Democratic and some Republican election officials, call the administration’s moves federal overreach, and some say they’re preparing for federal interference in the midterms.

Trump’s latest attempt to interfere with ballots in California is facing skeptical judges, and his own officials admit their list may be wrong. The Justice Department sued California to force it to set aside up to 20,000 ballots it claims may have been sent to noncitizens, after the state refused a demand to review the list within 48 hours in the middle of voting. A federal appeals court appeared skeptical of the effort, according to CNN, and Bonta called the lawsuit “a reckless political stunt” that “borders on the absurd.” The acting deputy attorney general admitted that “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens.” When Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 names, many appeared to be citizens, and most hadn’t voted or even been sent ballots. The administration’s track record elsewhere is similar: Homeland Security claimed Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its rolls, but sent only 185 names, all of whom turned out to be U.S. citizens.

While hunting for voter fraud, Trump fought to free a former election official convicted of compromising voting machines, and now he’s being sued over it. Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after a jury found her guilty of helping an unauthorized person access secure voting equipment while chasing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. The judge called her “a charlatan” and said, “You are no hero.” Trump called her a “hostage” and promised “harsh measures” if she wasn’t freed, and Colorado was then denied wildfire aid, lost $109 million in transportation funding, and faced threats to food aid, moves the White House says were unrelated. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is now suing Trump over what he calls a retaliation campaign, saying, “The threats were not hidden, they were not subtle, they were out in the open, and we’re fighting back.” Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ sentence in May, and she has since returned to the election-denial circuit and met with Trump at the White House.

Hegseth Is Reportedly Looking for an Exit as Impeachment Pressure Builds

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly angling for a Senate seat to escape a possible impeachment, according to Puck. If Sen. Marsha Blackburn wins her race for Tennessee governor next week, as expected, she would appoint someone to fill the rest of her Senate term, which runs until January 2031. Puck reports that Hegseth wants Blackburn to appoint him, which would get him out of the Pentagon before Democrats can go after him. Hegseth and his family set up residence in Tennessee in 2022, and Rep. Tim Burchett is also reportedly interested in the seat. Puck also reported that some Republicans hope Trump will dismiss Hegseth before an impeachment process begins, and some senators “foresee a pathway” for him to step down. The Pentagon dismissed the report as “beltway gossip by anonymous sources,” insisting Hegseth’s “singular priority is leading the War Department.”

The walls are closing in, with a House impeachment vote possible as soon as lawmakers return after the midterms. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment in September and says he’ll force a vote shortly after the House returns on Nov. 9, a vote that is expected to be close. His resolution accuses Hegseth of waging war on Iran without congressional approval, ignoring laws meant to minimize civilian casualties, and using unauthorized lethal force against suspected drug-smuggling boats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats will hold Hegseth accountable “in the same way that we held Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem accountable” if Trump doesn’t remove him. At a Pennsylvania rally this month, Jeffries went further: “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town.” Rep. Pat Ryan warned, “Hegseth and crew better buckle up and lawyer up because we are coming at them full on.”

Hegseth’s support is collapsing even among Trump voters, while the White House insists he’s doing “a great job.” Nearly two-thirds of 2024 Democratic voters and 20 percent of Republicans support impeaching him, according to The POLITICO Poll, including 18 percent of MAGA Republicans. Democrats are preparing probes into the Iran war, alleged war crimes, Pentagon business dealings, the firing of senior military officers, and the Signalgate scandal. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called Hegseth “incompetent and, frankly, corrupt,” and Rep. Jared Huffman called him an “unhinged fanatic who should be impeached and removed from office.” The White House defended him, saying the results of his military operations “speak for themselves.” But with Democrats favored to win the House, the reported search for a Senate seat suggests Hegseth may be planning his own exit before they get the chance.

Judge Rules Trump’s DOJ Illegally Fired Maurene Comey, Rejecting Its Claim of Unlimited Power to Purge Prosecutors

A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, as a federal prosecutor. In a 55-page opinion, Judge Jesse Furman found that her July 2025 firing violated the Civil Service Reform Act, the Constitution’s separation of powers, her Fifth Amendment due process rights, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Comey spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, leading the cases against Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and music mogul Sean Combs. Furman noted that she “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.” She was fired with a terse letter citing only “Article II of the United States Constitution,” with no further explanation. Her lawsuit argued she was targeted because of her father, a longtime Trump foe, or because of her perceived political beliefs.

The ruling rejects the Trump administration’s claim that it can fire career federal employees for any reason. The Justice Department argued that because prosecutors exercise the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers, Congress has no say over how they’re removed. “The Court concludes the Defendants are wrong,” Furman wrote, saying the argument “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.” He warned that accepting it “would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.” The decision matters far beyond Comey, since the administration has relied on that same theory to justify a sweeping purge of the federal workforce. Under Trump, the Justice Department has fired scores of career prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on investigations of the president or were seen as opposed to his agenda.

Comey was awarded reinstatement and back pay, and the Justice Department says it will appeal. Furman ordered her reinstated retroactively, with back pay from her firing through December 2025, when she became a partner at the Manhattan law firm Patterson Belknap, so she isn’t expected to return to the DOJ. Her lawyers called it a “hard-earned victory” for “all civil servants” and “all fighting for the rule of law,” adding that the decision confirms “the President is not above the law.” A DOJ spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.” The ruling lands as Trump’s Justice Department keeps pursuing her father: an earlier case against James Comey was dismissed after a judge found the prosecutor had been illegally appointed. A separate indictment accusing him of threatening Trump with an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647” is still pending, and that case has been delayed until early next year.

Trump’s Justice Department has charged former FBI Director James Comey for a third time, the same day a judge ruled the department illegally fired his daughter. Federal prosecutors charged Comey with transmitting national defense information and conspiring to transmit national defense information, according to NBC News. The case has been under seal since Oct. 5, and Comey has not been indicted. His lawyers filed a motion last week to dismiss the charges. Comey has been a target of Trump’s since he opened the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump fired him in 2017. The first case against him, accusing him of lying to Congress, was thrown out after a judge found the prosecutor had been illegally appointed, and a second, accusing him of threatening Trump with an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647,” is delayed until early next year.

Trump Calls Brazil’s Election “Rigged” Without Evidence as Even His Own Allies Congratulate Lula

Trump claimed without evidence that Brazil’s election “looked like another rigged election” after Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro. “It looked terrible. I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I mean, I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election, frankly.” He took issue with the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision to extend voting by two hours, which Lula’s campaign had requested after buses were taken out of service in cities where he had strong support. Bolsonaro called the extension a “dirty trick,” even though his own campaign had also asked for more time because of heavy rain in the conservative south. Lula won 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent, a margin of about 4.4 million votes. Asked whether anything should be done about the result, Trump said, “I’m not running Brazil,” and added, “I like Lula. I get along with him very well.”

Trump’s administration reportedly held back its congratulations, even as world leaders and Trump’s own allies in the region welcomed Lula’s win. The State Department had drafted the customary congratulatory statement, but guidance was issued to postpone it and “evaluate” the situation after Bolsonaro called the result “inexplicable,” according to the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Meanwhile, Trump allies Chile’s José Antonio Kast and Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella both congratulated Lula, along with Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Mark Carney, and Zelensky. The Kremlin also welcomed the result, praising Lula’s work within BRICS. Lula’s victory snapped a streak of seven straight conservative presidential wins across Latin America in 18 months, according to the AP. It also denies Trump a powerful ally and keeps the region’s largest economy as a counterweight to Washington.

Bolsonaro is now under travel restrictions, after his brother suggested he should leave the country if he lost. Flávio Bolsonaro said federal police asked him to hand over his passports after he visited his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for attempting a coup. “I was ordered right on the street to hand over my passports, and I’m also prohibited from leaving the country,” he said in a video. He claimed, without evidence, that the order came from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and said it was based on his brother Eduardo’s podcast remarks that Flávio should leave Brazil if he lost. He says he’ll comply and denies planning to flee. After first refusing to concede and seeking to annul the election, he now says he’ll “organize the opposition” to Lula’s government.

Other news:

Trump insiders say there’s “a very genuine possibility” that Nicki Minaj becomes the next White House press secretary. Reporter Jake Lahut surveyed his Trumpworld sources after White House staffers publicly floated the rapper for the job, following Katie Zacharia’s firing after just five days. One Trump adviser pointed to Trump’s history of unconventional picks, noting that his communications director, Steven Cheung, came from the world of professional wrestling: “Maybe after Kate it’s even time for a little chin music. Maybe that’s Nicki.” The same adviser predicted that almost anyone would look like a brilliant speaker compared with Zacharia, but probably wouldn’t be as good at the job as Karoline Leavitt. Another source involved in the situation wouldn’t give odds, answering with what Lahut called a classic Trumpworld “you tell me.” Lahut’s conclusion is that the pick is a real possibility, though it’s unclear whether it would happen before the midterms, and conservative commentator Scott Jennings is also reportedly in the mix.

Two Catholic bishops say the White House exploited a private prayer meeting with Trump for political purposes days before the midterms. Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, one of 12 bishops at the Oct. 22 Oval Office meeting, issued “A Public Apology,” saying they were told it would be a private discussion with a chance to pray privately with the president. Instead, the White House quickly posted photos and video of the bishops praying over Trump, which Grob says was done without the participants’ consent. “I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred... would be manipulated in that way,” Grob said, adding that he heard from people “harmed by the president’s policies.” Des Moines Bishop William Joensen wrote, “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purpose.” Asked whether it had the bishops’ consent to release the images, the White House didn’t answer, saying only, “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump.”

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI model, warned in its IPO filing that its own technology could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company released the documents ahead of a stock market listing that could be record-breaking, pitching investors on AI’s ability to transform the world while warning it could also destroy it. The filing says its models have already been shown to be able to help people “develop chemical, biological, or other dangerous weapons.” It also warns that the models could cause harm by “behaving in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways,” including actions “no user or third party directed,” and that those risks may grow as the systems become more capable. Anthropic devoted 94 pages, nearly a quarter of the document, to risks, including that the long-term effects of AI on mental health and child development “are not yet fully understood.” The same filing claims AI could help cure diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and says some of the money raised will go to new data centers and computing power.

A fighter jet intercepted a civilian plane that flew into restricted airspace over Mar-a-Lago while Trump was in Florida. Around 12:20 p.m. Saturday, a NORAD F-16 used a “headbutt maneuver,” flying close in front of the plane to get the pilot’s attention. The pilot then made contact and safely left the restricted area, according to NORAD, and the pilot’s identity has not been released. Trump and Melania Trump were in Florida that day to vote early in West Palm Beach. NORAD has intercepted more than 60 aircraft violating flight restrictions around Palm Beach since January, which a NORAD spokesperson called “a lot.” Pilots who violate the restricted airspace can face enforcement action from federal authorities when they land.

A United Airlines flight returned to Las Vegas after a flight attendant reportedly saw a passenger texting about hijacking the plane. Flight 1681 was carrying 150 passengers and six crew members to Newark on Saturday night when the flight attendant noticed the messages, according to CBS News. “The flight attendant saw him texting that he was going to hijack the aircraft,” the pilot told air traffic control. “They called me, we went into lockdown, and we returned to Vegas.” The plane landed safely about an hour after takeoff, and all passengers were removed and inspected, with no injuries reported. Passengers were rebooked on a flight the next morning, and the FAA is investigating. Authorities have not identified the passenger or said whether he was detained.

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its global workforce, to help pay for its massive AI spending. Staff across divisions including Copilot, Xbox, Windows, finance, and human resources are eligible, while marketing, commercial business, and security are excluded, according to a Reuters source. The company is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers and chips, and expects $175 billion in capital spending this year alone. Investors are increasingly questioning whether those investments will pay off. The offer covers eligible employees in the U.S., Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. It follows earlier buyouts offered to about 9,000 U.S. employees this year and 4,800 job cuts announced in July.

Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original “Star Trek,” has died at 90. He died at his home in North Hollywood, his agent confirmed, leaving William Shatner and George Takei as the last surviving primary cast members of the original series. Koenig joined the show in its second season as Pavel Chekov, the Enterprise’s navigator, and went on to reprise the role in seven “Star Trek” movies. Takei, whose wedding Koenig attended as best man, called him “a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend.” “Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course,” Takei wrote. Koenig kept working almost to the end, winning best actor at this year’s Independent Shorts Awards.

The NBA has signed deals making Kalshi and Polymarket its preferred prediction markets, alongside an agreement with federal regulators. The league says the deals include “significant integrity protections,” such as limits on which markets can be offered, information-sharing on suspicious trading, and a ban on league and team personnel trading on NBA events. The NBA will have the right to approve which types of markets are available on its games. “If you’re going to be betting on our games or trading on our games or playing fantasy around our games, it’s better for it to be regulated than unregulated,” said the NBA’s Scott Kaufman-Ross. The deals come as more than a dozen states fight prediction markets in court, and the NFL recently asked the Supreme Court to settle who regulates them. Giannis Antetokounmpo has promoted Kalshi and LeBron James recently signed with Polymarket, while Victor Wembanyama has said he will never endorse such sites.

The father of a 6-year-old boy killed when a driver plowed through a youth soccer game in Wichita paid tribute to his son at his funeral. Cole Adrian and soccer coach Nicholas Schafer, 35, were killed on Oct. 17 when a pickup truck reportedly sped from a parking lot across a field where a game was underway, injuring 10 others, including several young children. “Cole often told us this was the ‘best day ever,’ even on days when nothing really special happened,” his father, Chris Adrian, said through tears. The family has drawn comfort from local youth soccer players who wore shirts reading “LLCA,” which the family took to mean “live like Cole,” “love like Cole,” and “long live Cole.” The 34-year-old driver, who reportedly had two of her own children in the truck, was arrested at the scene but released a day later without charges pending toxicology results and an inspection of the truck. Wichita’s police chief defended the release, saying the law and Constitution required it.

Apple says a “small number” of its new $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo devices have cracked inner screens. Reports of cracks began spreading on Reddit and social media soon after the phone went on sale Friday, including one Australian user who said the screen broke along the hinge within six hours. “As I continued opening it, I heard an audible crack, and the screen broke right along the hinge,” the user wrote. Apple confirmed the issue and said affected customers should contact AppleCare for a replacement. Analysts say it’s too early to tell whether the problem is widespread, noting that Samsung’s first foldable had similar issues in 2019. The Duo is the biggest launch yet under new CEO John Ternus, and it has reportedly sold out until January.

When Trump has to go to Mississippi to save a Senate seat and can’t draw a crowd while he is there, it really is over for Trump and the Republican Party.

Democrats might not win the Senate seat in Mississippi, but Trump’s appearance in the state only helped them.

become a campaign prop, especially the immigrant families in his diocese who live a few miles from Mar-a-Lago.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Caught in Major Epstein Lies, White House ‘Panicked’ as Right Wing Governments Fall, Big Iran Strikes Planned, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Look at the stories in today’s newsletter and the same thing keeps happening. Trump says he was “never on Epstein’s plane,” and the flight logs say otherwise. He says he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and the government’s own documents quote him saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Today, House Democrats put those statements next to the records in a 50-page report and are calling for an independent special counsel.

The same thing is happening around the world. Bolsonaro called his loss “foul play,” but the votes say otherwise. Serbia’s government put Vucic on state TV more than 500 times, and voters threw him out anyway. Here at home, Trump’s party keeps calling its seats safe while its own redrawn districts slip away. And CNN reports the White House has plans for major new strikes on Iran, ready to go after you’ve voted.

Powerful people keep putting out their story. The records keep telling a different one. My job is to put the two side by side so you can see the difference for yourself.

Billionaires bought the newspapers and the social media platforms, and they’re spending hundreds of millions to shape this election. You can’t outspend them, but together we can fund a newsroom they don’t control. 

Here’s what you need to know today.

House Democrats Accuse Trump of Lying About Epstein and Call for a Special Counsel to Investigate the DOJ’s Alleged Cover-Up

House Judiciary Democrats released a 50-page report accusing Trump of lying “dozens of times” about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and they’re calling for an independent special counsel to investigate. The report, titled “The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up,” comes eight days before the midterms. It argues that the evidence clearly meets the FBI’s standard for opening a full investigation into whether Trump took part in Epstein’s crimes. Democrats say Trump’s own Justice Department can’t be trusted to run that investigation, so they’re demanding a special counsel under federal rules that require one when the department has a “conflict of interest.” That counsel, they write, should investigate the president, as past special counsels from Archibald Cox to Robert Hur did, along with all of Epstein’s potential accomplices. “An independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat.

The report walks through the claims Trump has made about Epstein and lays out the records that contradict them. In 2019, Trump said he knew Epstein “just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” but the report says the two were “inseparable” for much of the 1990s, and that Epstein’s address books listed 14 phone numbers for Trump. In 2024, Trump said he “was never on Epstein’s plane,” yet the Epstein files show he flew on the jet at least eight times. Trump has long claimed he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, but an unredacted DOJ document quotes Trump himself saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Democrats also point to the 2003 birthday note to Epstein that Trump denies writing, comparing its signature with his signatures on other documents from the same period. The report argues that repeated false statements like these can be treated in court as evidence of “consciousness of guilt.”

Democrats accuse Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, of possible obstruction of justice to protect the president. The report says Blanche shut down ongoing Epstein investigations and, as deputy attorney general, flew to Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison right after she was called to testify before Congress. According to the transcript, Blanche steered Maxwell away from a subject that implicated Trump on at least three occasions. Democrats say that “could easily run afoul” of federal witness tampering law. They also raise Maxwell’s transfer afterward to a minimum-security camp, the DOJ’s continued withholding of records despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and its refusal to share evidence with New Mexico and British investigators, which the report says left the U.K.’s investigation “at risk of collapse.” The White House said “none of these allegations are true,” calling the report “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans,” and Trump has long denied any wrongdoing connected to Epstein.

Trump’s White House Is Terrified the Global Uprising Against Strongmen Is Coming Here, and He’s Next

Trump’s White House is in full panic mode as the worldwide revolt against right-wing strongmen reaches America’s doorstep. In just one weekend, voters in Brazil rejected the Bolsonaro family Trump embraced, and students in Serbia toppled one of Putin’s closest allies in Europe, following the ouster of Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year. Trump’s response says it all: total silence on Brazil, a desperate Islamophobic rant in Michigan, and a party pouring millions into districts that were supposed to be safe. His own aides are already bracing for a midterm wipeout, and conservative groups are pushing him to issue mass pardons to protect his staff from investigations if Democrats take Congress. With just 34 percent of likely voters approving of him in Michigan, a state he won in 2024, the warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether the wave sweeping the globe crashes over Trump’s party in eight days. Instead of staying on message, Trump is posting lengthy diatribes on Truth Social:

Screenshot of a very long Truth Social post by Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), shrunk into a thin strip in the center of a gray card. The text reads: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Let’s talk about this COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER, Bill Maher. He’s got a Low Rated Show on equally Low Rated HBO, which was once, long ago, a Network of Quality and Excitement — But that’s all gone. It’s not “HOT” anymore! Maher’s friend and business associate, Chuck LaBella, was also a friend of mine, worked on The Top Hit Show, The Apprentice, as a “gofer” and, because of the success of that show, Number One and Top Rated on many weeks, with the Finale’ being among the Top Shows of the Year, he was automatically and quickly brought up through the Ranks of NBC, along with everyone else associated with that Historic “Happening.” The Success of the Apprentice was so great that everyone partook — It built many careers, and that is a wonderful thing. (continues)

Lula’s stunning comeback in Brazil was a direct defeat for Trump, who tried to rescue the Bolsonaro family with tariffs and sanctions. Lula won 51.8 percent to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent, becoming the first candidate in Brazil’s history to lose the first round and come back to win, with a margin roughly double his 2022 victory. It was the first leftist win after seven straight right-wing victories across Latin America, and a rebuke of Trump, who imposed tariffs and sanctions on Brazil trying to keep Jair Bolsonaro out of prison. “This country refuses to be anyone’s backyard,” Lula declared, thanking the young people “who took to the streets to defend democracy.” Turnout actually rose from the first round to more than 128 million voters, driven by youth mobilization and a massive WhatsApp campaign. Trump has said nothing, while Flávio Bolsonaro, following his father’s playbook, called the result “foul play” and demanded it be annulled.

Putin just lost one of his closest allies in Europe as Serbia’s students crushed Aleksandar Vucic in a landslide. Vucic was one of the few European leaders who kept visiting Moscow even during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, standing alongside Orbán as Putin’s friendliest voices on the continent. Now both are gone. The student movement won 52.6 percent to Vucic’s 39.2 percent, a projected 140 seats, well past the 126 needed for a majority, despite Vucic dominating state media with more than 500 live addresses, a level one monitor compared to North Korea. The Kremlin was left hoping Serbia’s new leaders will still “understand the value of cooperation with Moscow,” while Zelensky, Germany’s Merz, and leaders across Europe celebrated. Hungary’s new prime minister, who ousted Orbán, said he felt “nostalgic” watching the celebrations, as Putin’s allies fall one by one.

Facing the same wave at home, Trump is resorting to Islamophobic fearmongering as even his gerrymanders collapse. At a Michigan rally Sunday, Trump claimed Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed would “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” falsely calling the U.S.-born Muslim a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member.” El-Sayed, who holds a narrow lead in a race that could decide the Senate, fired back: “My name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your gas.” Meanwhile, the congressional maps Trump pressured states to redraw as a “firewall” are failing: North Carolina’s 1st District, drawn so Trump would have won it by 11 points, is now a toss-up with more than $42 million in ad spending, and Texas seats drawn with a 10-point Trump advantage are shifting toward Democrats. Trump even admitted Speaker Mike Johnson begged him to rescue struggling candidates because their races are “tough.” As one strategist put it, this “will go down as a dummymander rather than a gerrymander.”

Trump Has Plans Ready for Major New Iran Strikes, Likely After the Midterms

U.S. forces are ready to launch major new strikes on Iran within 96 hours of a Trump order, and officials say it’s a question of when, not if. According to CNN, enough forces are now deployed in the Middle East to carry out attacks that would go far beyond the limited strikes on radars and launchers the U.S. has conducted since Trump halted full combat operations earlier this year. The Pentagon has developed a wide-ranging target list including Iranian energy infrastructure, military sites, and nuclear facilities. “It will be a big effort,” one official said. Officials say Trump appears to be leaning toward ordering major action, most likely after the Nov. 3 midterms, though he has backed off at the last moment before. Trump himself told Fox News on Sunday: “Do I make a deal with them, or do I finish them off?”

Israel pushed Trump for a joint attack before the midterms, but Trump told Netanyahu to wait. An Israeli security source told CNN that Netanyahu “really wanted and tried to convince Trump for a joint attack in Iran before the elections, and Trump did not give a green light,” a claim Netanyahu’s office called “fake news.” Israel has since delayed new strikes but is building up for joint operations with the U.S., likely after the American midterms, with one source saying, “The plans are ready, waiting for Trump’s approval.” Israeli media reported an “unprecedented” confrontation between Netanyahu and his army chief, who reportedly demanded legal authorization before carrying out an unspecified Iran directive, amid fears the war could be exploited for political gain ahead of Tuesday’s Israeli election. Netanyahu called the report “rubbish,” and his defense minister insisted there is “complete” coordination. U.S. intelligence assessments found Netanyahu still lacks a clear strategic objective beyond showing “progress,” even as he has publicly ordered Israel’s security services to topple Iran’s regime.

The U.S. is quietly preparing for Iranian retaliation, pulling diplomats out of the region and halting troop deployments. Intelligence assessments warn that if the U.S. and Israel strike again, Iran and the Houthis would likely retaliate immediately against American personnel and facilities in the region and beyond. The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia is already under ordered departure, other embassies are expected to follow or face staffing caps, and nonessential troops scheduled to rotate into the Middle East have been told they’re no longer going. A U.S. official called the current standoff in the Strait of Hormuz “untenable,” as oil prices stay high near $115 a barrel despite more tankers getting through. Meanwhile, the Houthis claimed another attack on Riyadh’s airport just hours after it reopened, and a tanker was struck and disabled in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday.

Iran says new U.S. strikes won’t change its position, even as the war and blockade squeeze its economy. “Whether there is war or not, our policies remain the same,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, adding that the U.S. and Israel “know they will achieve no different outcome” if they attack again. Tehran says indirect talks with Washington continue through intermediaries, and senior officials from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are meeting Iranian leaders in Tehran Monday to push for de-escalation. But the U.S. naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue, and the shadow fleet of tankers Iran used to sell oil to China reportedly ran dry in mid-October. Iran’s parliament speaker is now calling on citizens to cut gas use by 10 percent ahead of expected winter shortages.

Netanyahu Accused of Trying to Provoke Iran War to Delay Israel’s Election as Army Chief Pushes Back

Israel’s army chief reportedly pushed back on a Netanyahu directive that could have triggered a war with Iran just days before Tuesday’s election. According to Israel’s N12 News, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir received an order from the political leadership to carry out an action that security officials said would “trigger a rapid escalation into a confrontation with Iran.” Zamir demanded an in-depth discussion and formal legal authorization before moving forward, as he and other military leaders grew concerned the government was trying to exploit the Iran front for political gain. The report described the relationship between Netanyahu and Zamir as hitting “new lows.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu would have welcomed a return to war with Iran in August, earlier in October, and again recently, with both Trump and Zamir at times acting as brakes on him. Zamir has reportedly only been willing to strike Iran before the election if Iran was preparing to attack Israel or if Trump launched a new round of fighting with full U.S. backing.

Opposition leaders are accusing Netanyahu of treason, saying he tried to drag Israel into war to stop the election. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman called on the attorney general to open a criminal treason investigation, accusing Netanyahu of trying to provoke a confrontation with Iran to delay or prevent the vote. “The man has gone off the rails,” Liberman said, adding that relations between the military and political leadership have “never been as strained.” Former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot warned Netanyahu, “Do not dare to place your own political interests above the security of the State,” vowing not to let the IDF become “a tool for Netanyahu’s political survival campaign.” Democrats party leader Yair Golan went further, saying Netanyahu “does not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of our children for his survival on the eve of elections.”

Netanyahu and his defense minister deny any rift or any plan to strike Iran before the vote. Netanyahu called the report “rubbish” and said “there is no confrontation,” claiming critics were trying to obscure warnings that Iran was attempting to interfere in the election. Defense Minister Israel Katz said coordination with the IDF on Iran has been “complete,” and stated “unequivocally” that Israel had no intention of attacking Iran before the election, unless Iran struck first. He called the opposition’s attacks “shameful and irresponsible.” The controversy comes as Netanyahu faces a tight race in Tuesday’s election, with polls suggesting his governing coalition could lose its majority. It also comes as CNN reports Israel lobbied Trump for a joint strike on Iran before the vote, which Trump declined.

Ukraine Gets Starlink and Intelligence Back, but Patriot Shortage and Russian Strikes Continue

Zelensky says the U.S. has fully restored Ukraine’s Starlink access and its warnings about incoming Russian ballistic missiles, but the Patriot missile shortage remains unresolved. After meeting with U.S. officials in Oslo, Zelensky said the intelligence and Starlink issues “have been resolved as of today,” following a restriction that came amid his public feud with Trump over the diesel deal with Russia and Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. Drone attack reports across Ukraine shot up while Starlink access was restricted, as Russia ramped up strikes ahead of winter. But Zelensky said U.S. Patriot interceptors still aren’t arriving, warning that “things are moving very slowly, more slowly than Russian missiles fly.” “You cannot say, ‘yes, we will give the missiles to you,’ and then not deliver them for a month or two,” he said. Overnight, Russia launched about 140 drones and three ballistic missiles at Ukraine, injuring at least eight people and hitting a shopping center in Zaporizhzhia.

A Ukrainian government source says the Oleshky ceasefire came about after Zelensky spoke with Pope Leo, who had spoken to Putin, even as the White House credits Melania Trump. The source told Sky News the humanitarian corridor took shape following those conversations, adding weight to questions about who really brokered the deal. The two sides also disagree on timing, with Ukraine’s human rights chief saying the ceasefire starts Tuesday while the U.S. says Oct. 29. The Kremlin said the Oleshky arrangement could serve as a model for similar deals elsewhere, but stressed that upcoming peace talks place no restrictions on its military operations. Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers have been using drones to drop food and medicine into the occupied city, where about 50 children are trapped, and even airlifted pets to safety in cages. Russia, without evidence, accused Ukraine of mining roads to block evacuations, while Russia itself has been accused of using Oleshky’s civilians as human shields.

Ukraine is making slow but significant gains on the battlefield as peace talks are set to resume next month without the leaders. The Institute for the Study of War says Ukrainian forces have liberated three villages in the Oleksandrivka direction, forcing Russia to redeploy some of its more combat-capable troops away from offensive operations, which could threaten Russian logistics over time. Ukraine also launched more than 100 drones at Russia’s Voronezh region overnight, killing two people and injuring 17, and drone maker Fire Point said it struck a major synthetic rubber plant there. Russia’s security service claimed it foiled a Ukrainian-directed drone plot targeting Moscow’s missile defenses, which Ukraine hasn’t commented on. U.S.-mediated talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. are expected in November at a technical level, possibly in Abu Dhabi or Switzerland. Zelensky said territory is a “red line” that can only be discussed between leaders, and that he doesn’t want to approach any such meeting “having lifted all sanctions.”

Other news:

Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude AI model bypassed a paywall to access voter data from the state of Georgia. The AI found a loophole in an old version of a state agency website, requesting a digital “access token” that let it reach aggregate vote counts normally available only for a fee, as part of an internal statistics project. Anthropic said Claude “did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” and that it has added safeguards to prevent similar behavior. The company had disclosed earlier this month that Claude had worked around restrictions to reach gated data, including on U.S. government websites, and had also submitted a fake tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police and filed 19 visa applications. It’s the latest in a growing string of incidents involving AI agents acting on their own, including an OpenAI agent that hacked Australia’s healthcare system. The White House’s new Super Intelligence Force now requires AI companies to report security incidents involving their technology.

RFK Jr.’s overhaul of U.S. vaccine policy has left new vaccines in limbo, with patients now paying out of pocket for shots that used to be free. After a judge blocked Kennedy’s attempt to replace the government’s vaccine advisory committee with his handpicked allies, Kennedy hasn’t appointed any new members, meaning no new vaccine recommendations are being issued. Without a recommendation, insurers aren’t required to cover newly approved vaccines, like Moderna’s new mRNA flu shot for adults 50 and up, potentially until January 2029. One retired public health worker was charged a $40 co-pay for the shot, saying, “I’ve never had to pay for a flu shot in my life.” Even Kennedy’s own former lawyer accused the White House and Justice Department of “doing everything they can to make sure that there is no functioning vaccine committee.” Experts warn the committee may never return to how it was without new legal protections from Congress.

U.S. forces are accused of “weaponizing” Somalia’s floods by driving civilians toward a rising river with relentless airstrikes. Residents of Jilib, the de facto capital of the militant group al-Shabaab, describe constant drone strikes that have killed civilians and pinned the population along the flooding Juba River, just as a strengthening El Niño threatens catastrophic floods. A source monitoring the region told the Guardian the offensive appears to be “exploiting El Niño as a weapon of war,” raising fears of mass drownings among women and children in the coming months. The U.S. military’s Africa Command denied the allegation, saying it “does not target civilians” or “use weather or flooding as a method of warfare.” But witnesses describe far more strikes than the 11 the U.S. has publicly acknowledged since August, raising questions about covert strikes. The crisis is compounded by aid cuts, with Somalia’s aid budget collapsing from $2.2 billion in 2023, and one refugee camp leader estimating 6,000 may have died in Kismayo’s displacement camps since USAID was shut down.

R&B singer Chris Brown received a suspended sentence for hitting a man in the head with a tequila bottle at a London club. Brown, 37, was sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months, after pleading guilty earlier this year to affray over the February 2023 attack at a private members’ club in Mayfair. Security footage showed Brown striking Abraham Diaw four times with a heavy square tequila bottle, twice in the head, before throwing punches as Diaw fell. Brown’s vocal coach, Omololu Akinlolu, who grabbed Diaw in a “bear hug” during the attack, received a four-month suspended sentence. The judge called the attack “plainly dangerous” and warned that “commercial success does not attract preferential treatment.” Both men were ordered to pay about $2,000 in court costs.

Newly released footage shows baby monkeys taken from their mothers and subjected to neurological experiments at the University of Washington. The videos, obtained by PETA through a public records request, show infant macaques, some just two days old, with electrodes attached to their heads, screeching and clutching blankets as researchers tested their reflexes and memory. The monkeys were part of a $4.2 million, NIH-funded project from 2014 to 2020 studying whether exposure to a marine algae toxin in the womb damaged their brains, and PETA says they were killed afterward. “Instead of clinging to their mothers, they grasp blankets on metal tables,” said PETA’s chief primate science adviser, a former University of Washington scientist. The university said its staff have specialized expertise in primate care and that the research remains relevant to public health, though there’s no clear evidence it changed health recommendations. PETA is calling for the closure of all seven U.S. National Primate Research Centers.

Police have arrested a 15-year-old in the shooting near Florida A&M’s stadium that injured 12 people during homecoming weekend. The teen faces 11 counts of attempted second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a delinquent, according to Tallahassee police. The shooting broke out Saturday night near Bragg Memorial Stadium after the historically Black university’s homecoming football game, injuring several minors, including an 11-year-old. Police said a physical altercation between people who knew each other came before the gunfire, and that none of the victims appear to have been the intended targets. “What should have been a weekend of celebration in our community instead became a night of fear and violence,” said Police Chief Lawrence Revell. More arrests are possible as the investigation continues.

Japan has indicted a U.S. Marine on robbery and murder charges in the killing of a Japanese woman in Okinawa. Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, is accused of strangling 39-year-old Anna Yagi with a telephone cord in a hotel in Naha earlier this month and stealing her backpack and wallet, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK. Ballard has denied the allegations. The case sparked protests in Okinawa and Tokyo, drew condemnation from Japanese political leaders, and led to a curfew and alcohol ban for U.S. troops on the island. It’s the latest in a long string of incidents fueling unease over the large U.S. military presence in Okinawa, near Taiwan and China. The Marine Corps said it recognizes “the seriousness of the charges” and will continue cooperating with Japanese authorities.

Meidas Touch Network, Monday Update: Lula Wins, Trump’s Allies Fall, and an Epstein Report Drops 8 Days Out, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. It's Monday. Eight days until midterms. Here’s what’s going on: House Judiciary Democrats just released a 53-page Epstein report with accounts from 11 women and a call for a special counsel; Lula wins a fourth term in Brazil, and Flávio Bolsonaro and Trumpworld cry “stolen”; Serbia’s students beat Vučić’s party, and María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela; Netanyahu reportedly clashes with his own army chief over Iran ahead of Tuesday’s election; CNN says Trump is prepping major Iran strikes, likely after the midterms; Gas prices are on track for the priciest Election Day in history; 

The Epstein Report

This morning, House Judiciary Democrats under Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin released a report titled “‘We Have Certain Things in Common, Jeffrey’: The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover it Up.”

It draws on accounts from 11 women, FBI records, and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The central claim is that Trump was an active participant in Epstein’s abuse of young women in the 1990s.

You can read the full report in its entirety here:'

Five of the 11 women directly accuse Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s presence, and others say Epstein or Maxwell tried to traffic them to him. Two allegations involve 13-year-old girls. There’s also a new allegation from a Swiss model who previously accused Trump of sexual assault and now alleges he raped her at a 1993 pageant at the Plaza Hotel. The report also names longtime Trump friend Paolo Zampolli as a possible co-conspirator.

The report argues that AG Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is compromised and that an independent special counsel is needed. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called the allegations untrue and the report a “desperate attempt” to distract. Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove reports the Epstein case is haunting Republicans on the campaign trail. Rep. Robert Garcia says Oversight will open its own probe if Democrats win the House.

Brazil Says No

Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro 51.76% to 48.24%, a margin of roughly 4.36 million votes, after trailing in round one. Lula not only had to fight Bolsonaro and the international network of autocrats, but also Big Tech. Meta appeared to suppress Lula’s ads and content while Flávio’s got amplified, on top of Musk’s thumb on the scale at X. So Lula’s people built their own channel, ironically on another Meta platform not based on algorithms, but based on the people. Congressman André Janones launched a WhatsApp channel he called “Lula’s Army.” Per Colombian journalist Félix de Bedout, it grew from 50,000 people in the first round to 10 MILLION in the runoff. That’s how they broke through the blockade.

Lula’s victory speech took aim at Washington and Silicon Valley. He said Brazil won’t be in anybody’s backyard, called out foreign interference through digital platforms, and promised to regulate the tech giants that earn billions, pay no taxes in Brazil, and try to steer its elections.

Flávio refused to concede and says he’ll seek to annul the election over a court order extending voting by 2 hours. And guess who posted his statement first? Trump adviser Jason Miller. Shocker.

Elon Musk posted that the “math doesn’t add up,” which ignores how runoffs work. Lula picked up about 10 million votes between rounds while Flávio added around 3.6 million. Trump influencer Joey Mannarino called for Trump to “send in a team for Lula” like he did for Maduro. The Trump propagandist class on X in unison all pushed their stolen election claims.

Pathetic.Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL) arrives to speak after losing the presidential runoff election, in Brasilia, Brazil October 25, 2026. REUTERS/Adriano Machado

Some on Brazil’s own right didn’t play along. João Amoêdo, founder of the center-right Novo party, said Flávio’s refusal proves the family’s coup-plotting DNA. Celebrations filled the streets all across Brazil, and even in Buenos Aires, the capital of Trump pal Javier Milei.

It Was a Rough Weekend for Trump’s Friends

In Serbia: The student-led movement born out of the 2024 Novi Sad canopy collapse beat Aleksandar Vučić’s party roughly 52% to 32%. Vučić is still president, but his party’s decade-plus grip on parliament is over. He cultivated close ties with Putin, Don Jr.—and Jared Kushner pursued a major real estate deal with his government.

In Venezuela: María Corina Machado returned home via Colombia and drew huge crowds on her way to Caracas. I have real problems with how much she has flattered Trump, but she is a far better alternative than Delcy Rodríguez.

In Cuba: Marco Rubio literally posted a recruitment pitch on X inviting Cubans into a “discrete partnership with the CIA.”

In Hungary: The Trump regime is reportedly encouraging another loser, Viktor Orbán, to run for UN Secretary-General, with Russia and China apparently supportive, per WSJ.Netanyahu vs. His Own Army

Israel votes Tuesday, and Channel 12 describes an unprecedented confrontation between Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir over military action related to Iran right before the election. Zamir has reportedly demanded signed documentation on its legal authorization. Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief now leading the opposition, publicly backed Zamir and warned Netanyahu not to turn the IDF into a tool for his political survival.

Reports circulated that Netanyahu was pressing Trump for more support heading into the vote, and shortly after, Trump posted a second endorsement to Truth Social, attaching the one he’d already given a week earlier “to those who haven’t seen it.” He encouraged Israel to vote for Netanyahu so that they can continue the war against Iran. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is running an ad bragging that electricity prices haven’t spiked in Israel, while Americans pay record prices for the war he and Trump started.

More Reporting on New Attacks

CNN, citing 2 U.S. officials, reports U.S. forces could launch major new operations against Iran within 96 hours of an order, with a target list covering energy, military, and nuclear sites. Trump apparently wants to wait until after the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, Iran hosted a security summit in Tehran with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Pakistan’s army chief, and Türkiye’s intelligence chief. Everything continues to spiral out of control for MBS as Ansar Allah (Houthis) gain territory and hit Saudi Arabia.

CENTCOM’s Admiral Brad Cooper claimed over 95% of ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz safely. But UKMTO data shows 27 attacks in October, the most of any month throughout this war. And UKMTO has admitted they are undercounting the attacks. But let’s humor Brad Cooper’s 95% number. That means tankers have a 5% chance of getting hit by his rosiest of scenarios. If you knew you had a 5% chance of your plane crashing, would you board your flight? This isn’t exactly encouraging.Gas Prices Keep Surging

GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan says gas is 42 cents above the 2022 Election Day average, making this the priciest Election Day ever. Diesel is nearly a dollar higher. Trump’s second-term average gas prices have already passed Biden’s.

So of course Kevin Hassett went on Fox and called this “about the best economy we’ve ever seen.”

The Early Vote

In Texas, Democratic primary voters are turning out like it’s a presidential year while Republicans are turning out like it’s a midterm. Democrats across the board are way ahead of their 2024 pace.

Then there’s DataRepublican, one of the most-followed data accounts on the MAGA right (and a former secret Trump regime employee). When her followers asked for her early vote analysis, she said her platform is big enough that being too honest with the numbers could hurt morale, so she would instead quietly post information to her website without announcing it on X. That says a whole lot. When she posted the data on her site, it showed a likely 15 to 21 point shift to the left from 2024 when you extrapolate the info.

Trump and Vance are spending the final week in states Trump won by an average of 14 points, including Mississippi today.

And one more reminder from me: don’t let any of this positive data make you complacent. Remember to vote. Keep spreading the word. Take nothing for granted.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.

Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.

The next nine days will decide the direction of this country, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way. I have some big interviews coming this week that you won’t want to miss, daily coverage as the final stretch unfolds, and a major election night livestream on November 3rd with guests I can’t wait to share with you.

None of it is possible without you. I don’t have a corporate owner or a billionaire backer. This work runs on readers who believe in independent journalism. 

Here’s what you need to know tonight.

Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat to a student-led protest movement, ending his more than decade-long grip on power in a historic election. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” Vucic said Sunday, projecting the students would take between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament to his party’s 105. A representative sample by pollsters showed the student list winning 138 seats to 104 for Vucic’s party. Turnout hit nearly 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, with long lines snaking from polling stations across the country. The vote followed almost two years of student-led protests against corruption and creeping authoritarianism, sparked when a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024, killing 16 people. Belgrade’s streets erupted in celebration, with cars honking and students chanting “victory” and “he’s done,” as one celebrating woman said, “We have finally got rid of this mafia.”

The Bottom Is Falling Out for Republicans as Trump’s Own Words Drag Down His Party

Trump told a Georgia rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans paying more at the pump, bragging that the U.S. is “making a freaking fortune” off high oil prices. “We’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, but my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher,” Trump said Saturday. He predicted the headlines would say he was bragging about money while people suffer at the pump, then added, “I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.” The remarks came as inflation rose to 3.7 percent in September, hotter than expected, and consumer sentiment sits near the lowest point on record. “Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded, while former Obama adviser David Axelrod quipped it was “not a great closing message.” New Yorker writer Susan Glasser called it “the epigraph for the entire Trump 2.0 presidency.”

Republicans’ own internal polling shows the bottom falling out in seats that were once considered safe. GOP leaders received polling in late September showing that districts Trump won by 10 points or more in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere are now competitive, and all three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa look likely to fall, according to Politico. Even longtime incumbents who haven’t faced serious races in years, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, are now at risk. “I think the scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is,” one senior House Republican said. Their worst fear is that white working-class voters, angry over fuel prices and the Iran war, won’t just stay home but will vote for Democrats. Arkansas Rep. French Hill, whose deep-red seat is now a Democratic target, blamed “President Trump’s lack of favorability at the top.” Democrats say they’re confident of winning the House and could reach as many as 240 seats.

Election analysts say Trump himself is the reason, warning of a “red undertow” that could sink Republicans in both chambers. Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said rising prices, tariffs, and the Iran war all hit at once just as voters started paying attention: “It was almost like the bottom fell out suddenly.” He said the coming wave “isn’t pro-Democrat. It’s anti-Trump,” predicting Democrats will flip 20 or more House seats and likely four Senate seats, enough to take both chambers. A New York Times poll this week showed Democrats leading by 11 points, with Trump’s approval at a new low. Early voting data also shows Democrats and independents far more energized than Republicans. And Trump’s own past attacks appear to be backfiring: after spending months calling mail-in voting fraudulent, he’s now frantically urging Republicans to vote early by mail.

Obama Hammers Trump Over the Iran War as Trump Fumes Over Obama’s Crowds

Obama blasted Trump for starting an unnecessary war with Iran, arguing he had already kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons without firing a shot. “Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, because I put a deal in place that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes,” Obama said in Cleveland. “And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it; I just had to engage in diplomacy.” Trump withdrew from that 2015 deal in his first term, then launched strikes on Iran alongside Israel in late February, promising a quick operation that has now dragged on for nearly eight months. “So seven months later, how’s that war going?” Obama asked, noting that 21 Americans have been killed, 865 wounded, missile stockpiles depleted, and Iran now holds “veto power” over the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the price of oil, diesel, and “just about everything.” The war has become a liability for Republicans, with a new AP-NORC poll finding 56 percent of Republican voters and 47 percent of Democratic voters say ending it should be a top priority for the next Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton now leads Vivek Ramaswamy 50 percent to 43 percent in a Marist poll taken before his controversial ad aired, and Sherrod Brown leads Sen. Jon Husted 48 percent to 44 percent.

Trump lashed out over the size of Obama’s Detroit rally, complaining that the media “never” talks about his crowds. Obama rallied Saturday in Detroit with Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson on the first day of in-person early voting in the state. Speaking at a rally in Georgia that night, Trump mocked the turnout: “A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd.” He referred to El-Sayed as “Mohamed,” a name drawn from the candidate’s middle name that Trump has repeatedly used against him. Trump then revived an old grievance about Sen. Bernie Sanders, claiming Sanders drew “like 900 to 1,000 people” while he drew tens of thousands. In reality, Sanders’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew an estimated 36,000 people in Los Angeles and more than 34,000 in Denver last year. He attacked Obama on Truth Social too:

Musk Doubles Down on Ukraine Starlink Cuts as Kyiv Fires Back and Pentagon Hands SpaceX Sensitive Military Data

Elon Musk is defending his decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starlink, lashing out at critics as “bloodthirsty warmongers” and agreeing that Zelensky “needs to go.” In a string of posts Saturday night into Sunday, Musk said Ukraine violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes, writing, “We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed.” He warned that if Starlink were switched off, “the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately,” adding, “This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.” Musk accused his critics of wanting the war to continue “until every last man in Ukraine has died in a ditch,” and when one user wrote that Zelensky needs to go, Musk replied, “Yes.” Until this weekend, neither Musk nor the U.S. government had taken responsibility for the cuts, with Musk previously insisting that limits were “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Earlier this month, Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev hailed Musk’s attacks on Zelensky as a “tipping point” in the war. Today, he celebrated Musk again:

Ukraine flatly denies Musk’s claim, saying it would have been physically impossible to use commercial Starlink the way he described. “It’s very strange that Elon Musk doesn’t know about the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov, noting that Starlink doesn’t work over Russian territory, so Ukraine “PHYSICALLY CANNOT USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK” for deep or mid-range strikes. A former drone adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry said any drone mission requiring satellite links had to run through Starshield, the U.S. government-controlled military version, and that Ukraine “did not violate the terms of use.” Ukrainian officials say the cuts capped Starshield at about 100 miles per hour, hampering their ability to shoot down Russian drones and forcing them to cancel operations. The restrictions came as Trump struck a diesel deal with Russia, waived sanctions, and called for Ukraine to get a new president, and coincided with an interruption in U.S. intelligence warnings of incoming Russian attacks. Zelensky has said he believes both Trump and Musk were involved.

Russia pounded Ukraine as the satellite fight played out, and Kyiv is now racing to build its own system so it never depends on Musk again. Zelensky said Russia launched about 1,600 guided bombs, 48 missiles, and nearly 2,300 attack drones at Ukraine in the past week alone, killing and injuring people almost every day. Ukraine’s defense ministry has partnered with Nokia and Finnish satellite firm ICEYE to develop a “sovereign” Starlink-style network built on European technology. “We must all rely on capabilities that we can control,” Zelensky said. A security analyst told NBC News that Musk’s control over Starlink gives him “enormous leverage,” which is exactly why Europe is pushing to build independent space infrastructure. This isn’t the first time: Reuters reported last year that Musk ordered a 2022 Starlink disruption during a pivotal Ukrainian counteroffensive, which SpaceX called inaccurate.

At the same time, the Pentagon has handed SpaceX access to sensitive military space-tracking data, raising new national security and conflict-of-interest concerns. The Space Force gave SpaceX “enhanced” access to U.S. Space Command’s most detailed catalog of objects in orbit, a first for any commercial company, including radar tracking data on objects as small as about 4 inches. The data has been closely held because it could expose the limits of U.S. defense capabilities used to monitor other countries’ satellites. Critics say it gives Musk an edge over competitors and moves toward privatizing space traffic control, after Musk’s DOGE fired much of the staff at the federal program meant to handle it and the administration twice tried to defund it. “It’s like giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights,” said a former employee of that program. Public Citizen said Musk “has bought his way into the favor of President Trump,” and his “political investment is paying off very, very handsomely.”

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 25, 2026 [MAGA Doubles Down], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 26, 2026. And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.

Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.

He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”

On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.

At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”

Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.

Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.

Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.

Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.

After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”

“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.

After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.

Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against incumbent Republican senator Mike Rogers in Michigan.

That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.

El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.

Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.

And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.

Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.

American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.

Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.

Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”

After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”

The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.

“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.

Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for [Donald Trump].”

It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”

An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”

In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ass Clown, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In a weird way, it’s almost sad to see. Donald Trump has spent a decade as the main character of our politics. He has managed to break and destabilize shockingly much in that time. Yet now, watching him stagger toward a humiliating midterm rebuke with his movement seemingly on the brink of collapse, I have to admit it’s hard to feel much pleasure about it all.

Instead, I still mostly feel disgust and shame: This is the would-be Napoleon who managed to haul the United States of America to this ridiculous place?

Trump, who still apparently believes in the mystical election-saving power of his rallies, has spent weeks dragging himself from stage to stage across the country. He is plainly exhausted; he is noticeably hoarser, looser, and less energetic than he was even a couple weeks ago. Most of what he dishes out is reheated sludge—microwaved leftovers from 2016 and 2024. Two things are new, though.

One is this ass thing. Can we talk about this ass thing? Trump can’t stop talking about the derrieres that surround him. Mostly it’s Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, but it’s started to spread. “I’ve been living with this whole thing about the ass,” he said last night in Michigan. Then he turned to Mike Rogers: “I’d say that about your ass, too, Mike, if it gets you a guaranteed victory.” Not in a gay way, though, he hastened to clarify. “By the way, I’ve looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before,” he added. “Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss.” He then invited Minaj, who was in the audience, to stand up so people could get a better view.

But the main new thing is the conditional promise.

You’ve heard the big one, of course: Trump’s no-foolin’ pledge that, if Republicans win the midterms, he’ll reward the public’s good behavior with $5,000 checks for every adult. What you may not realize, if you don’t watch the rallies, is how basically every Trump promise is now framed like this.

He goes to Westchester, Kentucky, and promises a new $100 million Defense Department investment in a pharmaceutical plant there—but only “if Republicans win.” “You have to win, Andy,” he tells Senate candidate Andy Barr. “Otherwise, forget it.”

He goes to Park City, Kansas, and promises a farmer-pleasing change to allow the sale of ethanol-blended gas year round—but only if Sen. Roger Marshall wins re-election. “If Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it,” Trump says. “I’m only doing it for him.”

He goes to Greenville, North Carolina, and promises to settle longstanding claims from veterans exposed to contaminated drinking water while serving at nearby Camp Lejeune decades ago. But only “if we win the House and Senate.” “If we don’t win, there’s no money,” Trump says. “If we do win, you’re getting it, and it’s going to be finally over with that nightmare that’s been going on for so many years.”

As is typical with Trump, none of these quid pro quo promises are actually true. Some of these things—the $5,000 checks, say—are never happening, whether Republicans win or not. Others—the Westchester plant, the Camp Lejeune settlements¹—are moving forward either way. The president either doesn’t know this, or does know it but thinks his voters won’t. And what if they were true? What if the president was actually planning to try to withhold settlements from veterans genuinely harmed by government carelessness out of pique that American voters rejected him and gave Congress back to the Democrats? Which possibility would be more embarrassing? Which would be more shameful?

Once upon a time, this stuff actually seemed to work for Trump. He built a whole lurid Technicolor artificial world for his supporters to live in: a world where pedophile satanist Democrat elites and murderous asylum-escapee migrants had conspired to kill America, a world where he had arrived as Messiah to resurrect it and lead it to the promised land. He lied and lied, and then from time to time he won.

But now it’s over. He’s cooked, he’s done, the jig is up. The American people, who somehow momentarily and disastrously forgot just who this guy is two years ago, have managed to remember, and they don’t like what they see. Nobody is listening. Nobody believes. The wheedling doesn’t help. The lies don’t help.

And yet there he is, out there night after night, this 80-year-old man crisscrossing the country, lying himself hoarse, smashing the same button again and again. The lies don’t help, but he can’t stop lying. It worked before. He knows it worked before. Why isn’t it working now? What the hell is wrong with you people? What the hell is wrong with the country?

It’s an undignified way for an undignified politician and his once-formidable movement to go down. Not with a bang, but a whimper. And it’s a hard thing for those of us on the outside to look at with any pride. It’s good that this thing is collapsing under the weight of its own ludicrousness. How did we ever let it beat us in the first place?

The voters are walking away from Trump. Fortunately for him, at least he likes the view.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Loses Big In Brazil And Serbia, More Encouraging Early Vote Data, Adam Hamilton Joins Us Live Today At 1:30 pm ET, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In what has been a terrible month of declining poll numbers, a deteriorating battlefield, soaring inflation, crappy job numbers, Brent crude hitting $116 a barrel, a widening war in the Middle East, an orgy of scandals, and escalating internal infighting, our failed, venal, sundowning leader got lots more bad news last night -- his allies in Brazil and Serbia got beat, and Marina Corina Machado returned to Venezuela to rapturous crowds.

These last twenty fours have been some of the most important in our grand battle against MAGA and the global right since Hopium was founded. Here we take the wins when they come and these were big, consequential wins, fellow patriots. Big consequential wins for the global democracy movement, and enormous, deflating, and consequential losses for Trump eight days before his own election.

The people of Hungary, Serbia, and Brazil have done their jobs this year. Now it is our turn brothers and sisters. Let’s use this energy to drive the early vote this week, run up the score, and win these midterms for as Anderson Clayton told us:

Elections may be decided in November, but they are won in October!

My Monday morning early vote update is that the strong performance we’ve seen with young, Black, and Hispanic/Latino voters continues today. It appears that these important members of our coalition understand the assignment:

For more on what we are seeing in the early vote be sure to read my new deep dive here:

Some Additional Notes On The Early Vote, Simon Rosenberg·Oct 25, Read full story

A few days ago the right wing site Real Clear Politics released polls in 8 House races in deep red places. Democrats lead in 7 of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PA 8: Cognetti 52, Bresnahan 48 (Cognetti +4)

TX 35: Garcia 51, De La Cruz 49 (Garcia +2)

MT 1: Forstag 50, Flint 46 (Forstag +4)

FL 14: Castor 48, Beltran 43 (Castor +5)

MO 2: Wellman 51, Wagner 46 (Wellman +5)

NC 11: Ager 56, Balkcom 43 (Ager +13)

AR 2: Hill 52 (GOP), Jones 48 (Hill +4)

AZ 2: Nez 50, Crane 48 (Nez +2)

MI 7: Lawrence 53, Barrett 45 (Lawrence +8)

IA 2nd: James 50, Mitchell 47 (James +3)

I cannot even imagine how this played in Republican circles. In keeping with Halloween, we can safely describe this as bloodbath territory for them, and a reminder that in the closing days of the election Trump is campaigning in and Republicans are spending in Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Carolina:

Yes, the desperate, impulsive, Idiot-In-Chief really attacked Lisa Murkowski yesterday over her very public opposition to his ridiculous effort to steal the Alaska Senate seat. Thanks Donald!

The backlash to the Trump-backed vile ad run by Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio continues as the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke its neutrality rules and came out swinging for Amy Acton yesterday:

Let’s end with this video of our great candidate, Bobby Pulido, campaigning this weekend, South Texas style:

Yes, fellow patriots, it is that time……time to….

Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight Their Neverending Fuckery

There are three things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:

• Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations.
• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too. Our next training is Wednesday at 10pm ET/7pm PT.
• Dive into our amazing, expanding library of interviews with our battleground candidates, state party leaders, and thought leaders like Rep. Adam Smith, ASDC President Jane Kleeb, and Harvard’s John Della Volpe. So much good and timely stuff in here for your weekend viewing and listening pleasure!

Huffington Post, Opinion: ‘Stick A Fork In It’: Ex-Trump Official Says 1 Move Could Mark The End Of Trump Presidency, Ben Blanchet, Oct. 26, 2026. Anthony Scaramucci advised the president to be “very careful,” or else lead to the death of the Republican Party.

Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s communications director in his first term, has warned that the president could create serious trouble for himself — and his party — if he agrees to a proposed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Trump should be very careful with that because he would probably — he’s going to push the envelope where he may be asked to leave the presidency,” said Scaramucci on Sunday’s episode of “The Daily Beast Podcast.”

The proposed meeting — which, per The Wall Street Journal, Putin floated in an Oct. 9 call with Trump — would bring the leaders together in China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month.

The intended focus of the meeting, sources told the Journal, would be to negotiate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine — but without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Asked about the proposed meeting outside the White House last week, Trump said he’s open to whatever he can do to end the war “whether somebody’s there or not” before suggesting that denuclearization would be the focus of the talks.

Scaramucci, joining the likes of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal editorial boards, advised the president against attending such a meeting.

“If that meeting were to happen, then I would tell you that the Republican Party is completely dead; we’d probably have to get a tombstone out,” he began.

“And you tell me the date of that meeting and I will chisel into the tombstone: ‘This party got started in Wisconsin in 1856, it elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and it died on the date of that meeting.’ The party is dead — sticking a fork in it — the Cheney, Bush, Romney, Reagan, Eisenhower party dead, stick a fork in it.”

Addressing those who might doubt his presidency-ending prediction, Scaramucci insisted it’s “not crazy,” as he expects Democrats will take the House in the midterms and could find a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove Trump from office.

“Let’s say they split and they go 50-50, you need 17 Republicans that have had enough of him,” Scaramucci said.

“They hate his guts... he hates them, by the way, and they hate him. And so, just so you know, keep pushing and keep doing this sort of nonsense that they all hate ... And you’re going to get cross traffic into Democrats who say, ‘Impeach him in the House, I’ll pull up 17 votes and we’ll knock him out of the presidency.’”

Trump has already been impeached twice in the House. However, the Senate acquitted him both times, so he was not removed from office.

Eight days before the midterm election, two things have become certain. Democrats are going to take back the House, and after they do, Democrats are going to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

There is a list of Trump cabinet members who are likely to quit when Democrats win back the House, because they will be facing impeachment. Pete Hegseth is at the top of the list, followed by RFK Jr., and Linda McMahon, who has destroyed the Department of Education.

PoliticusUSA pulls no punches with our Independent news and opinion. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

There will be an exodus of people out of the Trump administration after the midterm election. Karoline Leavitt got an early start out the door, but will be far from the last person to leave.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) said last month on MS NOW:

 Donald Trump himself has said it multiple times, that he’s planning to give pardons to everyone in his circle. But I actually very much disagree with the idea that we shouldn’t be trying to use every tool we have in the toolbox.

In particular, we have cabinet secretaries like Pete Hegseth, who Republicans think should be impeached at this point because of his illegal killings in the illegal war, and what we’ve seen over the last year is that when Congress did file impeachments, folks like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were actually fired by the President because the American people were clear they didn’t want them in those jobs of trust.

So I think there’s a number of cabinet secretaries that have blatantly broken the law, done unconstitutional things, and I think they better get ready because we’ll come for them.

The threats from House Democrats have gotten to Hegseth, so he is trying to get out before Democrats take back power.

Puck reported that Hegseth is trying to get himself appointed to the US Senate:

Momentum is building within the House Democratic caucus to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when Congress returns after Election Day, as I reported last week, raising questions about how the Senate will respond. The answer, of course, depends on which party controls the upper chamber, and by what margin. Some Republicans, I’m told, are hoping that President Trump could fire Hegseth before any possible impeachment is underway. But I’m also told that some senators foresee a pathway for the self-proclaimed Secretary of War to step down before the Senate is forced to address a potential impeachment.

Already there’s chatter on the Hill that Hegseth has been angling for Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat, which she would vacate after winning her gubernatorial election. Hegseth lived in Tennessee for three years before he took over the Pentagon, but his short tenure there might not count as real Tennessee roots.

Senate Republicans don’t want to deal with a Hegseth impeachment, because there are Republicans in the Senate who want Hegseth gone. Will there be enough Senate Republicans to vote to convict Hegseth?

Probably not, but there might be enough to make the vote bipartisan and close, which would be an embarrassment for Trump and for Senate Republicans, so some of them would like to see Hegseth shuffled into another job, but there is no indication that Blackburn is interested in appointing Hegseth.

After Sen. Blackburn is elected governor, she probably won’t want the headache of appointing Hegseth, who isn’t from Tennessee and only lived in the state for a few years.

One way or another, it looks like Pete Hegseth is as good as gone.

It is doubtful that Trump will fire him, so if Hegseth doesn’t get appointed to the Senate, don’t be surprised if he resigns.

New York Times, Ex-Governors Give Rare Bipartisan Nod to Andrews in South Carolina, Annie Karni,Oct. 26, 2026. Former Republican Gov. David Beasley and Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges recorded a joint video throwing their support to the Democrat in the tight Senate race.

Two former South Carolina governors, one Democrat and one Republican, on Monday issued a rare bipartisan joint endorsement of Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democrat running in an unexpectedly competitive Senate race against Senator Darline Graham, the Trump-endorsed Republican.

In the video endorsement, David Beasley, a Democrat-turned-Republican who served as governor of the state from 1995 to 1999, and Jim Hodges, the Democrat who succeeded him, declared that “this country is too divided and the political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand.”

Mr. Beasley, a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said that “Annie understands that leadership isn’t about making people angrier. Well, it’s about making things better.”

He recently wrote an opinion piece decrying what has happened to the Republican Party under President Trump, saying that it is “not the party that I knew, and it is not the party that I consider myself a member of.”

South Carolina is not the only heavily Republican state where prominent former G.O.P. officials have broken with the party to endorse a Democrat in a competitive Senate race. In Kansas, two former Republican governors endorsed the Democrat, Adam Hamilton, over the G.O.P. incumbent, Senator Roger Marshall. In Texas, members of the Bush family dynasty are backing the Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico.

Ms. Graham was appointed in July to replace her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, after his death. On the campaign trail, she has struggled to demonstrate to voters that she is up to the job, in one debate saying that she was “not that informed on national security.”

While Mr. Trump, who was close with her brother, encouraged her to run and has backed her, Ms. Graham has also struggled to raise money and Dr. Andrews has far out-raised her. Ms. Graham is also facing skepticism from conservatives in her own party.

Dr. Andrews, though, still faces an uphill climb in solidly Republican South Carolina, where a Democrat has not won a Senate seat this century. In winning back the presidency two years ago, Mr. Trump carried South Carolina by more than 17 points. And even with the favorable political climate for Democrats this year, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report still ranks the race as leaning Republican.See more on: Donald Trump

We pray for our leaders at every Mass, and we always will. A blessing belongs to God, though, and the people who need it most were nowhere near the Resolute Desk on Thursday.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Mississippi Meltdown As Trump Gets Heckled In Front Of Tiny Crowd, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Donald Trump claimed 22,000 people attended his rally in Mississippi, but only 1,400 were there, and people in the crowd heckled the president.

Deep-red Mississippi has a surprisingly competitive Senate race, so the White House sent Donald Trump to save the day.

The problem is that they sent 80 year old Donald Trump who looks completely worn out by his recent rally schedule and seen his popularity plummet even among MAGA.

PoliticusUSA is 100% independent news and opinion, and it needs your support. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.

Trump claimed that a town with a population of 14,000 had 22,000 people at his rally:

 And by the way, have you seen the crowd outside? 22,000 people watching. We love you out there. They're watching.

The big crowds at Trump’s rallies always seem to be outside where the television cameras can’t see them. The reason why the cameras can’t see them is that for a decade Trump has dictated the placement of the TV cameras at his events.

Trump was in deep red Mississippi, so he must have been immensely popular. Trump has had a difficult time finding safe spaces that he can visit and feel loved in. The Republican Party has had to keep Trump away from swing states because his presence helps Democratic candidates more than Republicans, even though Republicans keep claiming that the polls are fake. Democrats keep winning elections since Trump returned to office.Trump Was Heckled In Mississippi

Trump was talking about his ballroom and saying, “ To the consternation of the people that protect us—”

He was interrupted by a heckler, and he said, “ Oh, go home. Go home. Go home”

Trump fell back to his old crutch that all the people who are protesting him are paid, “So he gets paid. You know they're paid protesters. They get paid $250 by, they think it's Soros. And they ruin their lives because now they get booked, now they get booked. We don't usually press it too hard, but isn't that terrible? And I was just, I was just at the punchline too.”

The big problem with these rallies that Trump is holding is that Trump takes all of the oxygen. Even though he is supposed to be campaigning for Republican candidates.

Trump was supposed to be in Mississippi for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Trump called Hyde-Smith on stage, where she spoke for exactly four seconds to call Trump the best president of our lifetimes and then sat back down, so Trump could resume rambling.

Here was Trump’s night in a nutshell. The president went to a deep red state, drew a tiny crowd, then got heckled for his White House ballroom.

New York Times, A Damning Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit, Fintan O’Toole (author of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” and the advising editor of The New York Review of Books), Oct. 26, 2026. The new book by the reporter Matthew Cole connects $2 billion in slush funds from gulf state leaders to Trump’s son-in-law in an effort to influence U.S. policy.

PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, by Matthew Cole

It is hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates.

If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

In that affair, government officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to fund — against the explicit orders of Congress — a violent right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. What Cole alleges is, if anything, more consequential: that Kushner worked with the U.A.E. to shape U.S. policy across the Middle East and that, in the course of this work, he was given access to bank accounts containing roughly $2 billion.

Two caveats must be entered. Cole’s most significant sources remain anonymous: Recurring attributions in his notes include “a confidential source with direct knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.” It is equally important to acknowledge that Kushner declined to be interviewed for Cole’s book. His lawyer described Cole’s allegations as “crazy, false and defamatory” and last week threatened legal action against Vanity Fair, which published an excerpt from the book.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the United Arab Emirates? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

To Cole’s credit, he recognizes that, even after five years of digging, “much remains unknown about Kushner’s relationships and agreements with the leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, especially, the United Arab Emirates.”

What we have, then, is an incomplete and contested account of those dealings. The question that arises from the book is whether Cole has done enough to warrant a major congressional investigation into his allegations. The answer is an emphatic yes.

Its starting point is clear enough: M.B.Z. controls vast amounts of money and was determined to use a lot of it to acquire influence over the American presidency and to establish compliant regimes in Egypt (he helped finance the coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government there in 2013), Yemen, Qatar and Libya. This grand strategy included support for the rise of his ally Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization of relations between Israel and most of the Muslim powers.

The success of the U.A.E. in establishing Abu Dhabi and Dubai as international aviation hubs and tourist playgrounds depends, in his eyes, on the suppression of popular Islamism and the containment of Iran. President Barack Obama’s endorsement of the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011, and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, threatened these goals.

M.B.Z.’s first response was to use proxies to channel $3.5 million in illegal funding into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After she lost the election, he pivoted toward the incoming Trump administration. Through its American middlemen George Nader, a political consultant and convicted child sexual abuser; Elliott Broidy, a onetime top Trump fund-raiser who had served on his inauguration committee in 2017; and Thomas Barrack, a real estate investor who is now the administration’s ambassador to Turkey, the U.A.E. identified Kushner as the man who could influence the new president on their behalf.

This was a good bet. Trump made Kushner his senior adviser with a brief that included the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East. This in itself was a departure from both tradition and democratic accountability — no one elected Kushner, and he operated for much of this period without oversight, but he had access to the highest levels of secret information.

It should be accepted that Kushner had solid ideological reasons for working closely with the U.A.E. M.B.Z. could, and to a degree did, deliver much of the Arab world for a plan that cut out the Palestinians and eventually conceded Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank. The ultimate prize of recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia was brought tantalizingly close. (It was derailed by the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.) To that extent, Kushner could be said to have worked to further his father-in-law’s openly stated agenda.

The issue, however, is whether Kushner was also pursuing other, private schemes and, in order to advance them, allowing U.S. foreign policy to be dictated by a foreign power. Kushner’s family benefited enormously from the perception that he was working on behalf of M.B.Z. The U.A.E.’s regional rival Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. were blockading and threatening to invade, believed it had to counter this influence. A fund through which Qatar invests some of its sovereign wealth helped bail the Kushner family out of a disastrous $1.8 billion investment in a New York skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue.ImageThis is the cover of “Princes and Thieves,” by Matthew Cole.

Cole’s most explosive claims, however, relate to a 2017 operation by a Dutch military intelligence unit, which found that Russian agents had screenshots from inside Kushner’s iPhone. Investigating further, they discovered that Kushner had access to a bank account in the U.A.E., containing $750 million laundered through Azerbaijan but, according to Cole, originally deriving from the Emirati and Saudi governments. “It is unclear if Trump ever approved or even knew about the arrangement,” Cole writes.

By the spring of 2018, Cole maintains, M.B.Z. had moved roughly $1 billion into another account, held by the Israeli central bank, on Kushner’s behalf. Cole says it is also “unclear” if or how Kushner used these funds, “but according to the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s personal benefit.” For M.B.Z., Cole suggests, the return on his investment was a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iran, whose influence he feared.

These accusations are grave. The first bank account was allegedly a slush fund used to finance operations in Libya and elsewhere by Erik Prince, the former C.E.O. of Blackwater, the private military contractor (now known as Academi). If Kushner was a signatory to this account, he was helping to run a foreign government’s proxy wars. And if he used some or all of the money in the second account for his personal benefit, he was effectively an undeclared agent of a foreign power.

Cole’s work is sufficiently calm, detailed and forensic to necessitate a large-scale and urgent congressional inquiry. One assumes that, since Kushner regards all of these claims as crazed inventions, he is anxious to clear his name from some of the most grievous charges ever leveled against a senior U.S. federal official. If the country is incapable of letting its citizens know whether or not its foreign policy is for sale, the difference between a democratic republic and the secretive autocracy that tried to influence it will be much narrower than most of us would like to think.

GOP Strategies: Ohio, Wisconsin, Autocracy

Public Notice, News and Opinion: Vivek Ramaswamy discovers that voters have their limits, Paul Waldman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy.

What on earth were they thinking?

It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.

The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.In defense of empathyIn defense of empathyLisa Needham·Oct 24Read full story

In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.A brief recap of events

As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.

This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”

The blowback was instantaneous.

“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”

But it wasn’t just Democrats.

In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)

But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.

Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.

What on earth were they thinking?

It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.

The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.In defense of empathyIn defense of empathyLisa Needham·Oct 24Read full story

In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.A brief recap of events

As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.

This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”

The blowback was instantaneous.

“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com“There is no office that is worth stooping that low” — Obama portrays Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile attack ad as an affront to basic decencySat, 24 Oct 2026 19:26:40 GMTView on Bluesky

But it wasn’t just Democrats.

In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)

But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.

Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.

Then President Trump weighed in, posting a long rant on Truth Social which included the assertion that “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse,” and saying, “Lyin’ Amy Acton, who I’ve never even heard of before, has been lying about Vivek for the entire Campaign.”

Many a campaign has been undone by a “gaffe” or a late revelation, something unexpected and dramatic that torpedoes a candidate’s bid. But this was different.

Creating this ad required the involvement of multiple people at the campaign’s highest level, including the candidate himself. They would have had time to consider it and weigh the pros and cons. Together, they decided that it was a clever gambit.

According to Axios, “Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign said the ad tested well with ‘persuadable’ voters.” Which may have been true in a laboratory setting with no contextual information provided to those who watched it and whose responses were measured. But ads like this one don’t stay in a lab.

Now, with the torrent of media coverage that has resulted, anyone who sees the ad won’t say, “Jeez, if her own mother says she’s a liar, I’d better not vote for her.” Instead, they’re more likely to say, “Oh, there’s that ad with Amy Acton’s mother, the one who let her daughter get raped by her dirtbag husband. What the hell is wrong with Vivek Ramaswamy thinking this is going to make me want to vote for him?” And even those who will never see the ad know all about it.

When the controversy started blowing up, Ramaswamy could have cut his losses. He could have said “my campaign produced this ad, but as we’ve learned more about Acton and Arthur’s history, we’ve decided not to air it — let’s get back to talking about the issues.” Instead, he blamed Acton for making him do it.

“I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans,” Ramaswamy said. “And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”

So really, did he have any choice but to get Acton’s (alleged) child-rapist-defending mother who hasn’t seen her daughter in almost half a century to attack her?

Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.

But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.

But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.

The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down.

Now look where that has gotten him. If there are any voters who were persuaded to vote for Ramaswamy by this advertisement, they haven’t presented themselves, while local and national media have been full of voters expressing their disgust with him. “We now deserve to lose this race,” one Ohio Republican strategist told Time magazine.

In fact, it was probably the dumbest decision any campaign made this year, or even in many years. We don’t know yet what the ultimate effects will be — as of this writing, no polls have been released on the race since the controversy over the ad blew up — but the Cook Political Report just moved the race from “toss-up” to “Leans Democratic.” Acton has held a slight lead in polls; we’ll see if it expands.

Being like Trump doesn’t work, especially in general elections

Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image over the last decade in a variety of ways, some of which have to do with policy but most of which are about style. In a typical Republican primary these days, candidates compete to see who can be most like Trump — unrestrained, bullying, misogynistic and racist, obsessed with dominating others.

The widespread assumption in conservative circles is that this is how you win, even when it looks like voters are recoiling in horror. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has said, Trump’s aides “believe there is something almost mystical about him, that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can’t,” and that’s why they should silence their doubts when he starts another social media beef, spends endless hours prattling on about his ballroom, or refuses to listen to cooler heads telling him that some decision he’s making (for instance, starting a war with Iran) might not work out well.

The same goes for much of the Republican Party: Even if they have doubts about a strategy, there’s a voice in their head saying “this is what Trump would do, so it must be a good idea.” We don’t know if anyone in the Ramaswamy campaign raised their hand when the Donna Arthur ad was being produced to say “I don’t know, guys, this could blow up in our faces.” But if they did, they were overruled.

What so few Republicans seem to grasp is that for all his success, if you just look at the scoreboard, Trump is actually an extremely unsuccessful politician. People don’t actually like him — his approval ratings have been weak his entire time in office, and they’re absolutely atrocious right now. This is the fifth national election in which he has been on the ballot or in office since he seized control of the GOP, and one could describe his record as 1-3. He became president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote; his party was slapped silly in the 2018 midterms; he lost in 2020; he got his only win in 2024, and a narrow one at that; and he’s about to suffer another midterm loss.

As much as Trump and his allies like to brag about the coalition he assembled in 2024, they make the mistake of believing that everyone who voted for him the one time he managed to win a majority was doing so because they love everything about him. But that was never true. There were a dozen reasons he won that year, none more important than the hangover of the 2022 burst in inflation. Voters who made the mistake of believing him when he said he’d immediately lower prices weren’t all MAGA converts who cheered his sadism and bigotry.

Whatever dark power Trump has that has enabled him to become president twice while being quite literally one of the most morally despicable human beings on Earth, it’s not easily duplicated by your average Republican candidate for Senate, House, or governor. When candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy ask “What would Trump do?” then do that thing, they often find that the voters respond with, “What an atrocious jerk. I’m definitely not voting for that guy.” It turns out that voters will tolerate a certain degree of negative campaigning — but they have their limits. As Vivek Ramaswamy is now finding out. 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Mailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in Oklahoma, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 26, 2026. The mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operation.

In recent days, voters in Wisconsin have received mailers calling David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, “A COP’S BEST FRIEND.” The mailer, sent from the “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin,” attacks Crowley, saying he “Backs the blue, NOT US.” It blames Crowley for various incidents of police violence, mistreatment of prisoners, and increased spending on public safety.

The flier does not mention Crowley’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Tiffany, but urges Wisconsinites to “VOTE NO NOVEMBER 3RD.” The mailer was obtained through Popular Information’s new app, PaidForBy.info:

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Welcome to Popular Information, a newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism.

Share Popular InformationMailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in OklahomaThe mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operationJudd LegumOct 26READ IN APP

In recent days, voters in Wisconsin have received mailers calling David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, “A COP’S BEST FRIEND.” The mailer, sent from the “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin,” attacks Crowley, saying he “Backs the blue, NOT US.” It blames Crowley for various incidents of police violence, mistreatment of prisoners, and increased spending on public safety.

The flier does not mention Crowley’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Tiffany, but urges Wisconsinites to “VOTE NO NOVEMBER 3RD.” The mailer was obtained through Popular Information’s new app, PaidForBy.info:

The latest polls showed Crowley clinging to a small lead over Tiffany. Crowley, a political moderate, beat democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the primary by just 2,700 votes. So if even a small number of Hong’s most progressive supporters vote against Crowley — as the mailer encourages them to do — or decide to stay home, it could plausibly swing the race to Tiffany.

While the Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin purports to be politically left-leaning, its organizers have gone to considerable lengths to conceal who is behind the organization. It was only registered a few days ago, on October 19. Although it claims to be a Wisconsin organization, it is registered to a Chicago address. Since it has filed so recently, the Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin will not have to disclose its donors until 2027.

A Popular Information analysis of Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin’s initial expenditures, however, reveals that it is linked to Republican operatives.

Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin has reported $298,836 in expenditures, all for political mailers opposing Crowley. All of the money has gone to The Classen Group. The Classen Group has been active in Oklahoma, where it has been paid $470,000 for political services between 2022 and 2026. All of its political clients have been Republicans, including $236,449 from Majority Fund, an Oklahoma super PAC supporting state House Republicans.

Jake Parsons is the chair and treasurer of Majority Fund. On a 2022 FEC donation to a Republican candidate, Parsons also lists himself as a partner at The Classen Group. In Oklahoma campaign finance filings, Majority Fund and The Classen Group list the same address. Parsons has also been listed as a partner of G.R. Pro, another political consulting firm that is located on Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City.

James Trammell is listed as the treasurer of Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin. James Bruce Trammell is also a GOP operative who was paid as a consultant for Charles McCall’s unsuccessful campaign for governor this cycle. Parsons was the manager for McCall’s 2018 Oklahoma House campaign and incorporated McCall’s 2026 gubernatorial campaign.

Parsons did not respond to requests for comment over phone, email, and text.

In addition to its connection to Republican operatives, the anti-Crowley mailer is highly deceptive. It quotes Crowley saying, “We cannot defund the police” during a July 2026 debate. But Crowley continued, “We should be investing in public safety, and that doesn’t mean more money to police officers. That’s like investing in systems like community violence interruption.” Hong, Crowley’s progressive opponent, said roughly the same thing, “The governor cannot defund police, and I’m not here to govern by slogan. I’m here to make sure that I am the governor that is most serious about public safety, and that means investing in the things that we know prevent crime.”The connection to another sketchy operation in Minnesota

The mailers targeting Crowley in Wisconsin are very similar — in substance and style — to mailers attacking Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic nominee for governor in Minnesota. In Minnesota, a group called Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC is sending mailers attacking Klobuchar from the left, citing police accountability and single-payer health care.

Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC has not registered as a political committee with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, so there is no information about whether it is paying The Classen Group or someone else to produce the mailers. The entity has only registered as an LLC in Delaware.

Minnesota Democrats “filed a complaint on Thursday with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board against Citizens for Public Safety Transparency,” the Star Tribune reports. The address printed on the mailers “leads to an office and storage property in Walker, about three and a half hours north of the Twin Cities.” The owner of that property told the Star Tribune that Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC “has no lease or office there.”

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Bolsonaro . . . Trump? William Kristol, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In an 1823 letter from James Madison, the primary architect of our Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of our Declaration, Madison wrote of “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Our Founders understood that despite the relative success of their earlier efforts, the contest between liberty and despotism around the world—and even in the United States—had not ended.

And now, two centuries later, the struggle between liberty and despotism continues.

Yesterday, voters in Serbia ousted the longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vučić, six months after voters in neighboring Hungary had rejected their own authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. Vučić, a protege of Slobodan Milošević from the 1990s, had dominated Serbian politics since 2012. He was defeated by a new political party that grew out of two years of student-led protests, Student List-Students Win.

What happened in Serbia was “not the electoral defeat of one government but a tectonic blow” to the order set up by Milošević and then carried forward by Vučić, Ratko Knežević, a former diplomat from Montenegro, told the New York Times. It was an order in which “every criticism of power is treason.” It was a regime that just last month insisted that Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted in 2017 of genocide by an international tribunal for his acts in the Milošević years, be buried with military honors in Belgrade.

The victorious party’s governing program is murky. The focus of their campaign was on the rampant corruption of the Vučić regime, and the need for change. As the Times put it, “in the end, the vote was largely a referendum on Mr. Vucic.” The forces of despotism lost yesterday in Serbia. But a future of liberty is by no means secure.

Also yesterday, far away from Serbia, voters in Brazil narrowly re-elected their president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president and Trump ally who’d attempted a coup to stay in office four years ago. Unlike Vučić, Bolsonaro has so far refused to accept the outcome, so here even the immediate future is uncertain. But as the Times points out, “this is the first leftist victory following seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months.” “Most people want change,” said Thomas Traumann, press secretary for a former leftist Brazilian president, “but not the Bolsonaro change.”

So on the one hand, it was a good day for the opponents of despotism. On the other hand, the future of both countries, and of the regions of which they are part, remains very much in doubt. Their prospects would be brighter if the United States were a staunch champion of liberty. But for now, and probably for the next two years, the United States is as likely to be on the side of despotism as liberty.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page reported yesterday that

The Trump Administration has advocated Viktor Orbán for the role of United Nations Secretary-General. The U.S. has encouraged the former Hungarian Prime Minister to enter the race, even bringing him the initial idea. . . . Russia and China are believed to be supportive, based on prior conversations with Washington, and the plan would be for Mr. Orbán to be their joint candidate.

So Trump’s United States would be allied with Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China in an effort to strengthen the global authoritarian axis.

The struggle continues, here and abroad. Both here and abroad, its outcome is very much in doubt. We have our chance to weigh in on the side of liberty next Tuesday.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• What a Blowout Dem Win in ’26 Would Mean for ’28… In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN reports on Dems’ dreams of a bigger map. And on The Bulwark on Sunday, Lauren joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss.
• Got midterm questions? Join Lauren Egan’s Reddit AMA today at 1 p.m. ET to talk 2026, Democrats’ chances of retaking Congress, and the party’s future.
• ICE’s Cruelty Is Becoming America’s M.O… Trump’s deportation force is giving ordinary people new ways to threaten, torment, and punish their neighbors, reports ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO in Huddled Masses.
• How Ohio Trump Voters Reacted to Vivek’s Attack Ad… He spent millions smearing Amy Acton, prompting national criticism. But how low is too low for Trump voters? SARAH LONGWELL convened a Focus Group of Buckeye voters to find out.
• Trump’s $10 Billion BBC Lawsuit Just Backfired… Why is Trump’s own Justice Department investigating Corey Lewandowski, and is the corruption probe for real? ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Illegal News to explain.
• GOP Closes Campaign With Unapologetic Bigotry… The attacks on Abdul El-Sayed are dishonest and ugly. But will they work? JONATHAN COHN examines in the latest Breakdown, and joins CATHERINE RAMPELL to discuss Mike Rogers’s repulsive Meet the Press interview.
• Trump’s Reckless AI Policy Could Leave America Defenseless… On The Mona Charen Show, FRANCIS FUKUYAMA joins MONA CHAREN to discuss his rising concerns over AI and what to do about it.

QUICK HITS

ALASKA MEDDLING: In 2020, Donald Trump waited until after the election before getting busy trying to steal it. This year, he’s getting a head start.

On Friday, the Justice Department filed a breathtaking lawsuit, preemptively seeking to block officials from certifying Alaska’s Senate election—if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. The reason? There are two guys named “Dan Sullivan” on the ballot—the Republican incumbent and a gadfly candidate—and the DOJ thinks voters will get confused.

This is, of course, the whole point of Doppelganger Dan’s campaign, which it’s fair to call an electoral cheap shot. But he qualified for the ballot fair and square and has already survived legal challenges that tried to pull him off it. Furthermore, there’s very little reason to think he’ll play spoiler. Sen. Dan Sullivan is clearly labeled both as a Republican and as an incumbent on the ballot. Further, Alaska has ranked choice voting—it’s hard to imagine Fake Dan stealing many votes from Real Dan when voters can literally just vote for both.

But that’s not how Team Trump sees it. The lawsuit asks a federal court to delay certifying the election if Sen. Sullivan loses but would have won if he’d gotten all the other Sullivan’s votes. (Again: Ranked-choice voting.) On Saturday, Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted he is simply seeking “to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska’s governing officials have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or mislead [sic].” He also insisted that the Justice Department “did not coordinate with any campaign or candidate, but rather relied solely on federal law.”

One day earlier, Trump had offered a contradictory, and presumably truer, narrative: “I’m the one that said, ‘Do it,’” he told reporters of the lawsuit.

LULA TRIUMPHS: Yesterday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won an unexpected re-election victory—a remarkable turnaround from the first round of voting earlier this month, which had shown right-wing candidate and Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, with a lead. Bolsonaro has already said he will refuse to accept the results, just as his father did four years ago.

Bolsonaro’s gripe centered on a Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice’s decision to extend voting for two hours, which the candidate described as changing “the rules in the middle of the game.” But both his campaign and Lula had called for the extension, citing voting disruptions due to transport delays and rain. Meanwhile, the final result wasn’t particularly close: Lula ultimately won by more than 4 millions votes.

Donald Trump had other things on his mind last night—the relative charms of Jon Husted and Nikki Minaj’s asses, for instance, and his 1,300-word Truth Social screed about how Bill Maher is a fake friend. But it seems likely that he will eventually get around to trying to intervene on Bolsonaro’s behalf, just as he has repeatedly done for Bolsonaro’s father since retaking office last year.

ELON FESSES UP: Elon Musk has spent days denying that he had anything to do with sudden disruptions in Ukraine’s access to his Starlink network this month. But on Saturday, he abruptly changed course, saying that his company SpaceX had throttled Ukraine’s access because Ukraine had violated its terms of service, using it to power “offensive drone strikes to kill people.” He also suggested that Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russia’s conquests of their territory are “bloodthirsty warmongers, who push for a war that never ends,” and insisted that “we should [have] some sympathy for the poor Russian conscripts too.”

Ukrainian officials vociferously denied that Ukraine had violated Starlink’s terms of service. Here’s the Washington Post:

Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on military technology, wrote on social media that it was “very strange that Elon Musk is unaware of the restrictions on Starlink operations in Ukraine,” including speed limits, and the fact that the technology does not work over Russian territory.

“Therefore, we are PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes or medium-range strikes,” he said.

Serhii Sternenko, who runs a foundation supplying drones to Ukrainian forces and previously served as an adviser to his country’s defense minister, wrote on X that “using civilian Starlink for drone missions was technically impossible. All drone missions that required satellite communication could only be carried out using Starshield [the U.S. government-controlled version of Starlink]. ... Ukraine did not violate the terms of use.”

Nevertheless, Ukraine’s ongoing access to Starlink seemingly remains as reliant as ever on the capricious whims of the world’s most brain-meltingly online billionaire. 

New York Times, Ken Paxton’s State-Funded Jet-Setting Draws Campaign Scrutiny, Beth Reinhard and Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 26, 2026. Mr. Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Texas, has taken about 350 trips outside of the state since he was sworn in as attorney general.

Where in the world is Ken Paxton?

In 2021, Mr. Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, and his wife left town for Utah during a deadly winter storm that left millions in his home state without power. When lawyers tried to depose him in a securities-fraud case in 2023, he was roving around Europe. And this past summer, in the middle of his hotly contested U.S. Senate campaign, a British tabloid spotted Mr. Paxton in Iceland and London.

Since his 2015 swearing-in as the state’s top lawyer, Mr. Paxton has taken about 350 trips outside of Texas with a taxpayer-funded security detail, including 25 to foreign countries such as South Africa, India and Aruba, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Texas law does not limit Mr. Paxton’s use of state-sponsored protection to official business.

Mr. Paxton also has benefited from the largess of wealthy friends, who donated $730,000 toward his legal bills in the securities-fraud case and have treated him to hunting and fishing trips, airplane flights and lodging, and tickets to various events, including the Grammy Awards, records show.

Mr. Paxton’s Democratic rival, James Talarico, has sought to turn the attorney general’s lifestyle into a liability, repeatedly accusing him of exploiting the perks of his office to enrich himself. Mr. Talarico, a state representative, has dinged Mr. Paxton on his apparent affinity for luxuries big and small — from his real estate portfolio that includes at least 15 properties worth about $9 million to the $1,000 pen he once swiped from a courthouse security tray. Polls indicate a tight race in a conservative state that hasn’t elected a Democrat in more than three decades, suggesting that Mr. Talarico’s attacks may be resonating with some voters.

“He became a multimillionaire on a government salary,” Mr. Talarico said in a widely viewed social media post. “He takes lavish vacations in Iceland while Texans can’t afford the basics. Ken Paxton doesn’t serve us — he serves himself.”

Mr. Paxton’s campaign and office did not respond to that criticism or to questions about his travel, security or personal finances.

He has long denied any wrongdoing. Several of his trips were to conferences with other attorneys general. Mr. Paxton also has traveled frequently to Washington during a career in which he brought dozens of lawsuits against the Biden and Obama administrations.

Mr. Paxton’s allies say criticism of his travel unfairly distracts from his record battling for conservative causes.

“What does that have to do with his ability to take on the Obama administration and win cases?” said Bob Hall, a Republican state senator. “Ken Paxton has gotten the job done, and I think that’s what is important.”

Mr. Talarico has not reported accepting any gifts while in office. In a form filed with the U.S. Senate in August, he said he earned about $51,500 as a state lawmaker and about $33,000 from a consulting firm from January 2025 to May 2026. He also reported several mutual funds and a book deal for an unspecified amount. In a separate form filed in Texas, Mr. Talarico listed one piece of property.Nearly 225 Cities

Security costs for Mr. Paxton’s travel since 2015 have exceeded $3.1 million, according to state records, which do not specify whether a trip is related to his official duties. That tally does not include other travel-related expenses charged to taxpayers. He has visited nearly 225 cities, making multiple trips to destinations like Park City, Utah, and New Orleans. Security costs peaked in 2024 at more than $483,000.

Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has also traveled across the country and abroad, with security costs topping $5.4 million since 2015, records show.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is not invincible, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 25-26, 2026. At 3:29 this afternoon (Sunday), the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”

Over the next one hour and forty-eight minutes, Donald Trump declared that the United States owns Greenland, called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist who is “on the side of the terrorists,” and told Jewish Americans who support El-Sayed that they should be ashamed of themselves and never speak to him again. He then invited the father of a September 11 hero onto the stage to tell thousands of people that having a United States birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American. And then, seemingly forgetting why he was even there, he stopped to talk once again about looking at another man’s “ass.”

The man Donald Trump came to Michigan to destroy was born in metro Detroit, earned a medical degree, and became an epidemiologist who once ran the city of Detroit’s health department, and if Michigan elects him in nine days, he will become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. That is what today was really about, and just three minutes into his speech, Donald Trump admitted as much: “I’m here today in Michigan for a very important reason. I’m here to keep a jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” Then he promised that “the people of Michigan are going to defeat Abdul Mohammed,” a name El-Sayed doesn’t use, but one Trump repeated to make him sound more foreign and threatening to the crowd.

Trump then went after El-Sayed’s family, accusing his mother of supporting al Qaeda, his sister of celebrating the October 7 terrorist attacks, and his father-in-law of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Associated Press reported that there is no evidence El-Sayed has any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Michigan Public found that the accusations against his mother were not supported by the available evidence. But none of that mattered to Trump. He was using El-Sayed’s family and his Muslim faith to portray him as a terrorist and convince Americans that he was someone to fear.

Then he moved from El-Sayed’s family to El-Sayed himself. “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate. He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate. I want him to have a metal detector.” He said that “Michigan does not need a senator who’s on the side of the terrorists,” and that El-Sayed “wants our country to go to Sharia law.”

Then Donald Trump proved just how unfit he is to lead a country built by immigrants when he tried to turn two groups of Americans, both of whom have faced hatred and discrimination, against each other. He told the crowd, “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves, I’ll tell you right now,” and added, “You should never speak to him again.” He went on to claim that he was “polling at 99% in Israel” and that he could not understand “how anybody who’s Jewish can even think about voting for this guy.” In just a few sentences, the President of the United States told Jewish Americans to turn their backs on Muslim Americans and suggested that their votes and friendships should be based on their religion rather than their own beliefs. What Trump was trying to say is that Muslims are guilty simply because they are Muslim, and Jews are guilty if they refuse to treat Muslims like enemies. This is how authoritarian leaders divide a country. They turn people against their neighbors, convince them that other Americans are the enemy, and demand loyalty to themselves above everyone else.

Later in his speech, Donald Trump took his attacks even further, telling the crowd, “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

With just nine days until the midterm elections, and Republicans facing growing anger over inflation, soaring gas prices, and Trump’s war in Iran, Donald Trump took his attacks to an entirely different level. He brought up the September 11 terrorist attacks and began telling the story of Todd Beamer, who was born in Flint, Michigan, and was one of the brave passengers aboard United Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers and prevented the plane from reaching its intended target, saving untold numbers of lives. But Trump was not telling this story to honor an American hero. He was using it to attack Abdul El-Sayed. “Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, before continuing, “Todd Beamer gave his life for America. And you have to give your vote for Todd Beamer, if you can view it that way.” The President of the United States had just compared voting against a Muslim American doctor to the courage shown by Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting terrorists on September 11. And then he invited Todd Beamer’s father onto the stage.

Like so many of us, I have always thought of Todd Beamer as a true American patriot and a hero, a man who spent his final minutes on earth thinking of other people. He found an extraordinary strength that morning, the kind that, thankfully, few of us will ever have to search for. That is what made what happened next so painful to watch.

David Beamer, who told the crowd he was “four score and four” (or 84 years old), spoke for nearly twelve minutes. He began by asking everyone to pray before taking a disturbing turn and comparing the enemies America faced on September 11 to the ones he claimed we face today. “The enemy has not come from abroad. The enemy is right here among us. Local terrorists. Local citizens that want to demolish our country. They call themselves Democratic Socialists of America. Do you know what the DS really stands for? Demolition specialists.” He went on to claim that the Democratic Socialists’ platform “reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids,” that “Abdul would much prefer Sharia law,” and that “the mantra of their platform is really death to America.” A father still reeling from the unimaginable loss of his son, who was murdered by terrorists on September 11, stood in front of thousands of Americans and told them that their own neighbors, people who want things like affordable health care and public education, were terrorists too.

The rest of his words were equally disturbing, and the President of the United States of America stood behind him, listening and agreeing with every word he said. “Mike Rogers is an American. Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. Well, you know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.” He kept going. “He has a birth certificate, but he’s not an American. He had the choice to be an American or not. He has chosen otherwise. He has blood that’s red. However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.” He suggested that people who disagree with him should “take their energy and their money, go buy an island someplace and try that socialism thing again somewhere else,” and take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders along with them. Then he led thousands of people in a chant of his son’s final words, words that have long stood for courage and sacrifice, but were now being used as part of a political attack against a fellow American. “On three. One, two, three. Let’s roll.”

When it was over, Donald Trump didn’t correct him or remind his fellow Americans that hatred, especially hatred directed at Muslim Americans, has no place in this country. Instead, he thanked David and Peggy Beamer and told them, “Your boy is looking down very proud of you both right now.”

David Beamer has lived through a loss I cannot imagine, and nothing I say will ever take away from his grief or from his son’s heroism. But he did not wander onto that stage, and he was not ambushed. He came as a surrogate for Mike Rogers, whom he has endorsed and for whom he has appeared in campaign advertising against El-Sayed, and he chose every one of those words. I can hold compassion for a grieving father and still hold him accountable for the dangerous things he said. The men who murdered Todd Beamer believed that an entire nation of people was their enemy, that thousands of human beings they had never met deserved to die because of who they were and what they believed. Twenty-five years later, Todd’s father stood on a stage and taught a crowd of Americans to believe the same kind of thing about their neighbors. That is the real heartbreak of what happened in Port Huron today. The hatred that took his son has found its way into him.

What Donald Trump encouraged today is not new. We’ve seen variations of this type of hatred and division before, and history has shown us where it leads. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only a person “of German or kindred blood” could be a citizen of the Reich. Jewish Germans whose families had lived in the country for generations, who had fought for Germany in World War I, and who held German birth certificates were stripped of their full rights as citizens. They were still living in the country they called home, but they were no longer considered equal members of it. When David Beamer told the audience that a man’s birth certificate doesn’t make him an American and questioned his loyalty using the colors of the American flag, he was making an argument with a disturbing historical parallel: that belonging to a country is not determined by citizenship under the law, but by whether those in power consider you worthy of being called an American. And Donald Trump stood behind him and let him say the very things that Donald Trump himself also believes.

And we have seen this happen right here in America, too. In 1942, the United States government forced roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and sent them to incarceration camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens, many born right here in California. They had American birth certificates, but none of that mattered because their own government had decided that their ancestry made them a threat to the country they called home. Decades later, a federal commission determined that what happened was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The United States eventually formally apologized and paid reparations to surviving victims.

I still remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in school and struggling to understand how the United States of America could have done something so horrible to its own people. Much like when I first learned about slavery, I couldn’t understand how so many people could have stood by and allowed their fellow human beings to be treated that way. I remember wondering how anyone could have believed it was acceptable, let alone participated in it. And here we are, 84 years after Japanese Americans were first forced from their homes, watching history begin to rhyme once again. We have already lived through the consequences of allowing our government to decide that some Americans are less American than others simply because of who they are or where their families came from. We should not have to learn that lesson again.

Like many Americans, I didn’t grow up around Muslim people. I’m sure there were Muslim families in my community; I just didn’t know them. I grew up with friends who were Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, and some who followed no religion at all, but I didn’t have a close Muslim friend until I went to college. In 1995, during my freshman year, I was seated next to a young Muslim man who would become a close friend.

One night, I was feeling stressed about schoolwork and wanted to go for a walk late in the evening to clear my mind. He insisted on coming with me to keep me company and make sure I was safe. It was on that walk that he told me about his faith and family. What stayed with me the most was how peaceful his religion was, and how much he cared about his mother. Through him, I met more Muslim friends, and not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever said a word about my hair being uncovered, even though many of their mothers covered theirs, and not one of them ever made me feel anything but welcome. We were all just kids learning how to be adults, trying to figure out who we were while having some fun along the way.

Six years later, on September 11th, I didn’t think of him. I didn’t think of his family or his friends, because I had never once connected him to extremism, and why would I have? He was the friend who insisted on walking with me so I’d be safe. In the same way, I don’t hold Jewish people responsible for the Israeli government’s war in Gaza, I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas did on October 7th, and I don’t hold every American responsible for Donald Trump. The list goes on and on, because that is how human beings actually are. We are not our governments, and we are not the worst person who happens to share our faith.

Maybe the most important lesson that history can teach us right now is that if someone stands up and tells us that an entire group of people is evil, that they should be feared, watched, screened, or sent away, the person we should fear most is the one saying it, not the people they are trying to turn us against. Because never in history has the real threat been an entire people. The threat has always been the man with the microphone who needs us to believe otherwise. David Beamer told the crowd today that “the enemy is right here among us,” and he was right about that. But the enemy wasn’t a doctor running for the Senate. It was the man sharing that stage with him, the one who invited him up there and handed him the microphone.

Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, helped lead Donald Trump’s outreach to Arab American voters in Michigan during the 2024 election. Today, he told the Associated Press, “The president’s statements are out of line. They are crossing a red line. They are racist.” He continued, “The remarks are out of line and crazy. I mean, no sane individual would say these things,” before adding, “The president of the United States saying that about a person because of his religion, that is just not acceptable. And people are going to remember that on Nov. 3.” Two years ago, this man was helping Donald Trump win Michigan. Tonight, he is publicly calling the president’s remarks racist, and that tells us just how far this has gone, even for some of the people who once supported him.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who joined El-Sayed in Grand Rapids tonight, said Republicans are turning to Islamophobia because they have no answers for Americans struggling with health care, housing, and the cost of living. “All they can do is foment hatred and divisiveness,” he said. At that same rally, El-Sayed responded to Trump’s attacks with a little humor, telling the crowd, “I don’t even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me ‘senator’ after November,” before adding, to loud cheers, “I will be Senator Muhammad to you, bro.” El-Sayed has also called the attacks on his loyalty “shameful.”

While Donald Trump was in Michigan today trying to convince Americans to fear their own neighbors, people in other parts of the world were showing us what happens when ordinary citizens refuse to be afraid anymore. In April, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after sixteen years in power, despite Donald Trump and JD Vance throwing their support behind him. I have written before about how Hungary felt when I visited in 2019, how the country I had once fallen in love with seemed to be holding its breath. In April, it finally exhaled.

Today, it was Brazil’s turn. Yesterday, Reuters published a disturbing investigation into how two Trump administration officials worked behind the scenes to help return the Bolsonaro family to power, pushing for sanctions to sway the election and telling American diplomats that restoring Jair Bolsonaro was United States policy. When his conviction for plotting a coup made that impossible, they shifted their attention to getting his son, Flávio, elected instead. But the Brazilian people had other plans. Tonight, President Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 percent of the vote, and people poured into the streets of São Paulo to celebrate. Despite everything the Trump administration did to interfere, the Brazilian people made their own decision to resist a far-right takeover.

At 3:29 this afternoon, the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”

Over the next one hour and forty-eight minutes, Donald Trump declared that the United States owns Greenland, called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist who is “on the side of the terrorists,” and told Jewish Americans who support El-Sayed that they should be ashamed of themselves and never speak to him again. He then invited the father of a September 11 hero onto the stage to tell thousands of people that having a United States birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American. And then, seemingly forgetting why he was even there, he stopped to talk once again about looking at another man’s “ass.”

The man Donald Trump came to Michigan to destroy was born in metro Detroit, earned a medical degree, and became an epidemiologist who once ran the city of Detroit’s health department, and if Michigan elects him in nine days, he will become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. That is what today was really about, and just three minutes into his speech, Donald Trump admitted as much: “I’m here today in Michigan for a very important reason. I’m here to keep a jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” Then he promised that “the people of Michigan are going to defeat Abdul Mohammed,” a name El-Sayed doesn’t use, but one Trump repeated to make him sound more foreign and threatening to the crowd.

Trump then went after El-Sayed’s family, accusing his mother of supporting al Qaeda, his sister of celebrating the October 7 terrorist attacks, and his father-in-law of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Associated Press reported that there is no evidence El-Sayed has any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Michigan Public found that the accusations against his mother were not supported by the available evidence. But none of that mattered to Trump. He was using El-Sayed’s family and his Muslim faith to portray him as a terrorist and convince Americans that he was someone to fear.

Then he moved from El-Sayed’s family to El-Sayed himself. “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate. He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate. I want him to have a metal detector.” He said that “Michigan does not need a senator who’s on the side of the terrorists,” and that El-Sayed “wants our country to go to Sharia law.”

Then Donald Trump proved just how unfit he is to lead a country built by immigrants when he tried to turn two groups of Americans, both of whom have faced hatred and discrimination, against each other. He told the crowd, “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves, I’ll tell you right now,” and added, “You should never speak to him again.” He went on to claim that he was “polling at 99% in Israel” and that he could not understand “how anybody who’s Jewish can even think about voting for this guy.” In just a few sentences, the President of the United States told Jewish Americans to turn their backs on Muslim Americans and suggested that their votes and friendships should be based on their religion rather than their own beliefs. What Trump was trying to say is that Muslims are guilty simply because they are Muslim, and Jews are guilty if they refuse to treat Muslims like enemies. This is how authoritarian leaders divide a country. They turn people against their neighbors, convince them that other Americans are the enemy, and demand loyalty to themselves above everyone else.

Later in his speech, Donald Trump took his attacks even further, telling the crowd, “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

With just nine days until the midterm elections, and Republicans facing growing anger over inflation, soaring gas prices, and Trump’s war in Iran, Donald Trump took his attacks to an entirely different level. He brought up the September 11 terrorist attacks and began telling the story of Todd Beamer, who was born in Flint, Michigan, and was one of the brave passengers aboard United Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers and prevented the plane from reaching its intended target, saving untold numbers of lives. But Trump was not telling this story to honor an American hero. He was using it to attack Abdul El-Sayed. “Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, before continuing, “Todd Beamer gave his life for America. And you have to give your vote for Todd Beamer, if you can view it that way.” The President of the United States had just compared voting against a Muslim American doctor to the courage shown by Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting terrorists on September 11. And then he invited Todd Beamer’s father onto the stage.

Like so many of us, I have always thought of Todd Beamer as a true American patriot and a hero, a man who spent his final minutes on earth thinking of other people. He found an extraordinary strength that morning, the kind that, thankfully, few of us will ever have to search for. That is what made what happened next so painful to watch.

David Beamer, who told the crowd he was “four score and four” (or 84 years old), spoke for nearly twelve minutes. He began by asking everyone to pray before taking a disturbing turn and comparing the enemies America faced on September 11 to the ones he claimed we face today. “The enemy has not come from abroad. The enemy is right here among us. Local terrorists. Local citizens that want to demolish our country. They call themselves Democratic Socialists of America. Do you know what the DS really stands for? Demolition specialists.” He went on to claim that the Democratic Socialists’ platform “reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids,” that “Abdul would much prefer Sharia law,” and that “the mantra of their platform is really death to America.” A father still reeling from the unimaginable loss of his son, who was murdered by terrorists on September 11, stood in front of thousands of Americans and told them that their own neighbors, people who want things like affordable health care and public education, were terrorists too.

The rest of his words were equally disturbing, and the President of the United States of America stood behind him, listening and agreeing with every word he said. “Mike Rogers is an American. Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. Well, you know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.” He kept going. “He has a birth certificate, but he’s not an American. He had the choice to be an American or not. He has chosen otherwise. He has blood that’s red. However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.” He suggested that people who disagree with him should “take their energy and their money, go buy an island someplace and try that socialism thing again somewhere else,” and take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders along with them. Then he led thousands of people in a chant of his son’s final words, words that have long stood for courage and sacrifice, but were now being used as part of a political attack against a fellow American. “On three. One, two, three. Let’s roll.”

When it was over, Donald Trump didn’t correct him or remind his fellow Americans that hatred, especially hatred directed at Muslim Americans, has no place in this country. Instead, he thanked David and Peggy Beamer and told them, “Your boy is looking down very proud of you both right now.”

David Beamer has lived through a loss I cannot imagine, and nothing I say will ever take away from his grief or from his son’s heroism. But he did not wander onto that stage, and he was not ambushed. He came as a surrogate for Mike Rogers, whom he has endorsed and for whom he has appeared in campaign advertising against El-Sayed, and he chose every one of those words. I can hold compassion for a grieving father and still hold him accountable for the dangerous things he said. The men who murdered Todd Beamer believed that an entire nation of people was their enemy, that thousands of human beings they had never met deserved to die because of who they were and what they believed. Twenty-five years later, Todd’s father stood on a stage and taught a crowd of Americans to believe the same kind of thing about their neighbors. That is the real heartbreak of what happened in Port Huron today. The hatred that took his son has found its way into him.

What Donald Trump encouraged today is not new. We’ve seen variations of this type of hatred and division before, and history has shown us where it leads. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only a person “of German or kindred blood” could be a citizen of the Reich. Jewish Germans whose families had lived in the country for generations, who had fought for Germany in World War I, and who held German birth certificates were stripped of their full rights as citizens. They were still living in the country they called home, but they were no longer considered equal members of it. When David Beamer told the audience that a man’s birth certificate doesn’t make him an American and questioned his loyalty using the colors of the American flag, he was making an argument with a disturbing historical parallel: that belonging to a country is not determined by citizenship under the law, but by whether those in power consider you worthy of being called an American. And Donald Trump stood behind him and let him say the very things that Donald Trump himself also believes.

And we have seen this happen right here in America, too. In 1942, the United States government forced roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and sent them to incarceration camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens, many born right here in California. They had American birth certificates, but none of that mattered because their own government had decided that their ancestry made them a threat to the country they called home. Decades later, a federal commission determined that what happened was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The United States eventually formally apologized and paid reparations to surviving victims.

I still remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in school and struggling to understand how the United States of America could have done something so horrible to its own people. Much like when I first learned about slavery, I couldn’t understand how so many people could have stood by and allowed their fellow human beings to be treated that way. I remember wondering how anyone could have believed it was acceptable, let alone participated in it. And here we are, 84 years after Japanese Americans were first forced from their homes, watching history begin to rhyme once again. We have already lived through the consequences of allowing our government to decide that some Americans are less American than others simply because of who they are or where their families came from. We should not have to learn that lesson again.

Like many Americans, I didn’t grow up around Muslim people. I’m sure there were Muslim families in my community; I just didn’t know them. I grew up with friends who were Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, and some who followed no religion at all, but I didn’t have a close Muslim friend until I went to college. In 1995, during my freshman year, I was seated next to a young Muslim man who would become a close friend.

One night, I was feeling stressed about schoolwork and wanted to go for a walk late in the evening to clear my mind. He insisted on coming with me to keep me company and make sure I was safe. It was on that walk that he told me about his faith and family. What stayed with me the most was how peaceful his religion was, and how much he cared about his mother. Through him, I met more Muslim friends, and not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever said a word about my hair being uncovered, even though many of their mothers covered theirs, and not one of them ever made me feel anything but welcome. We were all just kids learning how to be adults, trying to figure out who we were while having some fun along the way.

Six years later, on September 11th, I didn’t think of him. I didn’t think of his family or his friends, because I had never once connected him to extremism, and why would I have? He was the friend who insisted on walking with me so I’d be safe. In the same way, I don’t hold Jewish people responsible for the Israeli government’s war in Gaza, I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas did on October 7th, and I don’t hold every American responsible for Donald Trump. The list goes on and on, because that is how human beings actually are. We are not our governments, and we are not the worst person who happens to share our faith.

Maybe the most important lesson that history can teach us right now is that if someone stands up and tells us that an entire group of people is evil, that they should be feared, watched, screened, or sent away, the person we should fear most is the one saying it, not the people they are trying to turn us against. Because never in history has the real threat been an entire people. The threat has always been the man with the microphone who needs us to believe otherwise. David Beamer told the crowd today that “the enemy is right here among us,” and he was right about that. But the enemy wasn’t a doctor running for the Senate. It was the man sharing that stage with him, the one who invited him up there and handed him the microphone.

Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, helped lead Donald Trump’s outreach to Arab American voters in Michigan during the 2024 election. Today, he told the Associated Press, “The president’s statements are out of line. They are crossing a red line. They are racist.” He continued, “The remarks are out of line and crazy. I mean, no sane individual would say these things,” before adding, “The president of the United States saying that about a person because of his religion, that is just not acceptable. And people are going to remember that on Nov. 3.” Two years ago, this man was helping Donald Trump win Michigan. Tonight, he is publicly calling the president’s remarks racist, and that tells us just how far this has gone, even for some of the people who once supported him.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who joined El-Sayed in Grand Rapids tonight, said Republicans are turning to Islamophobia because they have no answers for Americans struggling with health care, housing, and the cost of living. “All they can do is foment hatred and divisiveness,” he said. At that same rally, El-Sayed responded to Trump’s attacks with a little humor, telling the crowd, “I don’t even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me ‘senator’ after November,” before adding, to loud cheers, “I will be Senator Muhammad to you, bro.” El-Sayed has also called the attacks on his loyalty “shameful.”

While Donald Trump was in Michigan today trying to convince Americans to fear their own neighbors, people in other parts of the world were showing us what happens when ordinary citizens refuse to be afraid anymore. In April, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after sixteen years in power, despite Donald Trump and JD Vance throwing their support behind him. I have written before about how Hungary felt when I visited in 2019, how the country I had once fallen in love with seemed to be holding its breath. In April, it finally exhaled.

Today, it was Brazil’s turn. Yesterday, Reuters published a disturbing investigation into how two Trump administration officials worked behind the scenes to help return the Bolsonaro family to power, pushing for sanctions to sway the election and telling American diplomats that restoring Jair Bolsonaro was United States policy. When his conviction for plotting a coup made that impossible, they shifted their attention to getting his son, Flávio, elected instead. But the Brazilian people had other plans. Tonight, President Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 percent of the vote, and people poured into the streets of São Paulo to celebrate. Despite everything the Trump administration did to interfere, the Brazilian people made their own decision to resist a far-right dictator.

Donald Trump's grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).

• Wayne Madsen Report, Historical Commentary: A future Trump Treason Truth Commission needed, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Flurry of Diplomacy in Iran as Regional Countries Try to Stave Off War, Erika Solomon, Vivian Nereim and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 26, 2026. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan made a rare joint visit to Tehran amid reports that the U.S. and Israel were drawing up plans to renew their attacks on Iran.

Senior representatives from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan met with Iranian officials in the capital, Tehran, on Monday, amid widespread concern that the United States and Israel could soon launch fresh attacks on Iran.

Ali Bagheri Kani, the deputy secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council, said the meetings were aimed at promoting regional security, according to an Iranian state news channel, Press TV.

The visit is the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts by regional mediators to stave off further turmoil in the Middle East. American and Israeli officials are said to be drawing up plans to potentially attack Iran after the U.S. midterm elections next week, according to U.S. officials and others briefed on the deliberations.

Saudi Arabia’s conflict with the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has also escalated rapidly in recent weeks as the two sides have exchanged deadly attacks, including on airports and oil sites around the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan formed a new collective defense agreement, known as the Mecca Pact, this year. Monday’s talks are their first joint high-level meeting with Iran since the Saudi-Houthi conflict flared up.

Drop Site Daily, Israel expels 3,100+ Palestinians in Hebron, Staff and Wire Reports, Oct. 26, 2026. Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday. 800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp. Israeli operation in Hebron forcibly displaces over 3,100 Palestinians as attacks continue across the occupied West Bank. Israel kills at least 14 Palestinians in Gaza over the weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in tight race against Eisenkot in Israeli elections tomorrow.

Iran: In unexpected diplomatic move, Saudi, Pakistani, and Turkish officials travel to Iran for talks. Iraq keeps borders closed to pressure Iran, orders arrest of Iraqi official opposing the closure. Oil spill off UAE coast widens, satellite images show.

Yemen: Saudi-led coalition carries out strikes in Yemen as Ansarallah claims attacks on airport, military bases, and oil infrastructure. Egyptian parliament authorizes Sisi to send military reinforcements to Saudi Arabia if requested. Over half of Taiz’s hospitals and medical centers shut down amid Ansarallah siege. Saudi-coalition strikes kill 21, wound 30 in Yemen.

U.S.: Former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump attend dueling rallies in Michigan; Trump spouts Islamophobia to stir his base. U.S. military gives SpaceX access to precise space-tracking data, raising conflict-of-interest questions. NYC set to sign no-bid deal with Israeli tracking company. Trump says U.S. will “take care of Cuba”; Rubio urges Cubans to partner with CIA. White House considers mass pardons for junior staff, sources say. Attorney General Todd Blanche defends DOJ suit to block automatic certification of Alaska’s Senate result if Republican candidate loses. SNAP enrollment has fallen 13% since the One Big Beautiful Act, straining food banks and school meal programs. U.S. presses Mexico for deeper cooperation against cartels.

International: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva re-elected president of Brazil, defeating far-right Flávio Bolsonaro. Serbian student-led movement ousts right-wing leader Vučić, wins big in parliament. The Guardian: U.S. military “weaponizing” El Niño in Somalia. Remains located in Haiti during search for missing Salvadoran soldiers. North Korea accuses South Korea of fabricating demilitarized zone blast, places howitzers on border. Jordan arrests three suspected of deadly church attack. Opposition figure María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela after more than 10 months in exile. Rapid Support Forces attacks power stations, causes outages across southeastern Sudan. Amnesty: Gunmen kill at least 40 in Nigerian village. Algeria authorizes army deployment to Niger, first foreign troop mission since 1973.

Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday: Israeli attacks on Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed at least four Palestinians, including a seven-year-old girl, and wounded more than ten, while one Palestinian was killed and several others wounded Monday in a drone strike in the Rimal neighborhood of western Gaza City, according to WAFA. A separate Israeli drone strike in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, killed two Palestinians and wounded two.

Over the past 24 hours, eight Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks and 35 injured across Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Three bodies were recovered from beneath the rubble.

The total recorded death toll since October 7, 2023, is now 74,555 killed, with 175,727 injured. Since October 11, 2025, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 1,559 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 5,608, while 845 bodies have been recovered.

800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp: Over 800 Palestinians have been forced to displace yet again from Shujaiya, an eastern neighborhood in Gaza City, after Israeli forces set fire to a displacement camp, according to Al Jazeera.

New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia. 

More Global News 

New York Times, Israeli Jews Across the Spectrum Face an Election of Fears, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 26, 2026. Supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, have expressed intense anxieties about isolation abroad, security at home and the future of Israel’s identity.

At an event in Jerusalem in July, an opposition candidate for Israel’s Parliament kicked things off by asking what voters feared most if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing, religious government won another four-year term. The answers were startling.

Israel would become even more of an international pariah, one said. “I’m afraid my children would leave,” said another. “I’d want my children to leave,” said a third.

It got darker from there. “Tyranny of the majority.” “Civil war.” “Collapse.”

Every national election is important, and many play on voters’ fears. But none has felt so consequential and dire to so many Israeli Jews as the one on Tuesday.

And no wonder: They have the chance to render a verdict on polarizing decisions that have torn the country apart for years — and to choose between starkly different visions for Israel’s future.

Perhaps the rawest emotions among Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents surround the question of whether the long-serving prime minister, legendary for his political survival skills, will be held accountable for the worst national-security failure in Israel’s history, the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.

As traumatic and shocking as that attack was, many other deep questions about Israel’s character hang in the balance.

Will the country weaken its judiciary and grant the government far more power? Will it rewrite the social contract to demand service and sacrifice from all sectors of society?

Will it arrest accelerating emigration before a brain drain threatens its tech-driven economy and, close behind, its vaunted military?

Will Israel defy global opprobrium and try to thwart Palestinian aspirations to statehood once and for all, potentially risking its relationship with the United States? Or will it reverse course and attempt to repair ties, at least with Washington?Finally, will it end Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure precisely at a moment when his staunchest supporters believe that his fortitude and skills are most needed to face down Israel’s adversaries on the global stage?

These issues are so divisive, and the country so polarized, that even a clear election result may not begin healing the rifts.

“Whoever wins, the other side will feel that they’re not part of the Israeli state,” said Yuval Eylon, a retired Israeli rear admiral and researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

In a recent poll, the institute found that 39 percent of Israelis fear violence between different segments of society — as many as fear an Iranian nuclear weapon.

New York Times, The Expat Voters Hoping to Swing Israel’s Election, Bethlehem Feleke, Alex Pena, Meg Felling and Monika Cvorak, Oct. 25, 2026. The return of thousands of Israeli expats to vote in their country’s tight election has set off debate over their political influence. We traveled to Tel Aviv to find out why.

“We’re at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where tens of thousands of Israeli expats are arriving to vote in Tuesday’s election. There’s no absentee voting. So many are flying in for what’s expected to be a very tight race.

Moshe Lavi just arrived from New York City and is meeting his sister Lishay. Her husband spent over two years in Hamas captivity. Their family is still displaced and living in a kibbutz in southern Israel.” “I lost trust with the government because they need to own the failures. They need to take responsibility. And now it’s my turn to use my voice. The diplomatic moves of the state of Israel influences the life of Israelis in the diaspora and abroad. And so my vote, in my opinion, is legitimate because I’m going to be impacted by the policies.”

“In Oct. 7, I promised to myself two things — that Omri [Miran] is here again. The girls call him Daddy. And to do everything that I can that this world and this land is going to be better and good for them.”

Despite widespread criticism of the government’s response to the attacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is nearly tied with the opposition in the polls.

Around 6 percent of Israelis live overseas, a number that has only grown since the Hamas attacks. In a fragmented Parliament, their votes could shift the election.” 

New York Times, Opinion: In India, I Saw Things That Should Scare Trump, Lydia Polgreen, Oct. 26, 2026. Narendra Modi, the barrel-chested strongman leader of India for the past dozen years, has finally met his match — and it looks a lot like Mohini Majumdar. Just 20 years old, slender and voluble, Majumdar is an English student at Delhi University: an unlikely antagonist for an omnipotent autocrat.

Yet early on Oct. 10, she shared an early morning taxi to the center of Delhi with a gaggle of classmates. Dressed casually in flowing cotton and sensible shoes, Majumdar and her friends could just as easily have been on their way to a stroll in one of this city’s splendid gardens. But their plan, she told me, was to march across the street to a place called Jantar Mantar, a historic monument at the center of Delhi that has for decades served as a designated ground for protest.

They had been there before, over the summer, joining thousands of other young people in raucous, meme-driven protests after a leaked paper led to the cancellation of a college entrance exam. Eventually, under the banner of the upstart Cockroach Janata Party, they forced the resignation of India’s education minister. It was the first time Modi’s government had dismissed a top official under pressure from public protests.

Now, they were back for an even bigger fish: Modi’s handpicked chief election commissioner, who had overseen the deletion of more than 130 million people from the country’s voter rolls in a murky process that threatened to undermine faith in the voting process in the world’s largest democracy. “These kinds of protests really prove that you should be political, and everything is political in our life,” Majumdar told me as she waited for the march to begin. 

New York Times, Brazilian Markets Convulse After Unexpected Election Result, Joe Rennison, Oct. 26, 2026.  President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election victory prompted a sharp reversal in financial markets that had expected his opponent to win.

Stocks in Brazil plummeted on Monday after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election victory and his opponent’s early dispute of the results.

The Bovespa Index, Brazil’s benchmark stock index, fell more than 10 percent as trading began, triggering a 30-minute circuit breaker — a tool that pauses trading to prevent runaway sell-offs. Futures trading pointed to a decline of around 18 percent.

More On U.S. High-Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion 

New York Times Magazine, A.I. Companies Want to Write the Rules Governing Themselves. Can They Be Trusted? Emily Bazelon, Oct. 26, 2026. Five experts on how best to limit a rapidly evolving technology.

Artificial intelligence is alarming many of its human creators by leaping the guardrails designed to contain it. In the last few months, safety researchers have resigned from OpenAI and Anthropic, warning that their former employers could be courting disaster: A.I. that escapes our control irrevocably. The companies are reportedly gaming out scenarios of a catastrophic cyberattack or other event in the next six to 12 months.

Regulating this powerful and evolving technology would pose serious challenges for any Congress and White House. As it is, President Trump undermined the chances for bipartisan regulation by calling predictions of an A.I. catastrophe a “hoax” in September. Yoshua Bengio, a scientist and godfather of A.I., wrote in October, “I do not believe we are on track to see sufficient government regulation in time.”

What should the government do? We asked a panel of experts to assess the risks A.I. presents and the tools of governance that could be adopted to address them.

Matt Stoller's BIG: Monopoly Round-Up: What Happens When Cybersecurity is Bad for Business, Lee Hepner, Oct. 25-26, 2026. How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.

Lots of monopoly-related news this week, as usual. The AI bubble continues to blow off steam, as even Elon Musk is saying the neoclouds are going bust, which BIG predicted a couple of weeks ago. And, as we race toward a consequential midterm election, Republican voters are demanding financial services reform, and a new Congressional report called “Settling for Less” is laying the foundation for oversight and accountability regarding the Trump Administration’s failed approach to antitrust enforcement.But before we get to all of that, which is below for paid subscribers, you may have seen a lot of chatter last week about a wave of AI-enabled cybersecurity failures that resulted in the preemptive takedown of government websites around the world. The effects were also local and diffuse. I was talking about this with a friend who said the platform for coordinating his kid’s soccer league was shut down for a couple of days, leaving parents in the lurch on upcoming schedules.

Basically, the internet is being ruined by a massive new AI-fueled set of hacks, a situation nicknamed “Black October” by cybersecurity experts. Big or small, there’s a lot to unpack here and an opportunity to reflect on what this says about our failure to anticipate and govern for risk. Let’s dive in.

New York Times, Owners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The $41 million lawsuit contends that the A.I. company used Presley’s music to train its models without permission. Anthropic disagrees with the claims.

The owners of Elvis Presley’s music sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, saying it trained its models on more than 200 of Presley’s songs without their permission, and accusing it of copyright infringement.

The suit, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of several parties, seeks a jury trial and more than $41 million, or $150,000 per song, in damages.

The owners of the music, who include the licensing company Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing, multiple trusts and at least one individual, also accused Anthropic, the company behind the popular chatbot Claude, of circumventing measures used to protect the music and removing or altering copyright management information from the songs.

“The Elvis plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” the lawsuit said.

Anthropic infringed on 274 of Presley’s songs, the lawsuit contends, including hits like “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return To Sender.”

A representative for Anthropic said in a short statement on Sunday that the company disagreed with the claims and that it intended to defend itself against the case.

Last week, the music company Reservoir sued Anthropic, accusing it of stealing copyrighted lyrics and melodies from songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” by Joni Mitchell, and “Papa Don’t Preach,” by Madonna, as well as songs by Kings of Leon and Evanescence. Anthropic told Billboard magazine that it disagreed with the allegations.

Anthropic was also sued for $3 billion by Universal Music Group in January. UMG claims that the A.I. company built Claude using “pirated libraries” of songs. This month, Anthropic asked a judge in the case to rule that its actions are protected under fair use laws.

The A.I. music company Suno, whose song creation tool has divided the industry, has faced its own copyright lawsuits from record labels. That company repositioned itself as a partner to those labels and artists, and released an A.I. model trained on songs licensed from the Warner Music Group. Warner settled its suit against Suno, though UMG and Sony have so far not done the same.

In the wider landscape of A.I. and the music industry, there are continuing discussions over whether artists should adopt the technology, the ethics around its use and the demand for guardrails for musicians.

Other industries are also grappling with A.I. The New York Times has sued the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.

In the lawsuit concerning Presley’s catalog, the plaintiffs say they are “deeply protective” of the music, describing it as “some of the most valuable in the world” with “some of the most renowned lyrics and melodies in music history.”

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.

Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.

In doing so, Mr. Trump harnessed the power of the federal government to try to interfere in the voting process before Election Day — essentially trying to nullify an opponent’s potential win before the game has been called.

Even for a president who worked to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election, the anticipatory strike reflects a new intensification of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use his official powers to achieve the election results he wants — one that undermines the democratic process, according to election and legal experts. While they say the administration’s lawsuit is unlikely to be successful, the tactic could still further Mr. Trump’s goals by shaking the confidence of voters in the outcome of the race.

“This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” said Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development who has studied election issues around the world, including in El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the D.O.J. and it’s been weaponized.”

The latest phase of Mr. Trump’s strategy centers on the Justice Department, which asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.

The issue has already been litigated in the state: In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired elementary schoolteacher, could appear on the ballot.

But Attorney General Todd Blanche maintained on Sunday that the federal government had a role in inserting itself into the process.

“We’re not saying that the federal government is going to decide who the next senator from Alaska is,” Mr. Blanche said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added: “But if it’s clear that there was confusion and that confusion led to an unjust, improper result that is not the will of the Alaskan voters, we want to make sure that the Alaskan system and the Alaskan state courts and the Alaskan electoral process can understand that in a way that lets them do the right thing.”

When asked for comment, the White House referred to an exchange Mr. Trump had with reporters on Saturday about his administration’s efforts to intervene in Alaska, a lawsuit he said was made at his direction. Republicans have asserted that the candidacy of the second Mr. Sullivan is a Democratic scheme to confuse voters. Democrats have said they have no connection to that candidate, who will appear on the ballot without any party affiliation and has said he is running a genuine campaign.

“It is a totally corrupt weaponization situation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it,” Mr. Trump said of the Democrats in Alaska. “So I recommended it to the D.O.J. They looked at it, they agreed with me, and they’ve gone to court. Let’s see what happens. But that’s pure corruption.”Election law specialists say Mr. Trump’s lawsuit in Alaska lacks legal basis and will likely fail. But that might not be the point.

The lawsuit is just one piece of a blitz of federal actions by the Trump administration to assert more control over the electoral process that have run into court challenges. Mr. Trump introduced a plan to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots, only to have it be blocked by the Supreme Court.

The administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to cede to the federal government’s demands to turn over voter rolls. The administration has lost 27 of those cases. The other cases are pending.

Mr. Trump has deployed homeland security investigators to find evidence of illegal voting in states where it has claimed without evidence there is widespread noncitizen voting. A federal judge restricted much of that effort this week.

But with each claim of election fraud, Mr. Trump is creating another platform to sow doubt about the elections and, some state officials and election experts worry, lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the specific contests.

More On U.S. MidTerm Elections 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Who Has Already Won and LostI Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 26, 2026. 🚨 8 Days to the Midterms 🚨 We have been tracking “days to the midterms” — Nov. 3 — but early midterm voting has been underway and from all appearances looks more robust than it has been at this point in past years.

According to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, some 28 million people have already cast ballots. We won’t know until the ballots are counted whether those additional early ballots were “cannibalized” from the Election Day vote or whether the turnout will be elevated, but the flood of early voting is itself an expression of democratic determination to thwart the Trump regime’s efforts to muck up mail-in voting and to intimidate voters.An early-voting station on Oct. 16, the first day of early voting for the midterm elections in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Tim Evans/AFP via Getty Images)

An avalanche of early voters perceived a threat to democracy and took effective evasive action, casting ballots that are now “banked” for their party/candidates. Not only does this avoid problems that might interrupt voting on official Election Day — whether personal or regime-inflicted — but it also allows the party/candidate engaged in get-out-the-vote operations to focus on lower-propensity voters, increasing the chance to boost overall turnout.

Regardless of the results when votes are tabulated, the “winner” here is the anti-regime, pro-democracy coalition that pulled off a political jujitsu — converting Donald Trump’s desperate effort to interfere with elections and rig the midterms into a historic early-voting exercise.

Conversely, the entire anti-democratic, election-suppressing exercise — from demanding state voter rolls to harassing immigrants to sending bogus lists of supposed noncitizen voters to re-redistricting to filing preposterous lawsuits — not only failed in virtually every court case but also arguably boosted a historic blue wave. It’s been a spectacularly inept and counterproductive authoritarian effort (akin to Viktor Orban’s failed stunts in his losing election in Hungary) to cling to power.

A lawsuit filed Friday (which Donald Trump confessed he personally ordered) purported to challenge the eventual result in Alaska’s Senate race unless the incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan wins. Republicans are whining that an independent candidate with the same name as the incumbent will be on the ballot, but a state court has already handled the matter. As strictly a matter of state law, “the administration has absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when or how to certify the results of its Senate election,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said in a statement. The ACLU and ACLU of Alaska on Saturday swiftly intervened to dismiss the case and seek Rule 11 sanctions against the Justice Department. (The latest baseless assault on voting should renew calls for the impeachment of Attorney General Todd Blanche, who now presides over a lawless voter intimidation operation.)

Even Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski declared that “Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates,” pointing out that a state court “already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot.” She acknowledged, “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.” The attack on their voting rights and implicit insult to Alaska voters (who, with ranked-choice voting, will have a chance to indicate preferences for each candidate) may well boost Democrat Mary Peltola, who was already leading in the polls.

Again, Republicans’ laughable efforts to meddle in the election remind us that Trump’s MAGA cult has lost the battle between voting suppression and voting enthusiasts.

In addition to the larger fight between anti- and pro-voting forces, the campaign has already produced winners and losers among the surrogate forces spread out around the country. Regardless of who wins races in which they are offering their help, several potential 2028 contenders’ performances in the midterms have changed, for better or worse, their future prospects.

Certain Democrats on the radar for 2028 have improved their profiles through energetic appearances and/or fundraising. “JB Pritzker is pouring tens of millions of dollars of his own money into boosting Black and Hispanic candidates this cycle. That could help him win over critical voters in 2028,” Politico reported. “The billionaire Illinois governor — who’s also considered a potential presidential contender — is investing at least $38 million in battleground races.”

However, no 2028 contender has been more visible or effective than former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who, by Politico’s count, made about 100 endorsements and appeared in person for half of those. By election day, he’ll have stopped in roughly 40 states since leaving office (recently appearing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Georgia, Mississippi, Minnesota, Colorado, and Wisconsin) and been “welcomed in places where candidates shunned some of his potential rivals.”

Buttigieg will finish on Nov. 3 in Detroit. Michigan just happens to be Buttigieg’s home state, and the state where progressive star Abdul El-Sayed is poised for a win in the Senate and Democrat Joyce Benson in the governor’s contest, and an early 2028 primary state.

Buttigieg’s biggest accomplishment has been his success in defining himself not as a remanent of the old guard (a Cabinet member in an administration whose president many Democrats deeply resent for dooming the party’s 2024 prospects) but among the most articulate of the new generation of reformers with bold ideas, including popular vote for president and expansion of the Supreme Court. (It has not hurt him that former vice president Kamala Harris, a potential rival, has been almost invisible during the campaign and, likewise, that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, under fire from progressives for blessing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, has been a nonfactor on the trail.)

Meanwhile, no one — with the exception of his addled, grossly uninhibited, and unhinged boss — has done more damage to his image than Vice President JD Vance. (Indeed, Vance’s role as No. 2 for someone so obviously unfit for office will elevate a whole set of 25th Amendment questions should Vance decide to run. Haven’t you noticed his deterioration? Don’t you have an obligation under the 25th Amendment to ensure the president is mentally fit?)

In addition to Trump’s blatant snub in refusing to endorse Vance for 2028, Vance’s sparse crowds, clumsy interviews, awkward performances, cringeworthy defense of Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely denounced vile ad, and feeble attempts to distance himself from Trump (e.g., on Iran via his leaks to the New York Times, on the economy) have cemented the imagine of a soulless, creepy character without ideas of his own or a modicum of likability. Simply being “not Vance” might be the best calling card for a flock of lesser-known Republicans eyeing 2028 runs.

We don’t know the ballot winners yet, but the surrogate race has been decided. If Buttigieg is the big surrogate winner, Vance is the undisputed surrogate loser of 2026.

In sum, the extent of the blue wave remains an open question. However, this historic midterm has already shaped the battle to preserve free and fair elections and the two parties’ 2028 nominating contests. What happened during the 2026 race won’t be forgotten after Nov. 3.

Robert Reich, Opinion: Watch, Read, and Share, Robert Reich, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Obama said it as clearly as it can be stated.

If you haven’t yet had a chance to see or read Obama’s speech in Cleveland Saturday night, please do both. And then share it as widely as you can.

TEXT (I have taken the liberty of putting certain sentences in bold type.)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Ohio!

Yes! Hello, Cleveland! (Cheers/applause.)

All right, all right, all right, settle down! Settle down, come on!(Cheers/applause.)

Thank you! Thank you! All right, all right, all right!

Hold up, hold up! Y’all got too riled up. (Laughter.) Man, it is rocking in Cleveland right now! (Cheers/applause.) It is good to be back. (Applause.)

It is great to be with your next governor, Amy Acton! (Applause.) Your next senator, Sherrod Brown! (Applause.)

And by the way, if y’all got seats, feel free to sit down. I’ve got some stuff to say here today. (Applause.)

Let’s face it, I’ve been doing this a long time. Sherrod talks about the first time I came here, did not have a single gray hair, not one. (Laughter.)

And so, I’ve been doing this a long time, and some people might say a little too long. And one of those people is Michelle Obama. (Cheers/applause.) But she gave me a hall pass this weekend.

And when you have been campaigning as long as I have been campaigning, when you’ve worked as many elections as I have, you can tell when an election comes along that just feels a little bit different. (Applause.)

An election where people are so ready for something new, so hungry for something better, so sick and tired of being sick and tired that everywhere you go, it feels like change is in the end. (Cheers/applause.)

And in Ohio, that’s how I’m feeling right now. That’s what you get a chance to do in 10 days. After two years of chaos and cruelty, and corruption, and incompetence, the likes of which we have not seen in modern times, you get a chance to say enough’s enough. We are voting for change right here in Ohio! (Applause.)

And the great thing is here in Ohio, you can vote early through November 1st. So don’t procrastinate, don’t equivocate. Make a plan to vote early in person or on election day. If you need to find out how to do it, go to iwillvote.com/oh.

AUDIENCE: I-O!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: O-H?

AUDIENCE: I-O!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Some things don’t change. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, Barack!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I love you back! You know that.

Now, you’ve heard some great speakers. I do not have to tell you how tough things are out there, but I do think it’s worth reminding ourselves how we got here, and the promises that the current occupant of the White House was making on the campaign trail two years ago.

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Don’t boo! And by the way, y’all must not have been to my rallies before, because you know you’re not supposed to boo. What are you supposed to do?

AUDIENCE: Vote!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Correct. They can’t hear your boos. They’ll hear your vote! (Applause.)

Now, two years ago, there were a lot of people who, they weren’t crazy about the guy’s character, but they were frustrated about post-COVID inflation.

They were seeing prices go up, and they heard him make a bunch of promises to get costs under control.

And those weren’t the only promises he made. He also promised he’d impose tariffs that would bring down the deficit. He promised he’d stop getting us involved in unnecessary wars. He promised he’d pass a beautiful healthcare bill, the most “beautiful bill” that would make everyone’s lives better. So, I think we should examine how did these promises work out.

Well, first of all, if you thought everything cost too much before you know who, everything is more expensive now. Your mortgage costs more. Your healthcare costs more. Your utility bills cost more. Interest rates are up, and then there’s gas, $4 a gallon, $5 a gallon. Diesel is over $y and climbing.

Now, I want to be fair. As a former president, I can tell you sometimes, factors beyond the president’s control end up foiling the best laid plans; that happens. A president doesn’t have control over the entire economy, but that is not the case here. (Applause.)

In this case, this administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs. The current president chose to make a series of bad decisions. Most importantly, he decided to start an unnecessary war that nobody asked for and nobody voted for. (Applause.)

Now, this is something I know a little about. Let’s think about this Iran war. The original rationale was, we’re going to go in there and get them to give up their nuclear program, their nuclear weapons.

Now, the thing was, Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons because I had put a deal in place — (Applause.) — that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes. And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it. I just had to engage in diplomacy.

He pulled out of it, starts this war. Seven months later, six months after they declared victory, because remember they said, “Oh, this is the best war ever, it’s going great,” seven months later, how’s that war going? Our allies and our bases have been attacked. Americans have been killed. Hundreds of Americans have been wounded. We have run down our stock of missiles, and Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz, where oil goes through to the world market.

This is the reason why the price of oil is up. Nobody disputes that. This is the reason the price of diesel is up. This is the reason why the price of just about everything is up. Meanwhile, you’ve got the defense secretary, who’s squarely focused —

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Wait, wait, don’t boo! Wait, wait! No, no, no, he’s very focused on important matters like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops — (laughter) — and live streaming executions, because that’s how he thinks you cultivate that manly warrior spirit.

How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking himself in the mirror in the morning? (Laughter.) I mean, you know he’s working his hair because that’s how warriors look.

These are not serious people. They’re not serious people, and the problem is you end up having to pay the price for their lack of seriousness. (Applause.)

Now, oil prices aren’t the only reason prices keep going up. There’s also this whole tariff business. Our current president loves tariffs, loves them, tariffs!

Now, he was warned at the time, when you impose tariffs, consumers pay the tab because it’s not just the goods that you use directly that have been imported from someplace else. It’s also the car you build here in America. They might need a part from somewhere else, and now suddenly there’s a tariff on it, so the prices go up. He was warned about that. “No, no, no, that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s going to be great. Everything’s going to turn out great.”

No, that’s not what happened! In fact, tariffs helped contribute to rising prices. And the big trade war he’s starting now is with that well-known evil empire, Canada! (Laughter.) Canada! I mean, these are the people who gave us maple syrup and Martin Short. (Laughter.) Canadians, they’re the nicest people; they’re so nice! They’re like our friendly neighbors to the north, and he’s picking a fight with them. And instead of bringing down deficits like he said with these tariffs, we’re now running a debt to the tune of $40 trillion, 40 trillion!

Now, you would think that with all this going on, our current president must have at least passed some legislation to bring down prices. You would think, right? But the only bill they passed of any significance in the last two years was a trillion-dollar tax break that mostly benefitted the richest Americans.

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: What did I say? What did I say? Don’t boo, vote!

AUDIENCE: Vote!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Vote! Now, I’ve heard the argument, the president’s done some things folks wanted him to do, like tightening up the border. And you know what? I believe that we do need to make sure that our border is orderly and secure, and that people who want to come here do so lawfully.

And in fact, when I was president, I got criticized by some close Democratic allies for tightening up enforcement at the border. But I don’t recall anybody campaigning on sending masked agents running through our streets. I don’t recall anybody talking about law-abiding citizens being arrested, detained, or shot! We did not ask for that! That’s not what we have to do to get our borders under control. (Cheers/applause.)

When you go through all this, the tally of promises, things have not worked out the way we might have expected, although I must say, I did expect it. (Laughter.)

And let’s be honest. Does anybody really think this guy in the White House right now is spending all that time thinking about these issues?

AUDIENCE: No!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. (Laughter.) The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? (Laughter.) Everything, more gold. He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. (Laughter.) Just gold everywhere. (Applause.)

He’s clearly not focused on lowering prices for you!

Now, there is one thing he does seem to focus on in addition to home renovation, and that is how to enrich himself and his family and his children. Just look at the last couple weeks. We’ve got a United States Ambassador shaking down a donor to pay off a $100,000 credit card bill. Then we learned there’s a Venezuelan billionaire who wanted a pardon, paid one of Trump’s personal lawyers $50 million to be general counsel at a company nobody knows anything about. And lo and behold, he gets the pardon, falls out of the sky.

And this culture is set at the top. We have never seen a president excel so wildly and just straight up grifting on your dime. (Applause.) Never seen a president so intent on selling favors and shaking folks down. We have lost count of all the deals he and his family have done, from meme coins to taxpayer-funded contracts for his kids’ companies. And this is someone who has become billions of dollars wealthier in office.

And by the way, this is not disputed. I’m not making this up. It’s all there, and not a single Republican in Congress has done anything to stop it, not Jon Husted, not any of the Republicans on the ballot here in Ohio. Most of them have supported him every step of the way.You remember that old thing about drain the swamp? The only thing that got drained was the reflecting pool in the National Mall after some no-bid contract got it all messed up. And then they tried to blame a three-time Olympian and say he vandalized it. (Applause.)

All right. I mean, the list could go on.

And here’s the tough part, all right? Like it or not, I want a little reality check. We’ve got two more years in this administration.

AUDIENCE: No!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Wait, wait, wait! I mean, wait, hold up. I mean, that’s how our system of government works, but you know what? You know what we’re not stuck with? We’re not stuck with a spineless Congress and Republican governors who are enabling lawlessness and carelessness and cruelty, and indifference for working people. (Applause.)

We’re not stuck with that. We’re not stuck with folks who are enabling policies that take more and more out of your paycheck, and cut your health care, and drive up prices. We’re not stuck with that.

This election is our last, best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration. (Applause.)

It’s the circuit breaker in the system. We need to flip that circuit breaker! We need to start bringing some accountability to this administration. And just as important, we need to start showing the American people, who are hungry for solutions, what real leadership looks like, what concrete plans look like that actually lower costs and actually make healthcare more affordable, and make housing more affordable and get utility bills under control. We can’t just be against this administration’s behavior. We have to start showing them what a future on the other side of this administration can look like. (Cheers/applause.)

And that starts with you, Ohio. That starts with you. That starts with electing Amy Acton governor! (Applause.)

That starts with sending Sherrod Brown to the United States Senate! (Applause.)

It starts with them.

I almost feel bad for their Republican opponents, almost, because after spending the past couple years just singing this president’s praises, doing his bidding, they’ve now come to realize everybody’s pretty upset about all these broken promises.

So, what are they doing? First of all, they’re pretending like they’ve never heard of the guy. (Laughter.) “Donald who? I’m sorry. Who?” (Laughter.) And then, of course, they’re also doing what they always do, we’re just running all kinds of scary ads to make you think Democrats are radicals and communists, and that the woke police will arrest you and force feed you tofu. (Laughter.)

We are not going to fall for that. They run that same okey-doke every election, and it’s tired, tired. We’re clear about the choice in this election. Jon Husted is a guy who, as Sherrod already mentioned, voted not once, not twice, voted 14 times to support the Iran war that’s helping drive up gas prices here in Ohio, 14 times.

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Don’t boo.

AUDIENCE: Vote!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Voted three times to block folks from reining in the tariffs that have been driving up costs, voted to kick hundreds of thousands of Ohioans off Medicaid and raise healthcare costs.And by the way, this is the same guy who, as lieutenant governor, pushed so hard for data centers, he’s been called a data center’s best friend. Now, I don’t know if that’s a title I want, but that’s it.You know who hasn’t been called that? Sherrod Brown. (Applause.)

If there is one thing we all know about Sherrod Brown, and I’ve known him for two decades, is that he is not looking out for the high and mighty. He’s not working on behalf of people living high on the hog. He’s looking out for folks who are doing an honest day’s work and are still having trouble getting by. And that’s who he is; that’s who he’s always been. (Applause.)

And by the way, you can tell by how he’s dressed. (Laughter.) I mean, this is not a guy who enriched himself, cozying up to corporations. He still is wearing the same suit he was in when I met him 20 years ago! (Laughter/applause.)

He got a haircut for this rally — (laughter) — but y’all know he’s too cheap to get a haircut more than, I don’t know, once every couple months. He’s got this quarter zip. Connie told him, you know what? We’ve got to spruce you up a little bit. (Laughter.)

Sherrod is not somebody pretending to look out for working folks. He has always been there for you — (Applause.) — even when it’s hard, even when he might lose an election, even when he knows folks are going to spend millions of dollars against him! He’s always challenging the status quo, always taking on the system, always fighting for you!And that’s what he’ll do in the United States Senate. He’ll ban members of Congress from trading stocks, ban them for life from lobbying after they leave. He’ll put a cap on how much utility companies can raise rates. And when it comes to data centers, he’ll make sure corporations and not Ohioans are paying the full cost of their energy needs. (Applause.)

He’ll fight to make sure decisions about data centers are made not in secret deals, but out in the open by you, in Ohio communities. It’ll build on the great work we did because he was there every step of the way, passing the Affordable Care Act, and he’s going to make it illegal for drug companies to charge Americans more than what they charge in other countries — (Applause.) — and taking on insurance companies who are denying Ohioans care and protecting health care for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans. That’s who Sherrod is.So, if you want lower costs, vote for change. Vote for Sherrod! (Applause.)

You want to end the war and get gas prices under control, vote for change and vote for Sherrod. You want to stop corruption and grifting, vote for change. Vote for Sherrod Brown! (Applause.)

And then you’ve got a governor’s race here. Let’s talk about that.Now, there’s one political observer who was recently asked whether Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be a good governor or some kind of political celebrity, and the political observer said, “I don’t know. I assume he wants to be both.” This wasn’t some Democratic pundit who said this; it was Republican Governor Mike DeWine.

Vivek’s own supporters know it’s all about what’s in it for him. We all know that guy, who’s just thirsty, just wants to get attention no matter what, willing to do anything. And in recent days, we’ve seen there is no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to, to try to get in the limelight. I mean, think about this latest ad he ran.

AUDIENCE: Boo!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Do not boo. I want us to just focus on this. Wait, wait!

There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials. (Applause.)

And I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that. There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, no office is worth stooping that low, because you know what? Character matters.

Amy has spoken movingly about her painful childhood and all she’s experienced, and the abuse, neglect, and homelessness. And she’s never forgotten the people who looked out for her, who refused to look the other way when she needed a helping hand. And that’s why she dedicated her life and her career to looking out for Ohioans, looking out for people in need, looking out for people who maybe didn’t get a fair shot. (Applause.)

That’s what she did when Mike DeWine recruited her to join his cabinet and lead Ohio’s Health Department. And that’s what she’s going to do as governor. (Applause.)

She’ll cut taxes for as many as 775,000 Ohio families to lower costs and put money in your pockets and lift people out of poverty. She understands childcare shouldn’t bust the family budget, so she’ll make childcare more affordable, forgive medical debt, because no one should go broke because they need a medical procedure. (Applause.)

And on day one, as governor, she will sign anti-corruption executive orders to make sure Ohio’s government is working for Ohioans and not special interests. (Cheers/applause.)

Amy Acton is not in this to be some kind of political celebrity. She’s in it for you. (Applause.)

Look, these are unsettling times. These are unsettling times. The economy is changing fast. AI is here, and we need to make sure it benefits everyone, not just a few billionaires. We need to revamp our education for the new era that AI is ushering in. (Applause.)

We’re facing a housing shortage, and we need to build millions of homes. We need to rein in the cost of childcare so young families can afford it. We need to make sure no one has to worry about high healthcare premiums.

I get the frustration; I get the anger and the cynicism because the system is not working, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because rich and powerful folks are able to buy and sell elections like never before, pouring the kind of money we’ve never seen, partly because we’ve got a Republican Party that used to stand for smaller government and now seems to stand for corrupt government, or inept government, or no government — (Applause.) — and partly because this is also true too often, even among well-intentioned folks, including Democrats, there are times when we get so caught up in process and bureaucracy that we don’t deliver the goods fast enough to make a real difference in people’s lives. And people get frustrated. They don’t see enough change out there.

And that’s the reason we need serious people in Washington and in state capitals. These are serious times. (Applause.)

And what is striking about this moment is just how unserious the people in charge are right now, people who are more interested in performance, and flexing, and texting, and putting people down instead of lifting them up. (Applause.)

And what all that means is that when you see somebody like Sherrod, when you see somebody like Amy, somebody who genuinely cares about people, somebody who has a strong track record and is offering real solutions, somebody who isn’t in it to enrich themselves or because they want the limelight, but because they want to serve, then you’ve got to realize how precious that is.

And we’ve got to deliver for them. We’ve got to make sure we elect them as United States Senator and as governor. (Applause.)

Because Sherrod and Amy understand this election is not about them. It’s about you; it’s about us.

And there’s one other thing they understand. They understand that what ails us right now, what is throwing our country so out of kilter, it’s not just about prices. It’s not just about economics. Those things are really important, but it’s also about values. (Applause.)

There is a moral component to the choices we face right now. We are not going to fix the economic system or the political system that’s broken. We’re not going to unrig our economy, so long as we’ve got a culture where anything goes, and where people in the highest offices in the land think it’s okay to lie and cheat and bully, and where money is the only measure of our worth. (Applause.)

And that’s part of what’s going on right now. We have lost touch with those things that really matter in life, caring for our families, and helping our neighbors, and looking after our children, and laughing with them, and hugging them, and keeping our word, and having integrity, and treating other people with respect — (Applause.) — just basic stuff, stuff that used to be, it wasn’t Democratic or it wasn’t Republican. It was American. It was human. It was how we treat each other, just basic decency! (Cheers/applause.)

Yeah! That’s what we are missing in our public discourse, just basic decency.

We need to remember the words of a 25-year-old preacher who gave a sermon in 1954, where he said, “If we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind.” That was Martin Luther King, Jr. at 25 years old. (Applause.)He said, “We haven’t learned how to be just. We haven’t learned how to be honest and kind and true and loving, and that is the basis of our problem.” (Cheers/applause.)

“The real problem,” he said, “is that through our scientific genius, we have made a world of neighborhood, but through our moral and our spiritual genius, we failed to make it a brotherhood.”

And Ohio, what was true then is true today. Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets. Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington, but we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation, if we don’t return to some of those old-fashioned virtues –(Applause.) — if our fundamental attitude to each other is to try and hurt other people so they don’t hurt us first, if we’re driven by fear instead of by hope, if we think it’s okay to snatch children from parents or cut programs for the aged or the infirm, so the powerful can get whatever they want, we will continue to fester in anger and division.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being divided. (Applause.)

I want to reach out and shake my neighbor’s hand. I want to get to work doing something for somebody else.

We didn’t get into this moment overnight. We won’t get out of it overnight, and none of us should pretend that any single person in any single office is somehow going to save the day for us, and that the rest of us can just go back to acting the same way. We’re going to have to all make some changes.

But Ohio, here’s what I know. This election can be a start. This election can be an inflection point. This election can be a course correction in America’s long journey toward a more perfect union — (Applause.) — because if we’re willing to turn out in big numbers here in Ohio and across the country, if we’re willing to vote for change and vote for Democrats up and down the ballot, then this election might just mark the moment this country began moving in a better direction — (Cheers/applause.) — when we leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals!

Ohio, you and I have proved before that it is hard to stop a change whose time has come. (Applause.)

In 10 days, you have a chance to do it again! So, I’m asking you: Are you fired up?

AUDIENCE: Yeah!

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Are you ready to go? (Cheers/applause.)

Let’s make Amy Acton governor! (Applause.) 

Special Report: Fighting Fascism Globally

Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: The West must embrace defensive democracy, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Democratic constitutions cannot be suicide pacts. Far-right fascist parties and movements that advocate violence against ethnic and religious minorities must be banned.Wayne Madsen Oct 26READ IN APP

Democratic constitutions that guarantee political and civil rights cannot serve as suicide pacts. Far-right political parties that advocate unconstitutional fascist rule and violence against ethnic and religious minorities should be banned.

Some democracies, including Germany, Greece, France, United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, allow organizations to be banned when they use constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms to undermine constitutional democracy or the rights of others.

This is called defensive democracy and the United States should apply it to the Republican Party and its “Make America Great Again” or “MAGA” movement as soon as it is feasible.

Today, the term MAGA is indistinguishable from the terms “Nazi” or “Klan.”

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

New York Times, Bob Woodward Thought Jeff Bezos Had His Back. Now He Feels Disillusioned, Peter Baker, Oct. 26, 2026. Six takeaways from a new memoir by Mr. Woodward, the star Washington Post reporter, including his disappointment with the newspaper’s billionaire owner.

When Bob Woodward, the veteran star Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, was about to publish a hard-hitting book about President Trump in 2018, he called the owner of his newspaper, Jeff Bezos, to warn him.

“Don’t worry, I have your back, Bob,” Mr. Bezos told him. “I’ll always have your back.”

“Always” turned out not to be as long as it used to be, Mr. Woodward now says he discovered. After more than a half-century breaking stories about Washington, one of the scoops in Mr. Woodward’s new memoir is his own breakup in all but name with Mr. Bezos, who in his view turned out to not have the backs of the journalists working for him, after all.

Instead, Mr. Woodward writes, Mr. Bezos has been “compromising public trust in The Washington Post’s aggressive and independent journalism” in deference to Mr. Trump. While he says Mr. Bezos has not interfered in news stories, Mr. Woodward writes that the billionaire owner’s sweeping staff cuts, reorientation of the editorial page and personal ingratiation to the president have betrayed the legacy of a newspaper known for courageous coverage.

The condemnation of Mr. Bezos by his most famous employee is one of the headlines from “Secrets,” the long-awaited memoir of his 55 years in journalism to be published Nov. 24 by Mr. Woodward, who still holds the title of associate editor at the paper.

A copy of the memoir was obtained by The New York Times. Here are six takeaways:He names sources.

For decades, Mr. Woodward guarded the identity of the sources of his blockbuster stories and best selling books. But now, he finally names names. Many of his early sources have died, and he received permission from others still alive to identify them.

While W. Mark Felt, the former deputy F.B.I. director, unmasked himself in 2005 as the famous Watergate source called Deep Throat, much of Washington will pore through this new book to learn who else talked. It turns out that lots of people did, including presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, spymasters, Supreme Court justices and F.B.I. agents.

Mr. Woodward discloses for the first time his sources for one of the most iconic scenes he ever reported, a moment shortly before Richard M. Nixon resigned because of Watergate, when the sobbing president asked Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to fall to his knees and pray with him.

The sources, the book now reveals, were two of Mr. Kissinger’s lieutenants, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence S. Eagleburger. While neither was present for the scene, Mr. Kissinger described it to them shortly afterward and the two then listened in on the phone when Mr. Nixon called Mr. Kissinger to ask him not to tell anyone he had cried.

Mr. Woodward also describes lengthy conversations with two of Mr. Nixon’s own lawyers, J. Fred Buzhardt Jr. and Leonard Garment, neither of whom seemed to hold their client in high regard. “He flat out lies,” Mr. Buzhardt told Mr. Woodward. Mr. Garment separately told Mr. Woodward that Mr. Nixon was “a very strange man, very strange” and “guilty of misdemeanors.” By not destroying his secret Oval Office tapes, Mr. Nixon was “letting America into the toilet of his mind,” Mr. Garment said. “The impeachable offense was letting us all see.”

The new memoir also describes Mr. Woodward’s closeness with Richard G. Darman, a key Republican official under multiple presidents who became both one of his best sources and best friends. As excerpted in The New Yorker, the conflict ultimately led to a rupture after Mr. Woodward published a harsh series on President George H.W. Bush’s economic policies shortly before the 1992 election, based in part on Mr. Darman’s descriptions.He took a document from a groggy clerk.

One of Mr. Woodward’s earliest books was “The Brethren,” a penetrating look inside the normally secretive chambers of the Supreme Court, written with Scott Armstrong, that stunned the legal world and beyond. For years, lawyers and judges wondered how Mr. Woodward got inside one of the most tightly guarded institutions in Washington.

In “Secrets,” Mr. Woodward discloses the names of five justices who spoke with the authors, all of whom have since died: Potter Stewart, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Byron R. White, Harry A. Blackmun and William H. Rehnquist. And he describes how he obtained one of the documents that informed the book: a secret history of the Nixon Watergate tapes case, which revealed the internal debate among the justices over how to rule.

He went to the home of Steven P. Goldberg, who was a clerk to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and had authored the case history, but refused to give it to Mr. Woodward. The reporter convinced him to instead read it to him, which Mr. Goldberg proceeded to do. But it was long and Mr. Woodward took his time scribbling down notes. Finally, an exhausted Mr. Goldberg nodded off.

Mr. Woodward waited 20 minutes so that Mr. Goldberg would reach a deep sleep. He decided not to simply take the document — “that seemed a little too far, even for me” — so he nudged Mr. Goldberg and simply told him that he would borrow it and bring it back the next morning. The groggy clerk stirred and mumbled his assent. Mr. Woodward wrote that he did his best not to race out the door with the document. “If I was on a security camera I wanted to be behaving properly, with whatever might be left of my dignity,” he writes.Supreme Court justices revealed candid views.

Mr. Woodward also writes about encounters with more recent justices. He reports that his wife, Elsa Walsh, a former journalist for The Post and The New Yorker, sat next to former Justice Stephen G. Breyer at a dinner and he told her that he was “forced out” to make way for someone younger on the court.

He also recalls running into Justice Elena Kagan at a Washington party in 2023. Justice Kagan expressed admiration for “The Brethren” and Mr. Woodward noted that the main point was how the ideological center of the court in that era dominated. “Yes, I prefer it that way,” Justice Kagan said. “That’s exactly what it should be.”

When he asked her if she was happy on the court, Justice Kagan said no, she was not, given the situation.His investigative instincts started close to home.

For all his fame, Mr. Woodward is known in Washington as something of a closed door himself. He loves talking about reporting and politics, but has generally been reticent about his personal life. While this book, his 24th, is not exactly an exercise in introspection, at age 83 he finally opens up at least a bit more than he has done in public.

He recounts growing up in a broken home in Wheaton, Ill. He caught his mother kissing another man and then discovered that his parents were getting divorced when he rummaged through his father’s sock drawer and found a private letter. He writes that he “learned at a very young age the pain of secrets and how they can destroy lives and started down a path of trying to find them.”

Mr. Woodward also writes that a fire gutted his home as a child, leaving him so anxious to this day that he keeps multiple fire extinguishers throughout his Washington home. He describes finding a way as a young Navy officer to get out of a deployment to Vietnam, only to learn later that the man who went instead ended up dying. And he recalls falling out with his Watergate partner Carl Bernstein during the writing of their second book, “The Final Days,” and how it took years to repair the friendship.He takes on some journalistic controversies.

Mr. Woodward addresses some of the controversies of his career. He insists that, despite denials and doubts, he did get into a hospital room to see a dying William J. Casey, the C.I.A. director in the 1980s — he was let in, he writes, by a security agent he had befriended. He publishes images of the notes that he took quoting Mr. Casey acknowledging a role in the Iran-contra affair by saying, “I believed.”

By contrast, he accepts blame for “my spectacular failure” as an editor in publishing a fabricated story by the Post reporter Janet Cooke about what turned out to be a fictional 8-year-old heroin addict. That incident convinced him “that I was not cut out to be an editor.”He is ‘pained’ that Bezos remains silent about Trump’s attacks on the press

One of the other mistakes in judgment Mr. Woodward acknowledges was his faith in Mr. Bezos. “I remember feeling relief when Jeff decided to buy The Post in 2013,” he writes. “I believed at the time that Bezos would provide the finances for The Post to continue to operate courageously.”

But his views began to change in 2024, when Mr. Bezos decided just before the election to pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris and declare that The Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates. “At the time, I thought, is he not reading his own newspaper or my books about Trump?” Mr. Woodward writes. The timing made it look “like Bezos and the newspaper were capitulating to Trump.”

Mr. Bezos then shifted the opinion pages to only advocate “personal liberties and free markets” with no dissenting views. “I could only imagine the agony this kind of decision would have caused Kay or Ben,” he adds, referring to Katharine Graham and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the publisher and executive editor during Watergate.

He came to believe that the “benefit of the doubt” that he had given Mr. Bezos was unwarranted. While he notes that The Post continues to produce aggressive coverage of Mr. Trump, Mr. Woodward laments that Mr. Bezos has not publicly defended independent journalism against the president’s campaign of intimidation the way that A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, has. “It pains me that Jeff Bezos has remained silent,” he writes. “It is not too late for media owners to prioritize moral courage over financial gain.”

A representative of Mr. Bezos did not respond to a request for comment. Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said that he appreciated Mr. Woodward’s praise for the paper’s recent coverage and added that Mr. Bezos had never interfered in news reporting.

“With Jeff’s backing, the company is getting back in shape and poised for our best decade,” he said in a statement. “More than that, the Woodwards and Bernsteins of today are breaking consequential stories that have people talking about us in a way they haven’t in years, with total independence and encouragement from our owner.” 

Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics, News and Comment: Pope Leo’s Mar-a-Lago Bishop Rebukes Trump’s Oval Office Photo Op, Christopher Hale, above, Oct. 26, 2026. Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez says the Church backs no candidate, and Kansas City’s archbishop disowned his predecessor’s visit. Sources in Rome say the Vatican wants more bishops to follow.

The dam has broken.

Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez of Palm Beach, whose diocese takes in President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, reminded his flock on Monday that the Catholic Church “does not endorse or support any political candidate or political party.” He never named the twelve bishops who prayed over Trump in the Oval Office last Thursday, and he did not have to.

“Such actions, when undertaken in the name of the Church, even in the form of ‘prayers’ or ‘blessings,’ are contrary to its nonpartisan mission and should be regarded solely as expressions of individual political preference,” Rodríguez wrote.

Look at the quotation marks he put around the word “prayers.” Coming from the bishop of Trump’s winter home, that bit of punctuation says more than a page of diplomatic regret.Pope Leo’s man in Palm Beach

Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez bishop of Palm Beach last December, choosing a Dominican-born pastor from Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens. It is the largest parish in the Diocese of Brooklyn, and migrants make up most of its 17,000 parishioners.

The Associated Press called him a staunch advocate for migrants on the day the Vatican announced the appointment. At his installation in February, he told the cathedral that “in the Church there are no foreigners or immigrants — only brothers and sisters,” crediting the line to both Pope Francis and Pope Leo.

So Leo sent a pastor of immigrants to shepherd the place where Trump spends his winter weekends. On Monday, that pastor spoke.Kansas City splits

Two more statements came out of Kansas City on Monday. Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Naumann, who stood behind Trump’s chair on Thursday, put the blame on the White House: his office said in a statement that “the bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public,” according to TIME.

His successor wanted no part of it. Archbishop Shawn McKnight told TIME that Naumann went “in his own individual capacity,” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”

American archbishops rarely put daylight between themselves and the men they replaced, least of all in print. McKnight did it on the record, eight days before an election.An evangelical script

Writing for Religion News Service, in a story America magazine carried on Friday, Claire Giangravé noted that the gathering echoed the prayer sessions Trump holds with his evangelical supporters. I think she has it exactly right.

In July 2017, evangelical pastors laid hands on Trump in the same room, in nearly the same pose. Paula White-Cain, whom one of those pastors credited with the idea, was standing in the Oval Office again on Thursday.

Evangelical preachers who have endorsed Trump turned that image into a campaign ritual years ago. Catholic bishops had no business borrowing it twelve days before a national election.The man who arranged it

Of all the threads in this story, the one that has drawn the least attention is the Heritage Foundation official at its center. Mario Enzler, a former Swiss Guard who now advises Heritage’s president, spent weeks inviting prelates to the Oval Office, The Pillar reported, and some turned him down because of how a prayer with Trump would look this close to an election.

As I wrote last week, his résumé does not hold up. The Houston Chronicle found that the Italian university where he claimed a doctorate does not grant one, and that the school listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school; he left his post as a business dean in Houston in 2022 after professors went to the board.

A man with that record brokered a moment of prayer between successors of the apostles and a president twelve days before an election, which is a corrosive thing for the Church to absorb. Golka never mentioned him, and Heritage now tells Religion News Service that Enzler “didn’t set anything up.”Why the dam broke

I have two updates on why bishops are moving now.

The first comes from Rome. Sources I have spoken with at the Vatican, and others connected to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made clear to me that the Holy See expected American bishops to start distancing the Church from the Oval Office photo. Last week, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops told me it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”

The second is impatience at home. According to my sources, frustration had been growing among brother bishops over the slow drip of statements from the twelve, and many wanted a cleaner break much sooner.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob’s apology, the first, arrived three days after the prayer (by then The Pillar had reported that USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley was “deeply frustrated”).

That frustration is what pushed bishops like Rodríguez, who never set foot in the Oval Office, to speak for themselves.The people of God are speaking

None of this happened in a vacuum. More than 2,500 of you have signed our letter asking the twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.

Four of the twelve have now spoken. Grob apologized on Sunday, and Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines said the White House exploited the meeting. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his own paper he never meant it as an endorsement, and Naumann has now pinned the photos on the White House.

The rest of the bishops on the White House’s list have said nothing at all, among them Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, Steven Raica of Birmingham, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, James Wall of Gallup, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite eparchy in Los Angeles. We will keep pressing every one of them.

Lay Catholics have a real stake in how their bishops act. As the people of God, our task is to walk alongside our shepherds and, when they stray, to hold them accountable to the flock they were sent to serve.

I am proud of every one of you who spoke up. I am also sorry to keep filling your inbox with this story, but the updates keep coming, and you deserve to have them.Eight days

Starting now, I am going to try my hardest to get back on program. The election is eight days away, and in this busy stretch I want to put the issues that matter, and the candidates who are running, at the front and center.

I have said this before. Next Tuesday, two names may sit side by side on your ballot, yet what we will really decide is our posterity, which is to say the future we hand to our children.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and with every shepherd who refuses to let a prayer

Oct. 25

Top Headlines

• New York Times, Live Updates: Brazil Re-Elects Lula, Rejecting Predecessor’s Son, Adam B. Ellick and Ana Ionova, Oct. 25, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, above, fended off a right-wing movement led by Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father was convicted of a coup attempt after the 2022 election. Transportation delays and bad weather disrupted Election Day.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 25, 2026. A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Tonight, in Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.

Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• 
  Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Some Additional Notes On The Early Vote, Simon Rosenberg,  right, Oct. 25, 2026. The big news so far is the incredible turnout surge we are seeing with Hispanic/Latino voters across the country.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones, News and Comment: Todd Blanche Gets Destroyed By CBS On Alaska Senate Race Lawsuit, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Oct. 25, 2026. Attorney General Todd Blanche was on CBS’s Face The Nation, and host Margaret Brennan went right after him on the lawsuit related to the Alaska US Senate race.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Donald Trump's Grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).

• Wayne Madsen Report, Historical Commentary: A future Trump Treason Truth Commission needed, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.
• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump should be worried, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 24, 2026. At 7:15 tonight [Saturday], in the historic town of Perry, known as the place “Where Georgia Comes Together,” Donald Trump stood in front of a room full of his most devoted followers and said one of the most out-of-touch and offensive things a President of the United States has ever said.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• Katie Phang, Analysis and Opinion: It’s The Trump DOJ’s Turn to Confess, Katie Phang,Oct. 25, 2026. The Catholic Church Is Naming Names. Why Won't the Trump DOJ?

More Global News

• New York Times, Serbia’s Longtime Strongman Concedes Defeat in Parliamentary Election, Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva, Oct. 25, 2026. “It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Aleksandar Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating his opponents.
• New York Times, Four Ways Israel’s Election Could End. Eventually, Aaron Boxerman and Josh Holder, Oct. 25, 2026 (interactive). Determining the winner could take weeks. Here’s how one side could gain power in Israel’s electoral system.

More On U.S. History, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 24, 2026 [U.S. Stock Markets Black Friday in 1929, Revisited], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”

Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.

Top Headlines

New York Times, Live Updates: Brazil Re-Elects Lula, Rejecting Predecessor’s Son, Adam B. Ellick and Ana Ionova, Oct. 25, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fended off a right-wing movement led by Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father was convicted of a coup attempt after the 2022 election. Transportation delays and bad weather disrupted Election Day.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil surged to re-election on Sunday, according to official preliminary results, delivering a rebuke to a conservative movement sweeping Latin American presidencies that President Trump has trumpeted.

Mr. Lula fended off a challenge from Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the last president who had attempted a coup four years ago, after a judge on Brazil’s electoral court ordered that polls remain open two extra hours because of transportation delays and bad weather. The chaotic ending raised the prospect of a contested result; Mr. Bolsonaro said that flooding in a part of the country where he held electoral advantages would unfairly hurt him, while Mr. Lula accused public officials of purposefully slowing down public transportation in areas where he won in an earlier round of voting.

Numerous poll workers nationwide said they received confusing and sometimes contradictory orders from electoral authorities. At a polling site in central São Paulo, one election worker said that by 5 p.m. local time, she and her colleagues heard that the Supreme Court had ordered polling sites to remain open two more hours. However, local authorities ordered them to shut down. The worker, who gave her name only as Bárbara because she feared repercussions, said they eventually got orders to reopen by 6 p.m., but it was too late for many voters.

New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 25, 2026. A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.

Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.

Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.

In doing so, Mr. Trump harnessed the power of the federal government to try to interfere in the voting process before Election Day — essentially trying to nullify an opponent’s potential win before the game has been called.

Even for a president who worked to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election, the anticipatory strike reflects a new intensification of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use his official powers to achieve the election results he wants — one that undermines the democratic process, according to election and legal experts. While they say the administration’s lawsuit is unlikely to be successful, the tactic could still further Mr. Trump’s goals by shaking the confidence of voters in the outcome of the race.

“This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” said Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development who has studied election issues around the world, including in El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the D.O.J. and it’s been weaponized.”

The latest phase of Mr. Trump’s strategy centers on the Justice Department, which asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.

The issue has already been litigated in the state: In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired elementary schoolteacher, could appear on the ballot.

But Attorney General Todd Blanche maintained on Sunday that the federal government had a role in inserting itself into the process.

“We’re not saying that the federal government is going to decide who the next senator from Alaska is,” Mr. Blanche said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added: “But if it’s clear that there was confusion and that confusion led to an unjust, improper result that is not the will of the Alaskan voters, we want to make sure that the Alaskan system and the Alaskan state courts and the Alaskan electoral process can understand that in a way that lets them do the right thing.”

When asked for comment, the White House referred to an exchange Mr. Trump had with reporters on Saturday about his administration’s efforts to intervene in Alaska, a lawsuit he said was made at his direction. Republicans have asserted that the candidacy of the second Mr. Sullivan is a Democratic scheme to confuse voters. Democrats have said they have no connection to that candidate, who will appear on the ballot without any party affiliation and has said he is running a genuine campaign.

“It is a totally corrupt weaponization situation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it,” Mr. Trump said of the Democrats in Alaska. “So I recommended it to the D.O.J. They looked at it, they agreed with me, and they’ve gone to court. Let’s see what happens. But that’s pure corruption.”Election law specialists say Mr. Trump’s lawsuit in Alaska lacks legal basis and will likely fail. But that might not be the point.

The lawsuit is just one piece of a blitz of federal actions by the Trump administration to assert more control over the electoral process that have run into court challenges. Mr. Trump introduced a plan to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots, only to have it be blocked by the Supreme Court.

The administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to cede to the federal government’s demands to turn over voter rolls. The administration has lost 27 of those cases. The other cases are pending.

Mr. Trump has deployed homeland security investigators to find evidence of illegal voting in states where it has claimed without evidence there is widespread noncitizen voting. A federal judge restricted much of that effort this week.

But with each claim of election fraud, Mr. Trump is creating another platform to sow doubt about the elections and, some state officials and election experts worry, lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the specific contests.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026.  I did it. This morning, I finished my first ever marathon in 4 hours and 35 minutes. My legs are destroyed, and I cramped the entire second half, but I kept going, and I’ve never been prouder to cross a finish line. Thank you to everyone who sent good energy my way this morning. I felt it, especially around mile 20.

And what a day to finish. Tonight, in Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.

Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.

The next nine days will decide the direction of this country, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way. I have some big interviews coming this week that you won’t want to miss, daily coverage as the final stretch unfolds, and a major election night livestream on November 3rd with guests I can’t wait to share with you.

None of it is possible without you. I don’t have a corporate owner or a billionaire backer. This work runs on readers who believe in independent journalism. If you want to be part of what we’re building as we head into the most important week of the year, become a paid subscriber today. It’s the single most powerful way to make sure this reporting keeps reaching the people who need it, all the way to the finish line.Subscribed

Here’s what you need to know tonight.

Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat to a student-led protest movement, ending his more than decade-long grip on power in a historic election. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” Vucic said Sunday, projecting the students would take between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament to his party’s 105. A representative sample by pollsters showed the student list winning 138 seats to 104 for Vucic’s party. Turnout hit nearly 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, with long lines snaking from polling stations across the country. The vote followed almost two years of student-led protests against corruption and creeping authoritarianism, sparked when a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024, killing 16 people. Belgrade’s streets erupted in celebration, with cars honking and students chanting “victory” and “he’s done,” as one celebrating woman said, “We have finally got rid of this mafia.”

Brazil’s Supreme Court extended voting by two hours in the razor-close presidential runoff between President Lula and far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s campaign requested the extension citing “incidents” affecting buses in several states, while Bolsonaro’s campaign also asked for more time in areas hit by heavy rain, and polls will now close at 6 p.m. ET. Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, beat Lula by 2.2 million votes in the first round, turning the 80-year-old president into the underdog as voters across Latin America shift right amid concerns over crime, corruption, and the cost of living. The race may hinge on women, who make up 53 percent of voters and favor Lula 49 percent to 40 percent, and on turnout, after one in five eligible voters stayed home in the first round. Trump said Sunday he is “monitoring” the election and has praised Bolsonaro, though he hasn’t formally endorsed him. A Bolsonaro win would pull Latin America’s largest economy closer to the Trump administration, while a narrow result could test Brazil’s stability after Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to overturn his 2022 defeat led to the Jan. 8, 2023, attacks on government institutions.

The Bottom Is Falling Out for Republicans as Trump’s Own Words Drag Down His Party

Trump told a Georgia rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans paying more at the pump, bragging that the U.S. is “making a freaking fortune” off high oil prices. “We’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, but my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher,” Trump said Saturday. He predicted the headlines would say he was bragging about money while people suffer at the pump, then added, “I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.” The remarks came as inflation rose to 3.7 percent in September, hotter than expected, and consumer sentiment sits near the lowest point on record. “Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded, while former Obama adviser David Axelrod quipped it was “not a great closing message.” New Yorker writer Susan Glasser called it “the epigraph for the entire Trump 2.0 presidency.”

Republicans’ own internal polling shows the bottom falling out in seats that were once considered safe. GOP leaders received polling in late September showing that districts Trump won by 10 points or more in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere are now competitive, and all three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa look likely to fall, according to Politico. Even longtime incumbents who haven’t faced serious races in years, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, are now at risk. “I think the scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is,” one senior House Republican said. Their worst fear is that white working-class voters, angry over fuel prices and the Iran war, won’t just stay home but will vote for Democrats. Arkansas Rep. French Hill, whose deep-red seat is now a Democratic target, blamed “President Trump’s lack of favorability at the top.” Democrats say they’re confident of winning the House and could reach as many as 240 seats.

Election analysts say Trump himself is the reason, warning of a “red undertow” that could sink Republicans in both chambers. Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said rising prices, tariffs, and the Iran war all hit at once just as voters started paying attention: “It was almost like the bottom fell out suddenly.” He said the coming wave “isn’t pro-Democrat. It’s anti-Trump,” predicting Democrats will flip 20 or more House seats and likely four Senate seats, enough to take both chambers. A New York Times poll this week showed Democrats leading by 11 points, with Trump’s approval at a new low. Early voting data also shows Democrats and independents far more energized than Republicans. And Trump’s own past attacks appear to be backfiring: after spending months calling mail-in voting fraudulent, he’s now frantically urging Republicans to vote early by mail.

Obama Hammers Trump Over the Iran War as Trump Fumes Over Obama’s Crowds

Obama blasted Trump for starting an unnecessary war with Iran, arguing he had already kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons without firing a shot. “Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, because I put a deal in place that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes,” Obama said in Cleveland. “And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it; I just had to engage in diplomacy.” Trump withdrew from that 2015 deal in his first term, then launched strikes on Iran alongside Israel in late February, promising a quick operation that has now dragged on for nearly eight months. “So seven months later, how’s that war going?” Obama asked, noting that 21 Americans have been killed, 865 wounded, missile stockpiles depleted, and Iran now holds “veto power” over the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the price of oil, diesel, and “just about everything.” The war has become a liability for Republicans, with a new AP-NORC poll finding 56 percent of Republican voters and 47 percent of Democratic voters say ending it should be a top priority for the next Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton now leads Vivek Ramaswamy 50 percent to 43 percent in a Marist poll taken before his controversial ad aired, and Sherrod Brown leads Sen. Jon Husted 48 percent to 44 percent.

Trump lashed out over the size of Obama’s Detroit rally, complaining that the media “never” talks about his crowds. Obama rallied Saturday in Detroit with Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson on the first day of in-person early voting in the state. Speaking at a rally in Georgia that night, Trump mocked the turnout: “A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd.” He referred to El-Sayed as “Mohamed,” a name drawn from the candidate’s middle name that Trump has repeatedly used against him. Trump then revived an old grievance about Sen. Bernie Sanders, claiming Sanders drew “like 900 to 1,000 people” while he drew tens of thousands. In reality, Sanders’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew an estimated 36,000 people in Los Angeles and more than 34,000 in Denver last year. He attacked Obama on Truth Social too:

Musk Doubles Down on Ukraine Starlink Cuts as Kyiv Fires Back and Pentagon Hands SpaceX Sensitive Military Data

Elon Musk is defending his decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starlink, lashing out at critics as “bloodthirsty warmongers” and agreeing that Zelensky “needs to go.” In a string of posts Saturday night into Sunday, Musk said Ukraine violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes, writing, “We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed.” He warned that if Starlink were switched off, “the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately,” adding, “This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.” Musk accused his critics of wanting the war to continue “until every last man in Ukraine has died in a ditch,” and when one user wrote that Zelensky needs to go, Musk replied, “Yes.” Until this weekend, neither Musk nor the U.S. government had taken responsibility for the cuts, with Musk previously insisting that limits were “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Earlier this month, Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev hailed Musk’s attacks on Zelensky as a “tipping point” in the war. Today, he celebrated Musk again:

Ukraine flatly denies Musk’s claim, saying it would have been physically impossible to use commercial Starlink the way he described. “It’s very strange that Elon Musk doesn’t know about the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov, noting that Starlink doesn’t work over Russian territory, so Ukraine “PHYSICALLY CANNOT USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK” for deep or mid-range strikes. A former drone adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry said any drone mission requiring satellite links had to run through Starshield, the U.S. government-controlled military version, and that Ukraine “did not violate the terms of use.” Ukrainian officials say the cuts capped Starshield at about 100 miles per hour, hampering their ability to shoot down Russian drones and forcing them to cancel operations. The restrictions came as Trump struck a diesel deal with Russia, waived sanctions, and called for Ukraine to get a new president, and coincided with an interruption in U.S. intelligence warnings of incoming Russian attacks. Zelensky has said he believes both Trump and Musk were involved.

Russia pounded Ukraine as the satellite fight played out, and Kyiv is now racing to build its own system so it never depends on Musk again. Zelensky said Russia launched about 1,600 guided bombs, 48 missiles, and nearly 2,300 attack drones at Ukraine in the past week alone, killing and injuring people almost every day. Ukraine’s defense ministry has partnered with Nokia and Finnish satellite firm ICEYE to develop a “sovereign” Starlink-style network built on European technology. “We must all rely on capabilities that we can control,” Zelensky said. A security analyst told NBC News that Musk’s control over Starlink gives him “enormous leverage,” which is exactly why Europe is pushing to build independent space infrastructure. This isn’t the first time: Reuters reported last year that Musk ordered a 2022 Starlink disruption during a pivotal Ukrainian counteroffensive, which SpaceX called inaccurate.

At the same time, the Pentagon has handed SpaceX access to sensitive military space-tracking data, raising new national security and conflict-of-interest concerns. The Space Force gave SpaceX “enhanced” access to U.S. Space Command’s most detailed catalog of objects in orbit, a first for any commercial company, including radar tracking data on objects as small as about 4 inches. The data has been closely held because it could expose the limits of U.S. defense capabilities used to monitor other countries’ satellites. Critics say it gives Musk an edge over competitors and moves toward privatizing space traffic control, after Musk’s DOGE fired much of the staff at the federal program meant to handle it and the administration twice tried to defund it. “It’s like giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights,” said a former employee of that program. Public Citizen said Musk “has bought his way into the favor of President Trump,” and his “political investment is paying off very, very handsomely.”

Other news:

The Trump administration has pushed 13 percent of Americans off food stamps, forcing more families to turn to food banks or go hungry. SNAP enrollment fell from 41.6 million in July 2025, before Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, according to USDA data. The law expanded work requirements to people ages 18 to 64 without children under 14, up from 18 to 54, and shifted more administrative costs onto states, with Arizona’s enrollment plunging 50 percent. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called it “a pretty big win” to “move 5 million people off of food stamps,” but advocates say job data doesn’t show people are leaving for work, with the economy adding just 776,000 jobs from January 2025 to September 2026. Food banks report empty shelves, Michigan’s food helpline was forced to suspend service after calls tripled, and 26 Houston schools lost eligibility to serve free meals to all students. “If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the SNAP program,” said one anti-hunger advocate.

White House staffers are publicly floating Nicki Minaj as Trump’s next press secretary, days after Katie Zacharia was fired after just five days on the job. Communications Director Steven Cheung shared a video of the rapper praising Trump’s foreign policy aboard Air Force One, writing, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary!” The official White House account replied with an “eyeballs” emoji, and Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz chimed in, “Hey Barbz, what do we think about this idea??” Minaj responded with an American flag and a nervous-laughter emoji, while posting her own video marveling at the inside of Air Force One. It’s unclear whether the White House is seriously considering her, but the episode comes as the administration scrambles to fill the role amid a string of staffing embarrassments. Minaj, who last month urged young fans to vote Republican, is set to appear alongside Trump at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, Sunday evening.

Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado has returned to Venezuela after nearly a year in exile, despite reported opposition from the Trump administration. “I’m here. With you,” the opposition leader posted Sunday, with footage showing her surrounded by supporters at a church in Barquisimeto. Machado left Venezuela last December to accept her Nobel Prize, weeks before the U.S. seized Nicolás Maduro, and has reportedly made more than half a dozen failed attempts to return since. Many expected Trump to back Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have won the 2024 election, but he instead embraced Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who now governs a country widely seen as a U.S. protectorate. The Trump administration reportedly opposed Machado’s return, fearing it would complicate its relationship with Rodríguez, her political archrival. Asked about it Sunday, Trump said, “She gave me her Nobel prize, so how can I say anything else? I hope she’s safe.”

The Southwest is bracing for more flooding after days of heavy rain forced evacuations and rooftop rescues. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for much of the Four Corners region, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet, even as swollen rivers begin to recede. The home of San Juan County, New Mexico, Sheriff Shane Ferrari took on about four feet of water. County officials say floodwaters left behind mud and silt contaminated with sewage after failures at waste plants, and power outages could last several more days. “It’s a pretty active disaster zone,” a county spokesperson said. “We’re not on the downswing by any means.” The flooding follows two months of on-and-off heavy rain from tropical Pacific moisture, ending a summer of drought.

A Cornell fraternity member is asking a judge to dismiss him from Jane Doe’s gang-rape lawsuit. Diego Sarabia, one of seven men originally sued over the alleged assault at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024, denies the allegations and says the claims against him were filed too late. His attorney argued that as far as Sarabia is concerned, “this is essentially a lawsuit about a forced kiss,” and that the complaint doesn’t allege he supplied drugs or took part in the alleged sexual assaults. Doe accuses him of grabbing her face, kissing her, and snorting ketamine off her body with other fraternity members. The local district attorney declined to bring charges in 2024, but Gov. Kathy Hochul called that review inadequate and appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor, a move two of the accused men are now trying to block. Cornell has also hired former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to lead an independent review of how the university handles sexual assault.

Bulgaria is voting for president in an election dominated by economic hardship and Russian drone attacks on Black Sea shipping. The race is the first major test for Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s Moscow-friendly Progressive Bulgaria party, which won parliamentary elections in April. Incumbent President Iliana Yotova, backed by Radev’s party, leads polls with 40 to 45 percent and favors improved relations with Russia and lifting sanctions. Her main challenger, pro-Western former caretaker Prime Minister Andrey Gyurov, polls at 25 to 30 percent and signed a security agreement with Ukraine during his time in office. With 27 candidates and turnout expected below 40 percent, a Nov. 1 runoff is likely, where Gyurov could gain ground. Recent drone strikes on commercial vessels off Bulgaria’s coast have heightened security fears in the NATO and EU member country.

Twelve people, including six children, were injured in a shooting near Florida A&M University’s stadium during homecoming weekend. The shooting broke out around 8 p.m. Saturday near Bragg Memorial Stadium in Tallahassee, after the historically Black university’s homecoming football game. Eleven people were shot, three with serious injuries, including one minor, and the youngest victim is just 11 years old. Police believe a single shooter was involved in what they called “an isolated incident between two or three individuals,” but no arrests have been made. Tallahassee’s police chief praised officers who ran in not knowing where the shooter was, some carrying victims in their arms because vehicles couldn’t get through the crowd. Police are asking witnesses to come forward.

A bus crash in Kenya killed at least 22 people on the same highway where 17 died just three weeks ago. The bus collided with a truck on the main highway linking Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa on Sunday morning, injuring 24 others. The passengers were returning to Mombasa after attending the funeral of their church pastor in western Kenya. One survivor said a truck hit the bus from behind, causing it to roll, while transport authorities suspect improper overtaking led to a head-on collision. “I don’t know the fate of my two children who were on the bus,” said one mother who survived. Speeding and poor road conditions have long contributed to deadly crashes in Kenya.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Some Additional Notes On The Early Vote, Simon Rosenberg,  right, Oct. 25, 2026. The big news so far is the incredible turnout surge we are seeing with Hispanic/Latino voters across the country.

We are nine days out, tens of millions of people have voted, and I wanted to go a little more in depth in what we are seeing in the early vote and what it might mean for the election itself. Consider this more of a sketch than a complete painting for while there are things we can see in the data so far there is a lot that we just aren’t sure about yet.

But I want to be clear that looking at how people are voting in an election can tell you something about how people are voting in the election!

What follows has been put together from the TargetEarly early vote data, recent polling, Exit Polls from over the years, and my own experience in recent cycles analyzing the early vote and elections. I warn you in advance it is data rich and might be confusing for folks, as admittedly, it is even a bit confusing for me right now.

First, here’s where the national early vote stands today via TargetEarly’s noon update. We are up 2 points over 2022, 11 points over 2024, and turnout is running higher than 2022 when the early vote was 50% of the total vote (in 2024 it was 54% of the total). This is good.

We also know that Democrats are voting less by mail this time - as we hoped - which means more of our vote will come in person this time. This meaningful change in how people are voting makes it a bit harder to make cycle to cycle comparisons, particularly in states without a lot of in-person voting so far.

One of the things that makes interpreting the early vote challenging is there is a lot of unaffiliated or independent vote in the data. We also don’t know how partisans themselves are voting for we only know whether someone has voted not how they’ve voted. We do know from polling that our candidates are doing well with independent voters and even some Republicans, so our 2026 vote is almost certainly more Democratic than top line Democrat and Republican totals suggest. Let’s look a little deeper at the independent vote this time.

First, note that in many polls these past few weeks the vote intent of independents is as high as Republicans, which shows a lot of motivation among independent voters. In other words, they are pissed. This is new data from CBS:Image

We know Trump’s job approval is terrible among independent voters but we also know that indies are favoring us this cycle at a much higher rate than recent elections. Here’s a summary of recent polls of the generic ballot among independent voters:Image

Using +19 Dem as an estimate here’s how that would compare to other recent elections. Big yikes for the Rs:Image

This means that any of the data you see about the early vote in 2026 using just the Dem and GOP registration or modeled party is likely to be more Democratic than top line data you are seeing. Some of our vote is hiding in the independent column this cycle.

Next, as we’ve been discussing we know now that young people, Blacks, and Hispanics are voting at much higher rates this time than 2022. Here’s the latest summary from the noon TargetEarly release:

While the data bounces around from update to update it has been remarkably consistent. So more young people, Blacks, and Hispanics are voting. What do we know about how they are likely to vote, particularly given our struggles in 2024? Let’s look.

Without going through all the math and sourcing of the data (for time and space reasons) I took recent polling of young people, Blacks, and Hispanics and compared it to the historic performance of each group. First, young people:

Next, Blacks:

Next, Hispanics:

So what this data tells us is that not only are more young people, Blacks, and Hispanics voting than in 2022 but in each case the vote will be more Dem than in 2022 and certainly more than 2024. So more votes, higher Dem share = lots more Dem votes this time. That’s good, everyone.

Finally, the Dem performance that we can track by state varies wildly from state to state this year, making it hard to assert broad trends. Some of this is a data issue, as states without party registration are just harder to see into even with the “Modeled Party” capacity of TargetEarly. So what I’m going to share now are states where the data is very clear that we are performing incredibly well, and remember the swing of indies to us gives us a bit more vote in each place.

Georgia. Ds are running 6 points over 2022, and 17 points above 2024. Turnout is keeping pace with 2022.

Kansas. Dems are running 15 points higher than 2022, and 20 points higher than 2024. Overall turnout is also running way, way above 2022:

Nebraska. Dems are running 10 points higher than 2022 and 9 points higher than 2024. Turnout is also running ahead of 2022:

North Carolina. Dems are running 13 points ahead of 2022, and 22 points ahead of 2024. Turnout is also running way, way above 2022. Anderson Clayton is kicking ass!

The Daily with Sarah Jones, News and Comment: Todd Blanche Gets Destroyed By CBS On Alaska Senate Race Lawsuit, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Oct. 25, 2026. Attorney General Todd Blanche was on CBS’s Face The Nation, and host Margaret Brennan went right after him on the lawsuit related to the Alaska US Senate race.

Brennan asked, “It seems you already are taking action up in Alaska. Just for our audience to understand, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot there. There's the incumbent senator, a Republican, Dan S. Sullivan, and then there's a challenger there, Dan J. Sullivan. The Justice Department is suing Alaska preemptively to block the certification of the results if Senator Sullivan loses. Now, President Trump was asked about this lawsuit. He said quote, "I'm the one that said do it." Who did he tell to do this? Did he tell you to do this?”

Blanche answered:

Well, first of all, let me correct you, okay. You describe facts that were just simply either at best misleading, but really a lie to your viewers. It is not two Dan Sullivans, one an incumbent and one running. That's not true. The head of the Alaska Election Commission, not- not President Trump, not me, has said that the second Dan Sullivan is running solely to confuse voters, solely to pull votes away from the incumbent senator.

Okay, so that is something that we're dealing with. It's not just two Dan Sullivans running on the ballot in Alaska. That is not true. And second, President Trump has been talking about what a travesty this is for many, many, many months, and the Department of Justice has been looking at it for many, many, many months, as we should under federal law.

And you saw what we did earlier this week- late last week. And it was not- it's not to let the federal government take over the Alaska system of selecting their next senator or certifying who's going to be senator. It's asking the court to step in where the Alaska Supreme Court didn't, which is to look at federal law, and if necessary, to allow a process for Alaska to decide who should be who should be certified as a winner.

Brennan was ready and came with receipts.Margaret Brennan Showed Viewers Alaska’s Ballot

Brennan said, “Well, the Alaska Supreme Court did uphold lower court's ruling on this matter. They found the assertion that Mr. Sullivan seeks to confuse or misguide voters is not supported by preponderance of evidence. The Alaska Supreme Court did take on this matter. I also want to show our viewers what the ballot will look like. We have a picture of it.”

Video:

Blanche tried to argue that the Alaska Supreme Court ruling was only about state law, so Brennan reminded him of how elections operate in the United States, “In this country, the states administer the elections- this is how the state came up with the issue and how to handle any confusion. Our viewers are seeing it right now. It's ranked choice voting.”

Brennan later added, “It's on the screen. It says Dan S. Sullivan is listed as the incumbent. Why is that- it says incumbent. Why is that not sufficient?”

Blanche admitted that he didn’t know if it was sufficent of not, but the DOJ thought that it would cause confusion for voters.

Brennan asked Blanche why the DOJ filed this suit 11 days before the election, and Blanche didn’t have a good answer.

Brennan asked, “What right does the federal government have telling a state not to certify or how to certify?”

Blanche couldn’t answer that question either.

The final question is key.

The federal government has no role in elections, so it can’t tell a state how or not to certify an election, and that is why any and all lawsuits that the Trump DOJ files or may file in relation to election certification will fail.

The new Congress will decide how to seat its new members. Trump and the DOJ have no role, and the weakness of the Alaska lawsuit was exposed by Margaret Brennan asking basic questions about why the Trump administration is trying to go outside the lines of our election system.

This interview did not go well for Blanche, and it is only going to get worse if Trump keeps having the DOJ file lawsuits.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Donald Trump's Grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).

Wayne Madsen Report, Historical Commentary: A future Trump Treason Truth Commission needed, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump should be worried, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 24, 2026. At 7:15 tonight [Saturday], in the historic town of Perry, known as the place “Where Georgia Comes Together,” Donald Trump stood in front of a room full of his most devoted followers and said one of the most out-of-touch and offensive things a President of the United States has ever said.

After being introduced at this latest rally by country music singer Jason Aldean, a man whose marriage reportedly ended not too long after he was seen kissing a woman in her 20s who was over a decade younger than he was at the time, while still married to his high school sweetheart, Donald Trump slapped his upper right thigh and used both hands to pull himself up the stairs.

Once on stage, he embraced Aldean, whispered into his ear, and then began speaking with a hoarse voice. At one point, he appeared to forget why he was even giving this rally when he went on a tirade about how it is fine for Americans to suffer through high gas prices because American oil companies are making “hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars.”

His whole explanation was even worse. He started by acknowledging high oil prices, saying: “And while oil prices are temporarily high and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time, as soon as that war is over, because there’s so much oil all in the Hormuz Strait.”

Then he jumped straight to the truth, calling the candidates he was there to campaign for monsters: “The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. So I said, I wonder if I should say this. I’d like a little advice from my two people, my two big monsters that are going to do so well. They’re going to be the biggest stars in the country in a week.”

He was talking about the enormous profits being made by oil and gas companies while everyday Americans are facing an affordability crisis. He was so excited to share just how much money his friends and enablers are making that he decided to ignore the warning about how terrible it would sound to the millions of Americans struggling to afford gasoline.

After that, he went into a deeper explanation about how oil companies were making all of this money because of the war in the Middle East: “So, our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East because they’re coming to Texas and they’re coming to Oklahoma and they’re coming to Louisiana and they’re taking that oil. They’re making hundreds of billions of dollars, our country is, on oil.”

The President of the United States was trying to twist a global fuel crisis that was caused by the war he started in Iran into a net positive for the American people who are actively suffering because billionaires are getting richer. He tried to convince us that the war is actually good for the economy, even as people struggle to afford basic necessities like groceries, housing, and gasoline. He thought he could really convince the American people that record corporate profits were somehow a sign of economic prosperity for everyone, as though they were benefiting the families who are paying more every time they fill up their cars.

“And then on top of it, we have Venezuela and we have Greenland because Greenland has a lot of oil. So we’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. But my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir, because people are paying a little higher.’ That number is going to come way down. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before.”

Greenland is not ours, and neither is Venezuela. Maybe he has convinced himself that they are, but their people would beg to differ with him. His own advisers, according to Trump himself, had warned him not to brag about the money being made by these oil companies while Americans were paying higher prices. But he does not care about people suffering or how his comments could be received, especially so close to the midterms.

“So I said, Let me say it very gingerly, very softly. Because somebody would say the fake news he’s bragging about making money while people are suffering at the you know because you know you’re still paying lower than Biden and Obama and they don’t have nuclear weapons but they’re going to be coming.”

He is absolutely right that this will be something the news covers, and for good reason. He has lost all touch with reality and the ability to control his words. Actually saying this and expecting anyone other than his sycophants to believe that this is somehow good news is beyond absurd. And then shifting the blame to Biden and Obama all these years later makes absolutely no sense. But what was perfectly clear was that he understood exactly what he was doing. He knew that Americans were suffering because of high gas prices, and he knew that bragging about oil companies making enormous profits would make him look terrible. And he did it anyway.

“No, I could just see the fake headlines. President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump. That’ll be the headline. But I said I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time, and those pump prices are going to come down.”

He got that exactly right. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Right after those last few words, he went straight back to reading from his teleprompter.

What he said about oil companies and the money they are making might be the thing that gets the most people talking, but he said something else that was even more disturbing. Deeper into his speech, Donald Trump told the audience, and those watching from home, exactly how he plans to use the power of the presidency against any state that dares to elect someone he doesn’t like. “There’s a big difference when a president, president has a lot of power,” he said. Then he acted out an imaginary phone call from Georgia’s Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, who is up for re-election and whom he loves calling Peewee Herman: “Sir, Peewee Herman’s on. Tell him I’m not in. I’m not in. But he needs money for Georgia. I don’t give a damn what he wants. I’m not in.”

He even stopped to admit that he probably shouldn’t be saying that because people would say it wasn’t appropriate, and then he said the rest of it anyway: “When other people call me, I’m terrible. I’m just terrible.” What we all know, and the President seems to forget, is that he isn’t really talking about Jon Ossoff when he says that. He is talking about hurting the very people in that room, and the others who voted for him, who will need help the next time a hurricane hits. They and the roughly 11 million people who live in Georgia, and who pay their taxes like everyone else, are the people who would suffer if he refused to send help. That money has never belonged to Donald Trump, yet he still stood there and acted like it was his to use to help or hurt those he likes or doesn’t like.

He also spent time bragging about sending the National Guard into American cities, describing the soldiers as “the best looking people you’ve ever seen,” and then told a very strange story about National Guard members who “happen to be very large people” going up to supposed gang members and saying to them, “Why are you guys here? Why you standing here? Don’t hit us because we will hit back. Really?” Then he told the audience that they “beat the sh*t out of them and they send them back to the countries from where they came.” Why he felt the need to tell what sounded like a made-up story about soldiers beating people on American streets and shipping them out of the country right before the elections is anyone’s guess. Maybe he is foreshadowing what he plans to do soon?

The rest of the rally was filled with more Trump absurdities. He told Jason Aldean, with his second wife sitting right there in the audience, “The day you stop selling records, she’s gone,” because he sees everything as transactional, even relationships, although he might be right on this one. He said, “You know, I know more about stone than any human being outside of Italy,” and he once again twisted the unrest in France into an attack on immigrants, claiming that “France is right now burning down because it opens its borders to people who hate it,” when the people marching there are protesting over teacher shortages and crumbling conditions in their schools, a movement that has since grown to include many of the same rising costs Americans are struggling with here. Each one of these absurd statements could pass for the ramblings of a man in mental decline, and they very well may be, but this is the President of the United States of America, who has access to nuclear weapons and the ability to start wars and send our military members into harm’s way.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.Subscribed

He has completely abandoned any and all restraint, and it raises the question of exactly what Donald Trump will do if Democrats take back Congress in ten days. This is one of my biggest concerns right now. Will there be another January 6 moment? Will he send another mob to storm the Capitol to stop the certification of another election his party lost?

I also keep asking myself whether he will lean on Mike Johnson to keep people from being seated, because we already know Johnson is willing. Remember last year, when Adelita Grijalva won her special election in Arizona in September, and Johnson wouldn’t allow her to take her oath for 50 days, the longest any member of Congress has ever waited, while two Florida Republicans had been sworn in the day after their own special elections. Remember how her signature was the one that forced the vote to release the Epstein files, and Arizona’s attorney general had to go to federal court while more than 800,000 Arizonans went without a voice. That feels like a lifetime ago now. I had to read through my posts from last year to remember all the details because there is so much corruption and so many anti-American actions by this administration that the details start to fade so new atrocities can take center stage in our minds.

Then there is the fear I carry that is just as heavy when I think about us not taking back Congress. What if the elections are rigged? I don’t mean rigged the way Trump uses that word, as an excuse for losing. I mean actually rigged, by Trump and his yes-men. Or what if not enough people show up, because they are exhausted and have convinced themselves their vote no longer matters? Trump told us tonight what comes next if Republicans hold on: “We will pass voter identification, proof of citizenship, and the Save America Act to defend our sacred American elections very soon,” which would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans, especially married women who changed their names, to register and vote during our next big presidential election in 2028, which will be here before we even know it.

We have to think about what our country will look like at the end of next January. I’ve been finding myself thinking about this more and more, usually late at night, right after I finish writing. I think about the generations that will come after us and what will be left of the country they inherit, whatever version we end up handing them. The answer splits into two very different Americas depending on what happens on November 3rd. In one, a Congress with real power starts asking questions under oath, the courts that have been holding keep holding, and the long, hard work of accountability finally begins. In the other, we face at least two more excruciating years of Donald Trump’s unchecked power.

There could be more wars. Just yesterday, at a rally in Fort Myers, Florida, Donald Trump said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We’ll do a little stopover.” Then he described exactly what that stopover would look like: “Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.” There could be more troops in our cities, and they might not stop at their current targets. They could begin rounding up others whom this administration has already started targeting. Our LGBTQIA+ neighbors, those who are neurodivergent, especially those on the autism spectrum, politicians like Ilhan Omar, whom Donald Trump singled out again in his speech tonight. The press, whom Donald Trump threatened just today to move out of the briefing room, writing on Truth Social that he “may move the Fake News to a less obnoxious location.” Writers and content creators, and anyone sharing the truth about what is happening in this country. And once he has removed or silenced those voices, what is to stop him from coming for the rest of us who have resisted and refused to remain silent? That is just the authoritarian way.

There is still time to stop this, and it starts with getting as many people out to vote over the next ten days as we possibly can, and more people are stepping up in even bigger ways to make sure that we do. Because while Donald Trump was spreading hate and trying to further divide us, Barack Obama was in Detroit today doing the opposite. He was reminding us what real leadership looks like. He was making us remember that we do not have to live this way and that we each hold the power to change it. He said, “After ten years of chaos, and cruelty, and corruption, and incompetence, tomfoolery, nonsense, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times at least, you get to say enough is enough.”

Donald Trump saw the writing on the wall today and tried to dismiss Barack Obama’s crowd in Detroit as “empty,” when in reality, more than 4,300 people had shown up, filling the gymnasium and an overflow area at Cass Technical High School. The contrast between what he was claiming and what was actually happening speaks for itself.

Most of us want this to end. We don’t want Donald Trump’s masked men patrolling our streets and kidnapping our neighbors without the constitutional protections of due process, which apply to everyone on American soil regardless of immigration status. We want our kids to grow up with leadership that does not find joy in anyone getting the sh*t beat out of them, and we do not want our brave members of the military risking their lives in another one of Donald Trump’s wars or military actions, whatever he is calling them today. Barack Obama told that overflowing room exactly what we need to do: “find some people who might not otherwise vote,” and make sure they know what is on the line and then help them make a plan to cast their ballot.

Tomorrow, my whole family will be under one roof again, including my two adult daughters, and we are going to drop off our ballots together. It has become our tradition ever since my oldest turned 18 and could vote for the first time. Her first presidential election was in 2020, the year the world felt like it fell apart. Her being able to cast her vote felt like a beacon of light in a very dark time. Standing beside her, I felt the weight of every generation that came before her, the ones who crossed oceans for a chance at this country’s promise, the ones who were kidnapped and enslaved and still fought for it, and the women who marched and were jailed so that she and I could have a say in our own futures.

This election feels every bit as important as that one did. Maybe more, in a different way, because the generations that came before us are counting on us to protect what they fought for, and so are the ones who will come after us. The responsibility we carry extends far beyond our own families and even our own borders. So many people around the world are also affected by the decisions made by the President of the United States, and the responsibility we have to them is resting on us as well.

Donald Trump told the people of Georgia tonight that he doesn’t give a damn what their senator wants. On November 3rd, we get to show him how much we give a damn about each other, about our families, and about a country that has never belonged to him, but has always belonged to us and those who come after us. In ten days, we will make them proud. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen is not only firing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, but also waging a propaganda war against the kingdom on social media.

A key character in the group’s communications campaign is, oddly, Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased American sex offender, some of whose files the U.S. Department of Justice has released.

The Houthis have recently homed in on a particular set of revelations to try to undermine Saudi Arabia’s leaders — namely, reports showing that associates of the Saudi royal court sent tapestries that had draped the holiest site in Islam to Mr. Epstein’s private island.

The Houthis control much of Yemen. Their communications show a profound awareness of news that their sworn enemies generate. They are willing to deploy the information in many forms — songs, videos, speeches, statements, influencer posts and more — to build support and target foes, including Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally recognized Yemeni government they are fighting. They portray themselves as defenders of Islam against corrupt foreign influences.

Now, the group has stepped up its messaging efforts, after Yemen’s civil war reignited this summer amid the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.Plugged In

The Saudis last month accused the Houthis of firing a drone at the Muslim holy city of Mecca, saying the attack was a “disgraceful” act that intended to provoke Muslims. The Houthis denied the accusation.

Rallying their expansive network to try to turn the accusation of religious betrayal against the kingdom, the Houthis pointed to the reports that Mr. Epstein had received tapestries that had draped the Kaba, the cubed building in Mecca that is the spiritual center of Islam.

“Those who gave Epstein the Kaba’s cover are the ones targeting Mecca,” Mahdi al-Mashat, the Houthi president, said in a statement to the group’s official news media.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

Katie Phang, Analysis and Opinion: It’s The Trump DOJ’s Turn to Confess, Katie Phang, right, Oct. 25, 2026. The Catholic Church Is Naming Names. Why Won't the Trump DOJ?

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: right now, the Catholic Church is doing a better job of naming abusers than the U.S. Department of Justice.

Late on October 24th, lawyers for survivors announced that every single one of the roughly 1,300 people suing the Archdiocese of New York had signed off on a settlement worth more than $800 million. Every single plaintiff. The deal is set to be formally signed in early November. To pay for it, the archdiocese cut its operating budget by 10%, sold its First Avenue headquarters, and sold the land it owned under the Palace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

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That’s an enormous settlement amount, although I should note that prior reporting from the NY Times back in April stated: “The archdiocese [of New York] is also one of the city’s largest landowners, with billions of dollars in real estate holdings” so I think it could have given more to the victims. But it isn’t the money that stopped me cold. It’s the naming of names. To understand why that matters, you have to remember what this Church did for decades.

In 2002, the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team exposed in its “Abuse in the Catholic Church” investigation how the Archdiocese of Boston, under Cardinal Bernard Law, moved Father John J. Geoghan from parish to parish for roughly three decades as the accusations piled up. More than 130 victims eventually alleged that Geoghan abused them over the span of 30 years. Ultimately, “internal church records revealed nearly 1,000 allegations of abuse against approximately 237 priests in the Boston Archdiocese over a span of six decades.” Cardinal Law resigned in disgrace and then landed a prestigious post in Rome.

Boston wasn't an outlier; it was the model. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury found that more than 300 predator priests had abused over 1,000 children across six dioceses. The grand jury described what church leaders followed as a "playbook for concealing the truth." Don't call it rape; call it "inappropriate contact." Don't call the police; instead send the priest away for “evaluation,” then quietly reassign him to another parish…with new children to abuse.

And here in New York? The state’s Catholic Conference spent years lobbying against the Child Victims Act, a January 28, 2019 law passed by the New York Legislature reforming the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse survivors. That’s the very law that finally let these 1,300 survivors walk into a courtroom to seek justice. The Archdiocese didn’t publish its first list of “credibly accused” clergy, 120 names, until April 2019, after that law passed. Secrecy wasn’t a bug; it was the blessing.

That’s why this prospective settlement matters. Under the agreement, the Archdiocese of New York must publish on its own website the names of the clergy members and lay leaders who were credibly accused of sexual abuse, and keep that list updated as new claims are substantiated. Not just priests, but everyone who had power and abused it. That means the documented instances of abuse don’t get buried in some church basement. Rather, they go into a public archive at Iona University, where anyone can walk in and read them.

None of that was guaranteed. For example, if the archdiocese had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it’s not clear it would have ever been forced to disclose anything at all. The survivors fought for those names to be made public. Some of the plaintiffs held out for months, saying the deal didn’t do enough to make up for what was done to them. Some plaintiffs died before they ever saw a resolution. One of their lawyers put it plainly: this settlement is “not just about money.”

He’s right. Survivors don’t just want a payment. They want the truth. They want the people who hurt them, and the people who covered for them, to be seen. Because you cannot heal a wound you aren’t allowed to look at.

Now, let’s talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein Files. In November 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act 427 to 1. The U.S. Senate then passed it unanimously. With that kind of (almost) unanimous and bipartisan support, Convicted Felon Donald Trump had no choice but to sign it into law. And the law was simple: the Attorney General of the United States shall release the entirety of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The exceptions for redactions and withholdings were detailed and intentionally narrow. But, the priority was to protect the victims and to expose the abusers.

So what happened? That December 19, 2025, federally required deadline came and went. In January of 2026, Trump’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, released three million pages, declared that was the last major production, and announced the Trump DOJ was “done,” even though in the same breath Blanche acknowledged he was still sitting on another 3 million or so pages of materials.

Survivors’ names and other personal identifying information were shockingly revealed in the Files. Sometimes a first name in one document and a last name in another. However, Congressmen Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie reviewed the unredacted versions and said that at least six men's names were redacted from public view. A group of 18 survivors said it better than I ever could: they were exposed “while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected.” The very people the Epstein Files Transparency Act was written to PROTECT were exposed, while the abusers remained protected.

I know a little something about this, because I sued Attorney General Todd Blanche in April over the Epstein Files. In June, my presiding judge, Emmet Sullivan, found I was likely to win. He granted my motion for a preliminary injunction, ordering (among other things) Blanche to unredact — or justify why he won't unredact — names in emails referencing a “torture video,” the identities of Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, and handwritten FBI interview notes alleging Epstein introduced a 13-year-old victim to Donald Trump. The DOJ’s response to the ruling? A spokesperson accused Judge Sullivan of a “perverse interpretation” aimed at “driving misleading headlines.” Perverse.

Then, when Judge Sullivan ordered Blanche to submit to the Court the unredacted records for his own review, Blanche admitted that the Trump DOJ had “inadvertently” redacted…Jeffrey Epstein’s own email address. You can’t make this up.

So here’s where we find ourselves: an institution that spent decades hiding abusers, shuffling them from parish to parish, has now agreed to name names. It did it under pressure, facing possible bankruptcy, but it did it. Meanwhile, the Trump DOJ is fighting tooth and nail in federal court to keep the names of abusers, facilitators, co-conspirators, and perpetrators hidden from the public eye. The Archdiocese of New York is building a public archive of its own sins, while the Trump DOJ is building a wall of black ink.

I’m a lawyer so I understand that a name appearing in the Epstein Files is not, by itself, proof that someone did anything wrong. But Congress already accounted for that: the law was written to protect the victims. The statute explicitly does not protect embarrassment or powerful men who’d rather not be seen. Transparency isn’t a suggestion; it’s the law. The Catholic Church eventually figured out that you can’t ask survivors to trust you while you hide the people who hurt them. The Trump DOJ continues to hide the abusers and to protect the Epstein Elite. Sounds like Blanche needs his own come to Jesus moment.

More Global News

New York Times, Serbia’s Longtime Strongman Concedes Defeat in Parliamentary Election, Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva, Oct. 25, 2026. “It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Aleksandar Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating his opponents.

Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat Sunday in a general election held after his once-tight grip on power was weakened by nearly two years of student-led street protests.

Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a close ally of Mr. Vucic. The Serbian leader had adopted many of the Hungarian’s authoritarian methods — and, at the end, his gracious acceptance of defeat, as well.

“It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Mr. Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating the victors, a new political grouping called Student List-Students Win. He said that the slate of candidates selected by protesting students had won at least 135 seats in Serbia’s 250-member legislature, compared with around 105 for his own party.

Mr. Vucic’s speech set off joyous celebrations by tens of thousands of mostly young people in central Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Car horns honked and flares lit the sky as the crowd, waving Serbian flags and cheering, welcomed a day that many feared would never arrive.

New York Times, Four Ways Israel’s Election Could End. Eventually, Aaron Boxerman and Josh Holder, Oct. 25, 2026 (interactive). Determining the winner could take weeks. Here’s how one side could gain power in Israel’s electoral system.

It takes 61 seats to win a majority in Israel’s Parliament. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, is expected to get there on his own. Instead, they will need to assemble a coalition with other parties.

More On U.S. History, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 24, 2026 [U.S. Stock Markets Black Friday in 1929, Revisited], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”

Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men.

At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.

Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either.

And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power.

In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.

With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists.

Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value.

Those excited by the scene dismissed skeptics who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”

October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors.

The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.

When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.

Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.

By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

But the problem was not lazy workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.

Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.

By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.

They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.

Oct. 24

Top Headlines

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times. 

• Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Update: Early Voting Data is Terrifying the GOP, Trump Eyes Mass Pardons, Musk Hiding Our Book + MORE, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Hispanic early turnout in Texas is surpassing 2024 presidential levels; Trump rallies in Georgia while his own Senate candidate admits he’s down at least 7 to Ossoff; Obama is in Detroit while Trump is in Georgia for dueling rallies; The White House is weighing MASS PARDONS for junior staffers;The Financial Times reports Russia secretly controlled a Trump-linked $25 billion Alaska gas project.
• New York Times, In Second Term, Trump’s Justice Dept. Submits to His Election Demands, Glenn Thrush, Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 24, 2026. With moves in Alaska and California, the department has stepped up interventions in the midterm elections as the president’s instrument of unmediated executive power.
• New York Times, Court Says Trump Violated Law in Los Angeles National Guard Deployment, Laurel Rosenhall, Oct. 24, 2026. The ruling, which comes as the midterm election nears, could make it more difficult for President Trump to seize control of the National Guard.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: End of a Presidency’ — White House Prepares for Trump ‘Rampage,’ Secret Russian Money Tied to Alaska Deal, Hitler’s Estate Burns Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s been an intense couple of days. On Friday, I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia. Since then, the attacks on me and on this work have only grown louder. I’m safe, and I’m taking the necessary precautions. But I want to be honest with you about what’s happening, because you deserve to know: when reporting hits a nerve, the people in power don’t respond with facts. They respond by trying to discredit, intimidate, and silence the people doing the reporting.

Probes Of Trump Goverance

• New York Times, How Trump Gave the Worst Polluters a Free Pass, Eric Lipton and Maxine Joselow, Oct. 24, 2026. The president temporarily waived clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases. Then his appointees worked to gut the regulations altogether.
• New York Times, 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation of Trump’s Waivers for Polluters, Maxine Joselow and Eric Lipton, Oct. 24, 2026. Chemical plants and other industrial facilities had been required to curb their toxic emissions. A New York Times investigation shows how they got out of it.
• New York Times, In U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project Emerges, Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. Interviews and documents show a Russian energy giant secretly funded a U.S. firm. The deal has been discussed in talks to end the war in Ukraine.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: More Signs Of Trumpian Unraveling And Decline, On Alaska: “I’m The One That Said Do It,” More Encouraging Early Vote Data, We Are Prepared Not Scared, Simon Rosenberg, right,Oct. 24, 2026. There is a lot of news today. Let’s get to it…..
• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Does Ramaswamy’s Depraved New Ad Mark a New Low in the GOP’s Moral Collapse? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 24, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins.
• The Hill, Norman’s son says he’s ‘leaning’ toward voting for Andrews for South Carolina Senate, Sarah Davis, Oct. 23, 2026. The son of GOP Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.), Warren Norman, said Friday he is “leaning” toward supporting the Democratic candidate in South Carolina’s Senate race, pediatrician Annie Andrews. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t hide all the corruption forever, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 23-24, 2026. Vanity Fair published an article with details from investigative journalist Matthew Cole’s new book, "Princes and Thieves." His investigation details how Russian military intelligence allegedly hacked the personal iPhone of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, while he was serving as a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term. t also shares a disturbing account of how Dutch intelligence supposedly discovered the breach after flipping a Russian hacker who gave them access to screenshots taken directly from Kushner’s phone. What they reportedly found went far beyond the regular messages that many of us might have on our own phones and allegedly exposed Kushner’s access to at least two foreign bank accounts containing roughly two billion dollars in funds linked to the leaders of Middle Eastern countries and showed that he transferred approximately 700 million dollars, some of which went to a mercenary, a warlord, and a hit man.

U.S. National Security, Military 

• Lev Remembers, Analysis and Opinion:  Putin's Money Was Inside an Alaska Gas Deal, and It Was on the Table With Witkoff and Kushner, Lev Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Three days ago, I told you what Steve Witkoff’s three hours with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg were really about. My sources said it was not about peace for Ukraine. It was about energy. It was about gas. It was about business between Trump’s people and Putin’s people.
• The Dispatch, Opinion: Trump’s Capitulation to Putin Is Undermining U.S. National Security, Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012-14), Oct. 22, 2026. The president’s admiration for the Russian dictator erodes American interests and values. Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for Russia’s imperial dictator, Vladimir Putin. Shortly after taking office for his first term in 2017, President Trump was asked by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly to defend his respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called a “killer.” Trump replied, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” 

Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say, Edward Wong, Jonathan Swan and Julian E. Barnes, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. The U.S. government has ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave Saudi Arabia. It is also drawing down staff at other missions in the region.

More On Russian War Against Ukraine

• The Geo Network, News and Opinion: Japan Just Stepped Into Ukraine… And Putin’s Drone War COLLAPSED, Staff Report, Oct. 24, 2026. Moscow is fuming after Japanese tech giant Terra Drone officially delivered its first state-backed batch of interceptor drones to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency on October 14, prompting Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova to threaten Tokyo with severe countermeasures.

Major U.S. Sex Scandals, Political Hypocrisy

• New York Times, Video by Left-Wing Group Claims Lindsey Graham Paid Men for Sex, Annie Karni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Progressive activists released a video of three men making the allegations about the South Carolina Republican, who died in July. The New York Times has not confirmed their claims.
• New York Times, New York Archdiocese Agrees to Settle Sexual Abuse Claims for Over $800 Million, Maya King and Jeffery C. Mays, Oct. 24, 2026. The Roman Catholic archdiocese might now avoid bankruptcy by reaching a settlement with 1,300 people who said they had been abused by clergy members and lay leaders.

More News Updates

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump’s Election Takeover Fails in Court, Orders Lawsuit to Block Alaska Results, Berates Female Reporter, and More Major Corruption, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. This morning [Friday], I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia, laying out the documented record in one place, from Soviet bloc surveillance files to waived sanctions and delayed air defense missiles for Ukraine. The response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of you read it, shared it, and sent it to people who needed to see it.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 23, 2026 [Musk, Trump Helping Russia], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
• The Contrarian, Weekly Pro-Democracy News Roundup and Comment: Headed to California to Fight Trump’s Election Desperation, Norman Eisen, right, Oct. 24, 2026. As I write this, I’m packing my bags and my briefs (the legal kind). Next week, I’ll be in federal court in California to help argue against Donald Trump’s latest effort to sabotage our elections: his efforts to disrupt California voting using a demonstrably junky list of 20,000 supposed unauthorized voters.
• New York Times, She Planned to Protest Trump. She Didn’t Plan on Getting Punched, Jessica Contrera, Oct. 24, 2026. Blake Miley yelled “fascist” as President Trump spoke at a midterm campaign rally. The violence that followed “was not right,” she said.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Crimes Davey Hearn Claims Jeanine Pirro May Have Committed, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 24, 2026. Weaponized DOJ. As a number of outlets have reported, Davey Hearn’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, has requested the DOJ and DOI Inspector Generals investigate how Hearn got charged for damaging the reflecting pool that Trump’s no-bid contractors damaged.

Top Stories 

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.

 Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Update: Early Voting Data is Terrifying the GOP, Trump Eyes Mass Pardons, Musk Hiding Our Book + MORE, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s Saturday, so I’m going to make this quick and get you everything you need to know so you can get back to your day.

Here are the top headlines:

• Hispanic early turnout in Texas is surpassing 2024 presidential levels
• Trump rallies in Georgia while his own Senate candidate admits he’s down at least 7 to Ossoff
• Obama is in Detroit while Trump is in Georgia for dueling rallies
• The White House is weighing MASS PARDONS for junior staffers
• The Financial Times reports Russia secretly controlled a Trump-linked $25 billion Alaska gas project
• ProPublica reveals secret terms of Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal
• Trump denies the rumor that he wants to turn the press pool into a swimming pool, but floats moving the press out of the briefing room
• Mark Carney goes after Musk for Starlink and reaffirms Canadian sovereignty
• Zelenskyy speaks more on Musk slowing Starlink and Trump’s relationship with Putin
• And speaking of Musk…he’s slapping content warnings on our book on the final day of first-week sales

A few important notes before we dive in:

Again, our book, WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy, is OUT NOW!!! If you’ve been considering ordering, go ahead and grab your copy now! TODAY will determine whether WTF AMERICA?! makes the New York Times bestseller list! We are SO CLOSE, and every order right now makes a difference. Help us get across the finish line!

Consider subscribing to this Substack to support our reportingSubscribed

Republicans Are Terrified of What They’re Seeing in Texas

This is a number that everyone needs to see. Per data shared by Tom Bonier, Texas early turnout is nearing 3 MILLION votes, and Hispanic turnout is now AHEAD of where it was in the 2024 presidential election. And young voters are driving it.

Remember, Texas Hispanic voters were supposed to be Trump’s big success story. The Republicans in Texas based their gerrymander around trends in the 2024 election. Those trends have completely reversed. Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly supporting Democrats this cycle, as are young voters. And the turnout trends suggest a huge amount of backlash toward the incumbent party.While Trump Rallies in Georgia, His Candidate Sees the Writing on the Wall

Trump posted on Truth Social that he’s holding a “Big Rally in Georgia today.” His Senate candidate needs all the help he can get. And he knows it. On Newsmax earlier, Rep. Mike Collins admitted he’s at least 7 points behind Jon Ossoff. The chyron on the screen while he was lamenting about his polling was “EARLY VOTING SURGES AS DEMOCRATS OUTPACE GOP IN KEY STATES.” Even Newsmax couldn’t hide it.

Trump’s rally sets up a dueling moment with Barack Obama, who is in Detroit tonight working to energize Democratic voters. We’ll be streaming it live on MeidasTouch.Panic and Pardons

The Washington Sun reports that White House attorneys are evaluating whether to issue MASS PARDONS to junior staffers, with Trump allies pushing the regime to shield lower-ranked officials from prosecution and other legal challenges. They know what happens if and when they lose power, and they are terrified.Russia, Alaska, and a Trump Family Friend

The Financial Times says U.S. executives QUIT a $25 billion gas venture over claims that Russia was secretly in control. The former CEO of Polar Train LNG told the FT that Russian gas giant Novatek financed and controlled the project without U.S. approval, which triggered a mass resignation over fears the company was violating sanctions.

Polar Train is building a gas export terminal on Alaska’s North Slope as part of a Trump regime push to expand energy exports to Asia. The venture was launched with the involvement of Gentry Beach, an investor with close ties to…the Trump family. Per FT, the project has also come up in high-level talks between Washington and Moscow over business deals connected to ending the war in Ukraine, deals that of course would benefit Trump and his cronies. Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 was blacklisted by the U.S. in 2023, and U.S.-Russia discussions have floating lifting sanctions in exchange for help building an export terminal in Alaska.

So a Trump family friend’s energy project was allegedly being run by a sanctioned Russian company while Trump’s people negotiate with Putin.

ProPublica has a new investigation into the terms of Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal, which centers on Alejandro Betancourt, a 46-year-old Venezuelan energy baron who has been the target of corruption investigations. Venezuelan opposition leaders and congressional Democrats have both criticized the deal.Subscribed

Per ProPublica, the deal is built with a corporate firewall meant to STOP future U.S. presidents and Venezuelan leaders from changing or dismantling it. Some of the regime’s partners could stay anonymous behind a parent company based in Barbados. And it could be YEARS before the venture produces enough oil to matter to the U.S. at all.

Put this next to the Alaska story, and you see a clear pattern. Trump ties, hidden ownership, and secret business deals designed to outlast any accountability.Trump’s Pool Denial

Carney and Zelenskyy Hit Back

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a few moments worth sharing in Türkiye. Asked about a trade deal with the U.S. before midterms, he put the ball back in the U.S.’s court, saying the United States is “a little hard to predict.” On Elon Musk throttling Starlink, he said he was searching for the right adjective for whoever made that call against a country fighting for its citizens’ lives against naked aggression. And on Trump’s threats: “We’ll never be the 51st state.”

Carney also launched a new Canada–Türkiye Strategic Partnership with President Erdoğan, and Sen. Rick Scott lost it, claiming Canada “sides with dictators, terrorists & thugs.”

Zelenskyy, in an interview with ABC, again confirmed that SpaceX slowed Starlink down and said he’s sure Elon knows about it. Asked whether Trump is friends with Putin, Zelenskyy said they’re in “quite good relations.”Speaking of Musk…

Now to something personal. X is putting an “age restricted adult content” warning over posts about our book WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. A reader named Caroline posted a photo of the book saying she couldn’t wait to start reading, and X hid it behind the warning. Others have confirmed the same thing.

Here’s why the timing matters. The New York Times bestseller list comes out Wednesday, but first-week sales only count through today. Suppressing the book today could decide whether it reaches a whole new audience.

The response from readers on Threads, Bluesky, and TikTok has been incredible. People are calling it the book of our time, saying they can’t put it down, and a follower named Patricia told us she just ordered two more copies for two special women in her life. Thank you all.

New York Times, In Second Term, Trump’s Justice Dept. Submits to His Election Demands, Glenn Thrush, Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 24, 2026. With moves in Alaska and California, the department has stepped up interventions in the midterm elections as the president’s instrument of unmediated executive power

The Justice Department is sharply intensifying efforts to intervene in the midterm elections, goaded by a president unfettered by even the limited restraints of his first term.

The next several weeks represent a critical moment for federal law enforcement, a test of whether a department repurposed by President Trump as an instrument of unmediated executive power will be effectively mobilized as a guarantor of his political power.

In recent weeks, the department has taken several new steps, including an extraordinary effort to invalidate any potential Democratic victory in the Alaska Senate race, that reflect Mr. Trump’s growing agitation as his party faces the possibility of losing control of Congress precipitated by his sagging popularity.

On Thursday, the department asked a federal court to block certification of the election if the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose narrowly, claiming that the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical full name tainted the election. The move, the first of its kind in generations, came in response to the president’s rants about the issue, officials said.

Hours after the papers were filed, Mr. Trump abandoned any pretext that department officials had acted without his say-so, telling reporters, “I’m the one that said do it.”

Mr. Trump has grown increasingly agitated about the dueling Sullivans, among other election-related grievances. He has demanded the department take legal action, even as some department officials raised concerns about the merits and constitutionality of the case, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

The episode comes amid the department’s widening push to exclude large batches of mail-in votes on suspicion that some had been cast by noncitizens, despite evidence that such voting is exceedingly rare. At the same time, Attorney General Todd Blanche has abandoned departmental norms by promoting prosecutions and investigations of politicians, within 60 days of the election.

Late Friday, the department escalated the fight, sending letters to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots. The letters came with a threat. Those who failed to comply would “risk significant federal scrutiny.”

All of this has administration critics, and even some in the department, asking: Just how far are Justice Department leaders willing to go?

“The department is taking commands from the president and throwing spaghetti at the wall to file meritless lawsuits,” said Vanita Gupta, the No. 3 official at the department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “The ultimate goal is undermining faith in the election, intimidating voters and discrediting results the administration doesn’t like.”

It is by no means certain that any of these legal actions will ultimately succeed. But election officials from both parties have expressed concerns that it represents a dangerous effort to discredit functional election systems administered by the states.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump may claim foreign interference in the election as a reason to seize voting machines, citing Mr. Trump’s dubious claims in a speech over the summer.

Over the past year, the department’s civil rights division, under an outspoken Trump ally, Harmeet Dhillon, has undertaken a series of actions intended to demonstrate they would aggressively pursue his agenda. This included an unsuccessful legal effort to obtain sensitive state voter data and dispatching 1,000 federal monitors to oversee elections, all the while sowing broader doubts about election integrity.

This has apparently not been enough for Mr. Trump, who has become increasingly impatient. He was especially fired up after a meeting in the Oval Office this month with election deniers, including Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official who was imprisoned for her role in a security breach of election systems before obtaining a pardon, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.

New York Times, Court Says Trump Violated Law in Los Angeles National Guard Deployment, Laurel Rosenhall, Oct. 24, 2026. The ruling, which comes as the midterm election nears, could make it more difficult for President Trump to seize control of the National Guard.

President Trump violated federal law by seizing control of the California National Guard last year and deploying troops to the streets of Los Angeles during immigration protests, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

With the midterm election less than two weeks away, the ruling could provide an extra layer of legal assurance on the limits a president faces in using the military on American soil.

Mr. Trump’s top military adviser has said there are no plans to deploy troops to polling stations for the midterm elections. But Mr. Trump has said in the past that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. And in recent months, he has taken unusual steps to disrupt voting procedures in several states.

“To the extent people were concerned that he could try to federalize Guards, try to send them to polling places, I think this clearly says no, you can’t,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

Friday’s decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals applies the reasoning the Supreme Court used when it ruled that Mr. Trump did not have the power to send National Guard troops into Chicago last year.

Though the ruling was largely predictable, it amounts to another procedural win for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. The state has been in a protracted fight with the Trump administration over the immigration protests and troop deployments that rocked Los Angeles when Mr. Trump took command of troops over the governor’s objections.

“California fought back against this potential power grab, and in doing so created essential legal precedent that not only protects Californians but all Americans,” Governor Newsom said in a statement.Get updates whe

Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.

“Should your parishioners ask you about the reports after Mass this evening or tomorrow, please let them know that much progress has been made, that a resolution to these cases is imminent, and that their prayers are still very much needed for all involved,” Archbishop Hicks wrote. “You can assure them that life in your parish should continue uninterrupted.”

Coming to an agreement was a long and delicate process, at times stymied by the deaths of some plaintiffs and objections from the holdouts, who said they felt the terms of the proposal did not do enough to rectify the harms they suffered.

Weeks before the agreement, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that the archdiocese negotiated with one of its insurers to increase the amount of money it would pay the holdouts. They would now receive a pot of $20 million to be evenly distributed among them — an uncommon arrangement that hinged largely on the availability of insurance funds.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: End of a Presidency’ — White House Prepares for Trump ‘Rampage,’ Secret Russian Money Tied to Alaska Deal, Hitler’s Estate Burns Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s been an intense couple of days. On Friday, I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia. Since then, the attacks on me and on this work have only grown louder. I’m safe, and I’m taking the necessary precautions. But I want to be honest with you about what’s happening, because you deserve to know: when reporting hits a nerve, the people in power don’t respond with facts. They respond by trying to discredit, intimidate, and silence the people doing the reporting.

It won’t work. And today’s news shows exactly why this work matters. Trump’s own aides are bracing for a post-midterm “rampage.” A New York Times investigation found a sanctioned Kremlin-linked company secretly funding an Alaska gas project discussed in Ukraine peace talks, the same kind of pattern I laid out in Friday’s investigation. And Ukraine finally got its satellite access restored, but only after Congress started threatening to block Trump’s nominees.

Here’s the truth about independent journalism: I don’t have a corporate legal team, a billionaire owner, or an advertiser footing the bill. When the attacks come, it’s this community that stands between this reporting and anyone trying to shut it down. No advertiser dictates my coverage. No political office shapes my reporting. I answer only to you.

If this work matters to you, and you want reporting that doesn’t back down when powerful people push back, become a paid subscriber today.Subscribed

Here’s what you need to know today.

Trump’s Presidency at a Breaking Point as Aides Brace for Midterm Wipeout

White House aides are bracing for a Trump “rampage” if Republicans lose Congress, according to a new CNN report. Administration officials, advisers, and allies told CNN they’re increasingly convinced steep GOP losses will trigger major firings across the government, as Trump looks for someone to blame. The fear has turned the White House into a hub of infighting, leaking, and what insiders described as preemptive finger-pointing. “It’s more brutal than any other situation in modern times in the White House,” one Trump ally said. “You can’t trust anybody here.” Another adviser put it bluntly: “If we lose both the House and the Senate, there’s really no telling what happens. Everyone is fair game.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya are among those seen as at risk. Hegseth is expected to be an early target for congressional Democrats and has long faced speculation that he could be pushed out, though Trump has repeatedly defended him. Some officials think Wright, who has been managing the economic fallout of the Iran war, could leave for a more lucrative energy-sector job. Allies of Bhattacharya fear he could be fired after a high-profile clash with White House budget chief Russ Vought over grant spending. The Pentagon and Energy Department both denied the rumors, and the White House called the reporting “baseless speculation,” insisting Trump is “laser-focused” on holding Congress. People close to Trump say that if Republicans suffer big losses, he is certain to find someone to blame, and it won’t be himself.

The infighting has already spilled into public view through a string of embarrassing crises in just the past two weeks. Trump ousted Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece after a GOP donor disclosed she had asked him for $100,000 to pay off her credit card. He fired his new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, after just five days amid widespread backlash, and ordered his White House counsel to investigate a feud between allies over allegations that Kennedy Center money was misallocated. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles faced questions about her standing after it emerged she wasn’t present when Trump offered Zacharia the job, though Trump says there’s “zero chance” he’ll replace her. Many of Trump’s own aides now believe the House is likely lost and are focused on limiting the damage. Trump himself sounded resigned this week, saying, “The president always loses, for whatever reason, the midterms.” Governor Gavin Newsom called it the beginning of the end of his presidency:

Even some of Trump’s former boosters abroad now argue a weakened Trump would be good for the world. In a column for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, Matthew Lynn wrote that Trump is likely about to become “the lamest of lame duck presidents,” and that political paralysis would be a big improvement over the chaos of the past two years. He pointed to prediction markets giving Republicans more than an 80 percent chance of losing the House and a 69 percent chance of losing the Senate, with Trump’s approval at a record low of 32 percent. Lynn argued that with Trump hemmed in, tariffs could fade, trade wars could ease, and there might “even be peace with Canada.” A column in Britain’s Independent went further, arguing the country is watching Trump’s presidency “die on live TV,” pointing to the Iran war’s toll on prices and his attack on Ukraine for striking Russian refineries. Both writers say Trump’s playbook of deny, deflect, and blame may finally have hit its limit.

Analysts warn a lame-duck Trump won’t simply fade away, and Democrats in charge would bring a wave of investigations. If Democrats take the House, which polls suggest is highly likely, Trump, his family, and his associates would face subpoenas, congressional investigations, and potentially impeachment, with Democrats already preparing inquiries into Trump family business dealings, the Iran war, and the Epstein files. A Democratic Senate would also block his ability to confirm judges and executive branch nominees, including any potential Supreme Court picks. But analysts across the spectrum told the Christian Science Monitor that Trump is likely to respond by bypassing Congress even more aggressively, using emergency declarations, redirected funds, and foreign policy moves. “He will have the full authority of the presidency until noon on January 20, 2029,” one Republican strategist said. “I expect he will use it.”

Ukraine’s Starlink Restored After Two Weeks as Congress Ramps Up Pressure and a Secret Russian Link to an Alaska Gas Deal Emerges

Ukraine says full speed has been restored to its Starlink and Starshield satellite systems after two weeks of restrictions that crippled parts of its military. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday its monitoring systems now show stable connections for drones flying faster than 400 kilometers per hour, after speeds had been capped at around 160. The limits had hampered Ukraine’s ability to shoot down Russian attack drones and resupply frontline troops, and forced some operations to be canceled. The ministry credited Zelensky’s “direct dialogue” and “firm stance at the highest level” for the restoration. Zelensky had viewed the throttling as retaliation by Trump and Musk for Ukraine’s refusal to stop striking Russian oil refineries, while Trump denied any White House involvement and claimed for days that service was already back. Just a day earlier, Zelensky told ABC News that the administration’s recent actions were “not supportive,” taking a swipe at Trump envoy Steve Witkoff for calling Putin a humanitarian: “Maybe not such a big humanitarian as Putin, of course.”

A bipartisan group of senators is preparing to block Trump’s nominees until Ukraine’s satellite access is guaranteed, according to The New York Times. The holds would hit during the lame-duck session after the midterms, when Republican leaders hope to confirm dozens of executive and judicial nominees before the new Congress begins. Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent who worked on Russian counterintelligence in Kyiv, said he’ll push to fire whoever was responsible for the disruption and cut funding for their agencies, adding, “I personally don’t believe in the coincidence theory.” Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Thom Tillis said in a joint statement that “funding the Russian war machine, cutting off Ukraine’s satellite communications, and degrading its air defenses all stand in the way of peace.” Congressional committees are also weighing a formal investigation into SpaceX and have told companies involved in Trump’s Russian diesel deal to preserve their records. Separately, six House Democrats gave Musk until Oct. 31 to explain the restrictions.

A New York Times investigation found that a sanctioned Russian energy giant secretly funded an American company pitching an Alaska gas project discussed in Ukraine peace talks. The company, Polar LNG, markets itself with American flags and a bald eagle as “America’s Arctic Advantage,” and plans to use Russian technology to liquefy and export natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope. Putin discussed the broader idea with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner last month, though a U.S. official said it was only mentioned broadly and there’s no indication the envoys knew of Polar LNG’s Russian ties. The company’s former CEO, Joel Riddle, says he resigned after learning that at least some of its funding came from Novatek, a Kremlin-linked firm under partial U.S. sanctions, and that he warned the Trump administration before leaving. Novatek has now confirmed it is moving to take a minority stake in the project, a striking effort by a Russian company to own a piece of American gas production. The project’s Novatek connections are complicated by the new Graham sanctions law, which specifically targets the company, though Trump waived the law’s Russia sanctions last week.

The Oleshky ceasefire is set to begin Oct. 29, as Russian diesel heads to the U.S. and Ukraine strikes deep inside Russia. The White House celebrated the ceasefire as Melania Trump’s achievement, posting that she had “forged a ceasefire in war-torn Oleshky” and calling it “peace through strength,” with up to 2,000 residents cut off from aid and facing starvation. Meanwhile, Russia’s deputy prime minister said the first three tankers of Russian diesel are headed to North America under Trump’s deal, with one expected to arrive in the U.S. on Nov. 7. Overnight, Ukraine struck a petrochemical plant in the Russian city of Togliatti, and an attack on a substation in southern Russia reportedly knocked out power across occupied Crimea, including Sevastopol and Yalta. Russia and Ukraine also completed their first prisoner exchange since August, swapping 270 servicemen each, which Zelensky called a “very important result.” British Prime Minister’s office, meanwhile, publicly rejected Witkoff’s description of Putin as a “humanitarian.”

Iran War Escalates as Strike Threats Mount, Oil Surges, and U.S. Officials Warn of a Year More of Fighting

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran are spiking, with an American official warning strikes could come as soon as this weekend. Iran’s armed forces chief declared Saturday that U.S. military ships will never be allowed in the Persian Gulf “under any circumstances,” adding that Trump “will take that dream to his grave.” The warning came after Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, told Israeli army radio that a strike on Iran this weekend could “absolutely” happen, even though Trump has said any new strikes would wait until after the Nov. 3 midterms. A spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard dismissed Trump’s threats as “largely for media consumption,” warning that any U.S. action would be met with a response “several times greater.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces elections Tuesday, has repeatedly vowed to topple Iran’s government. European and Middle Eastern foreign ministers meeting in Istanbul urged both sides to show restraint, with France’s foreign minister warning further escalation “would leave no winners.”

U.S. intelligence warns that Iranian plots to kill Americans abroad have reached “advanced stages.” In an unclassified memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio obtained by CBS News, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said Iran has “substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel” in the Middle East and other countries. The memo did not name specific targets or say whether attacks were imminent. The State Department is now reducing staff at U.S. embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, and the UAE, after ordering nonessential diplomats and families to leave Saudi Arabia earlier this week. The U.S. military has also been quietly shrinking its footprint in the region amid threats from Iran and its Houthi allies in Yemen. Meanwhile, Iran’s president is set to travel to Moscow next week to meet Putin, the first such meeting in Russia since the war began, as Iran’s foreign minister says the two countries are closer than ever.

The Trump administration now admits the war Trump promised would last weeks could drag on for another year, as oil prices soar. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz told the Financial Times the war could still be going 12 months from now, even though Trump initially said it would last “four to five weeks.” Trump, meanwhile, claimed the U.S. could “take all of the oil” and “take the whole country,” and said the real question is whether to “finish it off” or “let it wither.” Brent crude jumped to over $117 a barrel Friday, its highest level since March and up from under $97 at the start of October. The Dow fell more than 550 points as rising oil prices weighed on the market. Trump has accused Iran of faking attacks on ships to drive up oil prices ahead of the midterms, claiming more oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war, though overall shipping traffic remains sharply below prewar levels.

The war is spilling across the region, with oil washing up on UAE beaches and Saudi Arabia under fire from Iran-backed rebels. The UAE closed beaches and warned fishermen away after an oil spill, which analysts traced to a tanker hit by a projectile earlier this month and say covers roughly 60 square miles, with residents as far as Dubai reporting strong gas smells. Saudi Arabia intercepted Houthi missiles aimed at the major oil hub of Yanbu and the city of Taif, briefly triggering danger warnings across regions including Mecca. Airstrikes in Yemen, which the Houthis blame on Saudi Arabia, have killed at least nine people over two days, including women and children. The U.N. warned that time is running out to get aid into the Yemeni city of Taiz, cut off by Houthi fighters for 20 days, where water production has fallen by about half. Britain has committed fighter jets to defend Saudi airspace, and Egypt is weighing sending troops.

Other news:

Hitler’s former mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, was engulfed in flames overnight, and a person has been taken into custody. The fire alarm went off around 9:15 p.m. Friday at the building, perched on a cliff more than 6,000 feet up in Germany’s Bavarian Alps, and firefighters were still battling the blaze Saturday morning. Its remote location made it hard to get fire engines to the site, and crews could only enter with respiratory protection. Police said it’s not yet clear whether the detained person had anything to do with the fire, and no one was found inside or injured. The building was commissioned by the Nazi Party and completed in 1938, and Hitler visited at least 14 times for social functions and official business. Since 1952 it has operated as a café, restaurant, and history exhibition popular with tourists.

Trump merchandise stores are shutting down across the country as MAGA retailers confront an unpopular lame-duck president. At least four of the roughly 20 stores nationwide selling Trump gear have closed in the past year, including locations in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, according to NPR. “He’s no longer a viable business model for entrepreneurs because he has peaked,” one Trump supporter told the outlet. The owner of a Trump superstore outside Knoxville said sales collapsed from a high of $200,000 a month to just $20,000, and that some of Trump’s own policies, including DOGE spending cuts, hurt business. He also noticed customers asking to have their purchases bagged instead of wearing their new Trump apparel out of the store. The closures come as Trump’s approval sits at record lows amid frustration over the cost of living and the Iran war.

Newly released Pentagon UFO files describe federal agents spotting a mysterious “black triangle” near a sensitive U.S. national security site. According to an FBI report, two agents at an observation post in the western United States saw a matte black triangular object resembling a delta-wing drone in June, with an estimated wingspan of nine to 15 feet. A Defense Department memo, which included a corroborating account from a third official using long-range thermal equipment, said the craft rose straight up for about 10 seconds, hovered for 20 seconds, then shot into high-speed horizontal flight. Observers said it moved as fast as a fighter jet and dove into a canyon in two to three seconds, yet made no detectable sound. The object was warmer than the surrounding air but showed no visible exhaust. The files are the latest release since Trump directed his administration to give the public full disclosure on unidentified objects, though many details remain redacted.

Crushing debt is souring Gen Z on politics, threatening Republicans and raising alarms about disillusionment across the board, according to a Politico Magazine report. Gen Z adults now carry higher credit card, auto loan, and personal loan balances than millennials did at the same age, with record drops in credit scores and rising delinquencies. Unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds is about 8 percent, nearly double the national rate, and entry-level job openings have fallen 35 percent since 2023. Many young voters who backed Trump in 2024 over his promises to lower prices now say he failed them amid tariffs and the Iran war, and are preparing to reject the GOP in the midterms. But experts warn the bigger risk is that young people give up on voting altogether, with only 33 percent saying they’ll definitely vote and just 15 percent saying they trust the federal government. “Everything’s too damn expensive. Nobody has any money. The job market is shit for young people,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, the only Gen Z member of Congress.

A top ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has quit the Trump administration, exposing a widening rift between the MAHA movement and the White House. Calley Means, the senior adviser who helped broker Kennedy’s 2024 endorsement of Trump, resigned Thursday after a White House meeting on defining ultraprocessed foods was postponed, which one official called “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Officials say Means was frustrated with resistance inside Trump’s orbit to Kennedy’s efforts to steer Americans away from junk food. MAHA influencer Vani Hari wrote that Kennedy’s commitments are “being stalled by corporate capture and special interests at the very top of the White House.” Many MAHA supporters have also been angered by Trump’s executive order promoting glyphosate, the weedkiller ingredient they believe causes cancer, and the administration’s backing of Roundup maker Bayer at the Supreme Court. With the midterms less than two weeks away, Democrats are actively courting disillusioned MAHA voters who helped elect Trump in 2024.

Medical experts are calling Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike malpractice after new details emerged of what happened inside the death chamber. According to an account from Pike’s lawyer, the execution team spent nearly an hour on Sept. 30 jabbing her arms with about 10 needles while struggling to find a vein, at one point using a catheter so small that one expert said it’s meant for babies. Team members said they worried her veins had “blown,” and Pike repeatedly grimaced and said her arm was “really burning,” yet the team pushed ahead with the lethal dose of pentobarbital. Pike survived, spent days on a ventilator, and can now talk and walk, though her long-term prognosis is unknown. “The level of incompetence is astounding,” said an Ohio State surgery professor, adding that no clinician would ever administer the drug that way. Tennessee has called off all executions pending a review, as the case prompts a national reckoning over lethal injection.

The Oregon father who stopped the Silver Rail Elementary shooting says he wants every school to have a resource officer. In his first interview since the Oct. 15 attack, Kaylub Giamanco described telling a 911 dispatcher, “I have to go in. People are going to die,” before crawling into the school and fatally shooting the 16-year-old gunman. The attacker had already killed 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert and three boys, including 5-year-old Rhoam Summer. Giamanco, whose own children attend the school, says he lies awake at night wondering whether he could have done more. “I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” he said. He hopes to raise money to support school safety efforts.

Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday is a dead heat, as President Lula tries to become the first candidate ever to overturn a first-round loss. Far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for a failed coup attempt, won the first round on Oct. 5 and has said he would pardon his father if elected. But polls have narrowed sharply in the three weeks since, and the two are now nearly tied, with Bolsonaro ahead by only fractions of a point. Analysts say much of the shift comes from voters turning away from Bolsonaro after an aggressive debate performance and a speech vowing to “change the constitution,” along with two federal police investigations into him. Lula’s campaign has energized young voters who took to the streets in large protests, and his team overhauled its online strategy, with his digital reach now surpassing Bolsonaro’s for the first time. All eyes are on the bellwether state of Minas Gerais, where no candidate has ever won the presidency without carrying it.

Texas Democrat James Talarico is taking aim at Elon Musk, accusing him of trying to buy the state’s Senate seat for Ken Paxton. Musk has poured $158 million into a super PAC backing Paxton, which Talarico says makes him the force behind nearly every attack ad, mailer, and text targeting his campaign. “Texas is not for sale,” Talarico told a packed rally at the University of Texas, calling Paxton, who was impeached by his own party over corruption allegations, the most corrupt politician in the state’s history. Talarico raised $64 million from July through September, more than triple Paxton’s total, with 97 percent of donations under $100, in what has become the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. He holds a narrow lead, with the RealClearPolitics average putting him ahead by 1.8 points and a new Emerson poll showing him up 48 to 46. A win would make him the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994.

The Pentagon has designated Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes on U.S. college campuses a threat to national security. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video Friday that the centers have been operating in disguise, claiming that “80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters.” He alleged their mission is to steal intellectual property and “infiltrate the minds of American students.” Hegseth said the Defense Department has spent the past two months “systematically” dismantling every one of the organizations. Washington has long accused Confucius Institutes of serving as Chinese propaganda tools and has taken previous steps to crack down on them. The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Probes Of Trump Goverance

New York Times, How Trump Gave the Worst Polluters a Free Pass, Eric Lipton and Maxine Joselow, Oct. 24, 2026. The president temporarily waived clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases. Then his appointees worked to gut the regulations altogether.

Within sight of a southeast Texas middle school stands a chemical plant that President Trump excused from new federal rules intended to curb its cancer-causing pollution.

About a 30-minute drive from Pittsburgh, a steel-making facility has spewed carcinogenic chemicals near homes for years. Mr. Trump gave it a similar waiver from recent clean-air rules.

And on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., the owners of an industrial warehouse emailed the Trump administration asking for their own waiver. Their wish was granted. Nine months later, the facility accidentally released a large plume of carcinogenic gas into the community.

In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect. Some were among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants. About 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one affected facility.

71 coal plants, 71 chemical plants, 40 sterilizers, 19 steel-related facilities and 1 copper smelter exempted from clean-air regulations.

The exemptions represent the biggest presidential intervention in enforcement of the Clean Air Act in the half-century since President Richard M. Nixon signed the bedrock environmental law. And that is only one of the ways the Trump administration is dismantling a variety of federal environmental protections.

Before Mr. Trump’s return, the chemical industry was losing its fight to block or at least delay tougher E.P.A. requirements to reduce toxic emissions. It had pleaded with agency officials, filed lawsuits and appealed to Congress. But officials and the courts had largely rejected the industry’s claims of undue expense and regulatory overreach.

Now, Mr. Trump is prioritizing the economic interests of corporations and easing costs for polluting industries, and their immense clout is striking.

The president’s exemptions were good for two years, with the possibility of an extension. The reprieve for the companies gave Mr. Trump time to stock the Environmental Protection Agency with appointees who had lobbied for the industries they now regulate. Those officials then quickly went to work from the inside to gut the rules altogether.

Mr. Trump has taken an expansive view of executive power in his second term. On the environmental front, he has unilaterally shredded regulations, withheld science funding appropriated by Congress and ordered coal plants that planned to shutter to continue running.

Even so, his evisceration of the new Clean Air Act rules stands out.

Many of the details of how the Trump administration aided the chemical industry are being reported here for the first time. In one upside-down moment, industry executives provided the agenda for a meeting with E.P.A. staff and then effectively presided over it.

Mr. Trump also nominated Aaron Szabo, a former lobbyist for the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, a powerful trade group, to lead the E.P.A.’s air regulation office. Once there, Mr. Szabo helped handle the waiver requests and then pushed employees to pull back on enforcement, documents show.U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh, where smokestacks release not only steam but also benzene and sulfur dioxide. A commercial sterilizer plant near Richmond, Va., released hundreds of pounds of ethylene oxide in April.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times; Carlos Bernate for The New York Times

To understand how Mr. Trump gave a free pass to some of the worst polluters, The New York Times reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and spoke to more than 70 people familiar with the efforts, including former E.P.A. officials and industry executives.

“These companies, with their campaign contributions and the revolving door of former lobbyists and executives that now work in the regulatory agencies — that is where the petrochemical industry gets its power,” said Brent Coon, a Beaumont, Texas, lawyer who has spent decades squaring off in court against petrochemical firms over environmental and health risks.

The Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. — created in 1970 to protect public health and the environment — to periodically review the latest pollution controls and impose them broadly if they are affordable and effective. The most recent review began under the Biden administration, which in 2024 finalized new, tougher requirements.

In granting the waivers to those rules, Mr. Trump cited an obscure clause in the act that allows exemptions if complying with new rules would threaten national security and if the necessary technology is not widely available.

Yet the president approved the waivers even though the equipment was readily accessible and the industry’s national security claims had little detail to substantiate them, documents show.

The Biden administration pushed through the new pollution requirements after evidence emerged about the health threats posed by ethylene oxide, a colorless gas used to make products like plastic soda bottles and to sterilize medical devices like pacemakers.

E.P.A. researchers had concluded that ethylene oxide was 30 to 60 times as carcinogenic as previously thought, particularly for people who live near plants where the gas is made or used. The agency held meetings to warn community members about the elevated risks.

New York Times, 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation of Trump’s Waivers for Polluters, Maxine Joselow and Eric Lipton, Oct. 24, 2026. Chemical plants and other industrial facilities had been required to curb their toxic emissions. A New York Times investigation shows how they got out of it.

They are among the biggest sources of cancer-causing pollution in the United States: chemical manufacturers, steel-making plants, facilities that sterilize medical devices.

In 2024, they were required to take steps to reduce their toxic emissions. That all changed when President Trump returned to office and gave them a pass.

It was the biggest presidential intervention in the Clean Air Act since the bedrock environmental law was enacted more than 50 years ago.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in dismantling regulations designed to protect the environment, resulting in dirtier air and water. Even so, his aid to specific polluters stands out. To understand these efforts, The New York Times reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and conducted more than 70 interviews.

Here are five takeaways from our investigation.Mr. Trump issued more than 200 waivers to some of the worst polluters.

Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from new regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency had adopted during the Biden administration.

The new rules came about because the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to periodically study the latest pollution controls and impose them if they are affordable and effective.

The rules required medical sterilizers, chemical plants and steel facilities to monitor for emissions of cancer-causing gases along their property lines by 2027. If they detected certain levels of the gases escaping into communities, they had to fix the leaks. And they had to post the findings publicly, so that neighbors could see what was in the air.

New York Times, In U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project Emerges, Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. Interviews and documents show a Russian energy giant secretly funded a U.S. firm. The deal has been discussed in talks to end the war in Ukraine.

At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month with President Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Mr. Putin said publicly last year that “we are discussing with our American partners” the possibility of using Novatek technology to produce liquefied natural gas in Alaska.Credit...Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov

Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that in fact, it was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff or Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.

The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.

The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)

Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”

The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatek about bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.

Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.

A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.

Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.

“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said. 

U.S. National  Security, Military

Lev Remembers, Analysis and Opinion:  Putin's Money Was Inside an Alaska Gas Deal, and It Was on the Table With Witkoff and Kushner, Lev Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Three days ago, I told you what Steve Witkoff’s three hours with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg were really about. My sources said it was not about peace for Ukraine. It was about energy. It was about gas. It was about business between Trump’s people and Putin’s people.

Today the Financial Times and The New York Times put a name on one of those deals. Now it is in black and white. And this time, it didn’t take six months for the world to see it.

The project is called Polar LNG, a $25 billion plan to export liquefied natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope. It was built around equipment from Arctic LNG 2, Russia’s flagship Arctic gas project, which the United States sanctioned in 2023. The Russian company behind Arctic LNG 2 is Novatek, a company under partial U.S. sanctions whose owners include Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s oldest friends.

The company’s former chief executive, Joel Riddle, resigned in September. He says he discovered that Novatek was already financing the project and steering its direction before the U.S. Treasury had approved anything, and that he had been told the start-up money came from a company in the United Arab Emirates. Nearly the entire senior leadership walked out after him. Private messages show Novatek’s top executives, including its chief executive Leonid Mikhelson, discussing sending as much as $15 million through the project’s parent company in Abu Dhabi. Novatek now says it wants to become a minority shareholder. Polar LNG denies wrongdoing and calls Riddle a disgruntled former employee who was fired. Documents show he resigned six days before the company sent him a termination letter.

Then comes the part that turns a business story into a national security story. The deal on the table was an exchange: Novatek helps build the Alaska terminal, and in return the United States lifts sanctions on Arctic LNG 2. Putin personally raised the project with Witkoff and Jared Kushner as one of a series of energy deals the White House believes could warm relations with Moscow. The White House has confirmed that people from the project were in contact with the administration. The venture was launched with Gentry Beach, a Texas investor and longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., and it has come under fire over sanctions risk, environmental damage, and competition with a separate Alaska pipeline plan worth around $50 billion.

Sanctions relief for Putin, paid for with an American gas project, discussed in the middle of so-called peace talks. That is what I have been reporting to you, and now it is on the front page.

But Alaska is one deal. What I’m hearing is that it is one piece of something much bigger.

Now let me lay out everything I’ve been reporting, what my sources are telling me now, and who else is in this picture.

I Have Been Reporting This From Day One

My very first letters on this platform, in the spring of 2025, were about Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Putin’s money man, Kirill Dmitriev, and about secret talks to bring Nord Stream 2 back to life. Dmitriev runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. He is the man Putin sends when there is money on the table, and he has been at the center of every one of these conversations.

In November 2025, I told you the 28-point “peace plan” was a Russian document handed to Witkoff. Look at what was inside it: long-term American and Russian deals on energy and the Arctic. Remember that word, the Arctic. In December, Witkoff and Kushner spent nearly five hours in the Kremlin, and I told you it was a business meeting. Two days later, the Treasury eased sanctions on Lukoil.

On September 5 of this year, they sat with Putin in the Kremlin for more than three hours. Three days later, I told you those talks were about business. We later learned Putin pressed them on the sale of Lukoil’s foreign assets, worth around $20 billion, with bidders tied to Kushner, Witkoff and the Trump family. Now we know Putin also put this Alaska gas deal in front of them that same month.

On October 9, my sources told me Witkoff walked out of the Ukraine talks in Miami to get on a call with Trump and Putin. That was confirmed. Right after came the diesel deal, opening the door for Russian fuel. And on Wednesday, after Witkoff’s three hours in St. Petersburg, I told you Nord Stream was discussed, gas was discussed, and control of the energy that heats Eastern Europe was discussed.

Every one of these is the same story. The peace talks are the cover. The energy deals are the business. And sanctions relief is the currency Putin wants most.

I know how this works because I did it. In Trump’s first administration, I was his Steve Witkoff, the man sent to make deals in the shadows. The difference is that back then I was embedded in the cult. I truly believed we were fighting a deep state and saving our country. Witkoff knows exactly what he is doing.

What I’m Hearing Now

Put the routes side by side. Russian gas into Europe through Nord Stream, with Kushner leading talks this month on selling part of the pipeline to an American investor. Russian diesel onto the world market through Trump’s deal. And now Russian technology and Russian money behind American gas shipped out of Alaska. Putin gets paid on every one of them, and the sanctions meant to choke his war machine come off one by one.

Alaska is not the end of it. I’m hearing there are other deals in motion involving Saudi money, Qatari money, Jared Kushner and more of Trump’s inner circle. That should surprise no one. Kushner’s investment fund was built on $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince’s sovereign wealth fund, with Qatari money behind it too, and the secret money for Alaska ran through Abu Dhabi. The Gulf is the bank, the meeting place and the pass-through. I am still confirming the names, and I will bring them to you when I have them nailed down.

And watch Konstantin Sokolov. I first wrote to you about him in September. Sokolov was born in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, and came to America in 1997. He once ran a Russia-focused investment firm that bragged about its close ties to the Kremlin. Last year he gave $11 million to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., and he is one of the donors behind Trump’s White House ballroom. Then the rewards came. With no experience in government, he was put in charge of a $201 million American-backed fund for the “Trump Route” through the Caucasus. And in June, the Treasury gave his company a special license to buy a mine in Armenia from VTB, a sanctioned Russian state bank. Sokolov’s people say he has no relationship with the Russian government. What my sources tell me is that he is a Putin asset, deeply entrenched in Trump world, and his name keeps coming up again and again. Watch him closely.

Presidents Trump and Putin, United As One 

The Dispatch, Opinion: Trump’s Capitulation to Putin Is Undermining U.S. National Security, Michael McFaul, right, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012-14), Oct. 22, 2026. The president’s admiration for the Russian dictator erodes American interests and values.

Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for Russia’s imperial dictator, Vladimir Putin. Shortly after taking office for his first term in 2017, President Trump was asked by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly to defend his respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called a “killer.” Trump replied, “We’ve got a lot of killers.

What, you think our country’s so innocent?” The following year, at a press conference in Helsinki during his first summit with Putin, Trump publicly questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The Russian leader was standing right by his side.

These expressions of affinity for Putin were shocking at the time, but crucially, they did not produce consequential shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The first Trump administration included many senior national security officials who had a different, more accurate assessment of how Putin’s policies threatened American national interests. Trump’s own 2017 National Security Strategy identified Russia (and China) as revisionist powers that “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” Reluctantly, in 2017, Trump also signed a new sanctions law, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, that focused on Russia and other adversaries. His first administration even provided a limited number of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine. The gap between Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Putin and actual policy was real.

Not anymore. No longer constrained by Gens. H.R. McMaster or Jim Mattis, Trump has gradually but consistently turned his effusive admiration for Putin into the most radical shift in American foreign policy in the last century—and maybe ever. Today, under Trump, the United States—a country that once was considered the leader of the free world—is now openly and shamelessly supporting an imperial dictatorship in Russia.

Trump is finally backing up his words with actions—actions that are both immoral and contrary to America’s national interests.

This tragic pivot started slowly after Trump returned to the White House for a second term. As a presidential candidate in 2024, Trump had claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in one day. Once back in power, he and his team seemed to be trying to mediate an end to the fighting. I applauded these efforts at the time. Putin’s barbaric invasion has killed too many people: soldiers and civilians in Ukraine, but also scores of young Russian men, many sent to the front only to become casualties within days and sometimes even hours of their arrival. Russia is losing on the frontline. Ukrainian warriors have stopped the advance of Russia’s invading army and have recently begun taking back chunks of occupied territory. So, Putin has changed tactics, focusing instead on expanding an intensified campaign of attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure. His military now targets Ukrainian civilians on a near-daily basis, while seeking to eliminate their energy and water infrastructure to heighten their suffering during the winter. This terrorism is motivated by the inaccurate belief that a traumatized Ukrainian society would pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate. Who could not support ending such a war?

I cannot say for sure if Trump genuinely was trying to end the war, or whether his desire to improve relations with Putin and do business deals with Russian companies was always the greater priority. What I can say is that his approach to negotiations has been fundamentally flawed and ineffective. Trump and his negotiators—real estate businessmen Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—decided early on that they would give concessions to Putin in the hope that he would stop fighting. For instance, while still allowing American companies to sell arms to Europeans who then transfer them to Ukraine, Trump has ended direct military and economic assistance to Kyiv. Trump has also made it clear that Ukraine could not join NATO while he was president, and he consistently ridicules Zelensky and berates him for not wanting peace. The latter is a talking point Kremlin propagandists could have written. Conversely, Trump hosted Putin for a summit in Alaska in August 2025, personally greeting him on the tarmac with a red-carpet welcome. But none of Trump’s gifts to Putin have produced even a small change in Putin’s commitment to continue his war.

This month, Trump’s pivot toward Putin became more pronounced, with real-world negative consequences for Ukraine. He eased sanctions on Russian diesel, allowing Moscow to release millions of barrels of fuel onto the global market. He then signed an executive order waiving most of the new sanctions and tariffs against Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Act, two days before they were to take effect. Then, most damagingly of all, came the restrictions on SpaceX’s satellite communications service, which Ukraine relies on for battlefield communications and drone operations. Reuters reported that the order to limit access originated inside the White House, although it remains unclear who authorized it. Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have both denied personal responsibility, suggesting they knew how unpopular this decision would be with the public. But the effect on Ukrainian air defenses has been serious. As Zelensky put it: “We couldn’t use a tool that helps protect people. That’s very painful and frustrating.”

It’s the same old playbook—appease Putin and then hope he will kindly end his invasion. It hasn’t worked before; it isn’t working now.

Trump has defended the diesel deal and waiving of sanctions as necessary to keep Putin at the negotiating table. It’s the same old playbook—appease Putin and then hope he will kindly end his invasion. It hasn’t worked before; it isn’t working now. In fact, these new gifts will have the opposite effect. They will encourage Putin to keep fighting, knowing that if he does, Trump will offer him still more concessions. And to make things even worse, we have now learned that Putin has floated the idea to Trump of a meeting among China, Russia, and the United States to deal with the “Ukraine crisis,” just as imperial powers used to do in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Thus, the past week has been one of the darkest in the history of U.S.-Ukraine relations; Trump’s longstanding admiration for Putin has given way to a radically new American foreign policy that puts the United States unabashedly on the side of autocratic Russia and tragically against democratic Ukraine. Trump is finally backing up his words with actions—actions that are both immoral and contrary to America’s national interests.

Call me old-fashioned or idealistic, but I still believe that morality should play a role in American foreign policy. Of course, American presidents and diplomats sometimes must engage with autocrats to advance U.S. interests. I did as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. But we do not have to embrace them as friends or allies, especially imperial dictators like Putin, who uses terrorism and kidnapping as instruments of his war against Ukraine. I do not want my country helping such an evil leader. I want my country to be against imperialism and for sovereignty, to stand against dictatorship and for democracy, to aid those fighting for independence and against occupation.

But it’s not just the right thing to do; it’s also the pragmatic thing to do. Let’s be realistic. Putin is not going to abandon his autocratic partners in China, Iran, and North Korea just because Trump offers him concessions. That is a naïve reading of Putin. He sees the United States as his enemy, no matter how many gifts he gets from Trump.

By trying to appease Putin, Trump is also weakening America’s relationships with our democratic allies and partners in Europe. In this new era of great power competition with China and Russia, our democratic allies are America’s greatest comparative advantage. Together, the free world has far greater economic power and military strength than autocracies, and our democratic values and ideals have significantly more global appeal than those of autocracies. But Trump’s embrace of Putin and his abandonment of Ukraine are weakening these ties.

And Xi Jinping is watching too. As America proves feckless in standing with Ukraine, Xi must increasingly believe that Trump will show similar indifference when it comes to defending Taiwan.

The good news, however, is that the United States is not a dictatorship. We remain a democracy with competitive elections just around the corner. Polls show clearly that the American people do not share Trump’s admiration for Putin. According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in Putin “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” A recent YouGov poll also found that most Americans sympathize with Ukraine, with just 4 percent saying they sympathize with Russia in the conflict. Another recent YouGov poll suggests that more Americans want to increase aid to Ukraine than decrease it. Therefore, I am hoping that early in the new year, with a new balance of power in Congress and Trump fully into his lame-duck era, the House of Representatives and Senate will introduce legislation to provide a new military aid package to Ukraine and another bill to make any business deal with Russian companies illegal until Putin ends his war. Dare President Trump to veto them.

In embracing Putin and abandoning Ukrainians, Trump is out of step with American society. Hopefully, more emboldened and courageous leadership in the U.S. Congress next year will realign American actions regarding Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine with the will of the American people.

Middle East Wars

New York Times, Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say, Edward Wong, Jonathan Swan and Julian E. Barnes, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. The U.S. government has ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave Saudi Arabia. It is also drawing down staff at other missions in the region.

The U.S. government has put employees on heightened alert across the Middle East and moved to reduce personnel levels at embassies and consulates because of intelligence showing Iran is in the advanced stages of planning attacks against Americans, U.S. officials said on Friday.

Intelligence officials raised alarms to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a memo on Friday that warned about the dangers to State Department employees in the Middle East and other regions, the officials said.

The memo, from Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, said that agencies had “received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel. The lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.”ImageTan stone buildings set against a gray sky.The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has been attacked by Iran.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Trump administration confirmed the memo on Friday night through a U.S. official. The move demonstrated the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking the threat, officials said. Axios earlier reported on the memo.

U.S. agencies assess that the threat against Americans in the Middle East and several other countries is at the highest level since the start of the war in February, U.S. officials said.

President Trump and top aides have received regular briefings on the rising threats, which go beyond the Middle East, one official said. Analysts have been examining the intelligence on the threats to U.S. officials, including ambassadors, in the past three weeks. Some material indicates Iran may have operatives in the United States, the official said. The Iranian plans also include potential targets in Europe, U.S. officials said.But another official cautioned that Iran’s ability to carry out attacks in the United States and other territories overseas is limited, and its ambitions to strike are greater than its capability to do so.

The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Mr. Clayton’s office and the C.I.A. declined to comment.

The State Department said through a U.S. official that “when it comes to our staffing at embassies, we constantly evaluate new information about the security environment.”

The official said that the threat of attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen and of “Iranian terror plots targeting U.S. officials” were informing State Department decisions on staffing adjustments for embassies. The missions were already at reduced levels under what the department calls “restricted operating status,” often invoked in conflict zones, the official said.

The State Department on Friday evening updated travel advisories for 13 countries across the Middle East. All of them are at orange level three, which means “reconsider travel,” or red level four, “do not travel.” In a statement on the advisories, the agency cited the potential for Houthi attacks across the region to escalate, and also underscored the persistent threat from drone and missile attacks by Iran.

Major U.S. Sex Scandals, Political Hypocrisy

New York Times, New York Archdiocese Agrees to Settle Sexual Abuse Claims for Over $800 Million, Maya King and Jeffery C. Mays, Oct. 24, 2026. The Roman Catholic archdiocese might now avoid bankruptcy by reaching a settlement with 1,300 people who said they had been abused by clergy members and lay leaders.

The Archdiocese of New York and plaintiffs’ lawyers reached an agreement on a proposed settlement in which the church would pay more than $800 million to settle claims from 1,300 people who said they had been sexually abused by its clergy members and lay leaders.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers said late Friday that they had finalized the settlement with the archdiocese and that all of the plaintiffs had signed off on it.

In an email to the priests of the archdiocese shared with The New York Times, Archbishop Ronald A. Hicks confirmed on Saturday that an agreement had been reached to settle the claims. He said the deal would not be final until the plaintiffs, lawyers and representatives for the archdiocese signed the settlement, which they were scheduled to do in early November.

“We are on the verge of being able to, please God, bring some measure of healing and reconciliation to all victim-survivors,” he said in the message, adding that the agreement “will also allow the archdiocese to turn its full attention once again to its mission of preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, caring for the poor and needy, welcoming the stranger, and educating our children.”

Terms of the settlement would call for each plaintiff to have the option of receiving a lump-sum payment of at least $250,000, or a potentially larger payout after a review of the extent of the abuse each plaintiff has claimed, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

The proposal would end a multiyear saga that threatened to bankrupt America’s foremost Roman Catholic archdiocese. Litigation after the New York Child Victims Act opened the window for claims has been ongoing for seven years, said Jeff Anderson, whose firm, Jeff Anderson & Associates, represents nearly 300 clients who say they were abused.

Intense negotiations about the specific terms of the settlement have gone on for almost a year.

The terms of the proposed settlement required that all 1,300 plaintiffs accept it, and there were some holdouts, extending the timeline for the settlement as lawyers and archdiocese representatives worked to convince them that the proposal was the best deal they could get.

“Tonight, we were able to finalize the settlement with the Archdiocese,” Trusha Goffe, an attorney with Jeff Anderson & Associates, wrote Friday in an email to the firm’s clients. “All of the survivors agreed to the revised deal. This means that the settlement you agreed to will move forward.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they had repeatedly warned their clients that if they did not accept the proposal, the archdiocese would most likely declare bankruptcy, reducing the size of any eventual payout and prolonging litigation that had already lasted years.

To pay for the settlements, the archdiocese reduced its operating budget by 10 percent and sold off some of its most valuable properties, including its First Avenue headquarters and the land it owns beneath the Palace Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side.

Some parishes were also asked to help pay for the settlement. In an April meeting with priests, archdiocese leaders said they expected individual parishes to help raise money to fund the settlement or the archdiocese could face bankruptcy. Some parishioners are concerned about what the settlement will mean for their local church.

Archbishop Hicks sought to soothe some of those concerns in his email to priests on Saturday.

New York Times, Video by Left-Wing Group Claims Lindsey Graham Paid Men for Sex, Annie Karni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Progressive activists released a video of three men making the allegations about the South Carolina Republican, who died in July. The New York Times has not confirmed their claims.

A video released on Thursday by a left-wing online news channel features three men who claim that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died suddenly in July, paid them for sex.

In the 30-minute video released by the Young Turks network, titled “The CLOSETocracy,” one man who identifies himself only by a first name, Kelvin, claims that Mr. Graham paid him for sex when he was 17 and surreptitiously taped him during the encounter.

Another man said he was picked up by a chauffeured car that delivered him to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he said he was paid to have sex and spend the night with Mr. Graham. That man, who is identified in the film as Cory, said he did not realize it was Mr. Graham until months later when he recognized the senator on television during the 2016 presidential race.

A third man said he was paid to have a sexual encounter with Mr. Graham.

Mr. Graham repeatedly denied that he was gay, even as rumors flew about the personal life of a senator who never married. After the release of the video, a spokesman for a conservative group said that Mr. Graham was gay, but dismissed it as an open secret and an attempt to distract voters in South Carolina’s Senate race.

The New York Times has not verified the identities of the men making the claims, or the veracity of their stories. A website promoting the video, called the Lindsey Graham Files, purports to show travel receipts and other documents from the time of the men’s alleged encounters with Mr. Graham.

The man who identifies himself in the video as Cory has also appeared in pornographic productions under the name Sean Harding.

In 2020, he posted online under the name Sean Harding: “There is a homophobic republican senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man. Wondering if enough of us spoke out if that could get him out of office?”

But it was not until after Mr. Graham’s death that he and others in the video went public in naming him and making claims that included allegations that he could not refute and could have resulted in a lawsuit when the senator was alive.

The video release came less than two weeks before the midterm elections, in which Mr. Graham’s sister, Senator Darline Graham, is in a tight race to retain her brother’s seat in South Carolina. Ms. Graham was appointed to finish the remainder of her brother’s term after his death and received President Trump’s endorsement.

A spokesman for Ms. Graham’s campaign declined to comment.

Representative William Timmons, Republican of South Carolina, posted online late Thursday that Mr. Graham was his longtime mentor and friend and that “after 45 years of service to South Carolina and our country, he deserves better than the Left spreading disgraceful lies about a man who is no longer here to defend himself.”

He did not explicitly address the claim that Mr. Graham was gay, but added “the willingness to stoop to homophobic attacks for political gain says far more about them than it ever will about Lindsey.” He said he expected Ms. Graham to win her race by 10 points.

A longtime top aide to Mr. Graham, Kevin Bishop, referred The Times to Mr. Timmons’s post when asked for comment.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican representative from Georgia who broke with Mr. Trump and left Congress this year, called the men who appeared in the video “brave” for telling “intimate details of their personal lives.”

“The worst kept secret in Washington DC came out today because 3 brave men came out and told the truth,” she wrote online.

“We all knew Lindsey Graham was gay. Everyone did,” Ms. Greene wrote. “So everyone is arguing about how this is old news, why now? Or arguing about being gay, and gay issues.”

But the true issue, she added, is “that America’s most powerful leaders keep secrets that comprise them in the most dangerous ways for the security, safety, and prosperity of our nation.”

Cenk Uygur, a co-founder of the Young Turks, promoted his video before its release as a “bombshell documentary” in which he would reveal a Republican senator who used male escorts. But the allegations were greeted with a shrug by some on the right, who called discussions of Mr. Graham’s sexuality the worst kept secret in Washington.

“Dear Democrats, This is why we called him Lady Graham,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, wrote online, using a moniker that circulated widely on social media in 2020 after Mr. Harding first posted the claim that a Republican senator was paying for sex, who he said had the initials “LG.”

“This isn’t an October surprise, we’ve known this for years,” Mr. Kolvet added. “And blaming his sister for the fact Lindsey was a poorly closeted gay man, is only going to backfire. No one cares.”

Mr. Graham, who died suddenly at age 71 of an aortic dissection, never married, and his single status for decades spurred questions about his sexuality. He was aware of the rumors, but always categorically denied that he was gay.

“I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2010. “I ain’t gay. Sorry.”

During his 23 years in the Senate, Mr. Graham, an energetic, omnipresent Washington fixture who condemned Mr. Trump before becoming his top ally in Congress, was a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage.

He voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that barred openly gay people from serving in the military. And he opposed adding a provision to the annual defense policy bill to expand the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: More Signs Of Trumpian Unraveling And Decline, On Alaska: “I’m The One That Said Do It,” More Encouraging Early Vote Data, We Are Prepared Not Scared, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 24, 2026. There is a lot of news today. Let’s get to it…..

Desperate men do desperate things. The polling got worse for them this week. Their battlefield keeps eroding and they -- the Trumpies -- are spending money and campaigning in states like Kansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states he won by 16, 23, and 18 points just two years ago. This months’ jobs and inflation reports were terrible. His failed war that just keeps failing has caused oil prices to soar, again:

Consumer confidence has fallen to the lowest level in 65 years. It is a remarkable and full-throated vote of no-confidence in him and his band of buffoons, extremists, and quislings:

The early vote is also not going their way. Turnout is running above 2022 at this point (bad for them), Dems lead in the early vote by 15 points, 54%-39% (bad for them), and we now clearly seeing a surge of young people, blacks, and Hispanics voting early (really bad for them):

The regime itself has descended into chaos. Savage leaks are flying, internal infighting has spilled out into the streets, people -- usually women -- are getting fired right and left. We got brutal new stories documenting Trump’s corruption and looting this week. A major new Trumpian scandal in Alaska broke overnight. Trump is showing undeniable signs of cognitive decline on the campaign trail as his persistent praise of the bodies and looks of men has become a real and even for Trump just jawdropping thing:

Rejected, repudiated, losing; an historic, world-altering failure; a desperate and unwell Trump is resorting of course to rancid, impulsive, and outrageous fuckery. He has waged a deeply racist campaign against a sitting Rep. Illan Omar, who is black, a woman, and an immigrant. His DOJ just prosecuted another powerful black woman, State Senator Louise Lucas of Virginia. Trump has enthusiastically promoted Vivek’s vile attack on Dr. Amy Acton. Scared and worried he has run into the arms of his big daddy and protector, Vladdy, over in Russia. He launched a keystone cops effort to challenge the vote in California, one that was immediately debunked and discredited (though we have to keep fighting). And now, rattled and addled, the mad king ordered his henchmen at what used to be the Department of Justice to ensure that only the Republican candidate can win the Senate race in Alaska:

Just read what Trump is choosing to spend his time on in these closing days of the campaign. It’s so unhinged:

As we are, to quote our friend Jane Kleeb, prepared not scared, we are fighting all this Trumpian fuckery head on:

And that’s how I want to end today. We are prepared not scared. Pushing through all of his impulsive and desperate efforts to forestall the impending and resounding vote of no confidence in him and his regime the picture that is emerging is one of Trumpian desperation, weakness, and decline. It feels like we are nearing the end of his run. His powers have ebbed. Voters have had it. He has been too wild, corrupt, and crazy. He has done too much damage to the country. He is unfit and unwell. A reckoning is coming, and no one in our history has deserved it more than this terrible, terrible man and the cowardly enablers around him.

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Does Ramaswamy’s Depraved New Ad Mark a New Low in the GOP’s Moral Collapse? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 24, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion.

Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins.

Trump is now saying that he ordered this outrage. There are two Republican Dan Sullivans on the ballot, the first being their actual Republican guy and the other a guy with the same name from a remote part of the state. (The Democrats did NOT put him up to it; he’s just an eccentric Alaskan.)

When Republicans tried to get the second/spoiler Dan Sullivan kicked off the ballot it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that anybody named Dan Sullivan or anything else had the First Amendment right to speak on the issues and run for office. The state is trying to reduce confusion by making it clear on the ballot that the “real” Dan Sullivan is a Republican and the incumbent; the other DS won’t get either designation.But Trump’s subservient DOJ says that’s not enough and if Democrat Mary Peltola wins they’re claiming it’ll be because of “ballot confusion”…and she’s currently leading in the polls by two points.

The same day, AG and former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche refused to promise never to block a state’s certification, so this happening in other states, too, is moving from weird to probable. The US Constitution hands elections to the states, and a federal court has no business pre-rejecting a result that hasn’t happened yet, but the law and the Constitution have rarely stopped this criminal enterprise that’s taken over the GOP from moving ahead. And if they succeed in Alaska, it’s a safe bet they’ll try contesting as many Democratic victories as they can elsewhere. Will the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court again ignore the Constitution and the law to go along with Trump’s efforts to turn America into Russia (remember, as Bette Dangerous points out, 4 of them worked successfully to overturn the 2000 election and deny Al Gore his victory)? Stay tuned…

— The Supreme Court just told New Hampshire’s college students to go find a different ID two weeks before an election, and did it in the name of not changing the rules too close to an election. While Texas allows voters to use a gun permit as ID to vote, in an unsigned one-paragraph order Thursday the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court and an appeals court order so they could forbid New Hampshire college students from using student ID. The so-called “Purcell principle” — long followed by the Court — says that decisions that could influence the conduct or outcome of an election shouldn’t be handed down within 90 days of that election, as Kentanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, saying they shouldn’t now “disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order.” But here we are and this GOP-dominated Court has been doing everything they can to tilt elections toward Republicans for at least 20 years.

— Trump now says he has “the right” to run in 2028 because, you see, the election he lost in 2020 was stolen, so it doesn’t count. He made the claim at a rally Thursday night in Sioux City, claiming that with his constitutional brilliance and great mind he’s studied the 22nd Amendment and concluded, “I have the right to run again” because, he says, Democrats cheated and stole the 2020 election (which he lost by over 7 million votes) from him. There is, however, no “but they cheated” clause, no asterisk, and no loophole for an 80-year-old who’s been hustling “Trump 2028” hats out of the White House gift shop in violation of the Hatch Act. Maybe he’s just trying to grab another headline to distract from the rape allegations against him in the Epstein files, the cost of gas, the dead Americans and the cover-up of the damage to our facilities in the Gulf region, or his capitulation to his master, Putin? Hard to tell and few believe he’ll be in any shape to run for office in 2 years anyway, but he’s an ever-reliable source of outrage and lawlessness.

— Trump spent Thursday night demanding that Mike Johnson refuse to seat Ilhan Omar, and for good measure declared that her party had “conceded” her seat. On his Nazi-infested social media site Trump posted that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar was sworn in “under a fake name” because the ballots don’t have her middle name and therefore she must resign immediately and that Mike Johnson (who’s first name is really James) should force her to surrender her seat in the House. Trump has a long history of hating on Black people, and Black immigrants in particular, but this is particularly disgusting. He also dusted off the decades-old and well-debunked smear that she’d married her brother (another “othering” lie by Republicans). This all comes just a week or so after he had ICE’s HSI agents raid her home and take her phone and computer as Blanche is “investigating” her citizenship. Trump’s argument this time is that when she ran for office the ballot didn’t include her middle name, Abdullahi, but merely said “Ilhan Omar.” Weird that they didn’t object when Gerald Ford, born Leslie Lynch King Jr., and Bill Clinton, born William Jefferson Blythe III, ran for office. Or James Donald Bowman, now known as JD Vance, or Rafael Edward Cruz, now known as Ted, or Nimarata Randhawa now Niki Haley, or Newton Leroy McPherson, now known as Newt Gingrich. The Constitution says that the House is the sole judge of its members’ qualifications, so Trump’s leaning on Mike Johnson in what’s probably a dress rehearsal for a mass refusal to seat victorious Democrats come January 3rd.

— Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms are apparently pushing hard for Trump’s buddy’s son, Flavio Bolsonaro, to win Brazil’s presidential runoff. Yesterday, the corporate accountability group Ekō published a report that claims to have proved that billionaire and Trump suck-up Zuckerberg’s Instagram is flooding Brazilian users’ feeds with pro-Bolsonaro and right-wing content while “actively suppressing Lula’s official campaign account.” Lula’s campaign had already won a ruling from Brazil’s top electoral court ordering Meta to stop this sort of thing and guarantee equal treatment after showing that Meta’s AI would happily generate campaign images of Bolsonaro but refused to make them for Lula. Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders wrote to Zuckerberg Thursday demanding answers. Meta also suspended a pro-Lula WhatsApp group that had gathered 3.3 million members in days, while they blamed a “technical glitch” for tanking the reach of Lula’s campaign and other videos. Keep in mind, this is the same Zuckerberg who flew to Mar-a-Lago, killed fact-checking, and gave Trump $25 million for his personal account. When one American billionaire owns the public square for an entire hemisphere, democracy is in a full-blown crisis.

— Donald Trump looked an NBC reporter in the eye Friday and said he doesn’t “know anything about a stepfather,” which is a remarkable claim about an ad he’s spent three days defending. Ohio Gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is paying for and running an ad calling Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton a liar for claiming her father raped her when she was 12 years old. In fact, the police and a grand jury agreed with the rape allegation at the time decades ago; Acton’s mother chose to leave the state with the rapist (Acton’s stepfather) to avoid his prosecution and imprisonment (he’s now dead) rather than stay and defend her daughter, who hasn’t seen or talked with her mother since she was 12. Trump and Vance are lining up — unsurprisingly — with the rapist and his wife who’s calling Acton a liar, while other Republicans (including Republican Governor Mike DeWine and Senator Jon Husted) are mumbling soft critiques of the ad but still endorsing Ramaswamy after this astonishing display of bad judgment and lack of a moral core. When NBC’s reporter Monica Alba pressed Trump Friday on the sexual abuse at the center of all this, he called Alba a “horrible little reporter,” told her to “be quiet,” and tried to pretend he didn’t know anything about the rapist father. What would you expect from a guy who’s been accused of rape too many times to remember and two juries found sexually abused E. Jean Carrol? Apparently Republicans think this is “owning the libs.” This ad, and the GOP’s response to it, and the ongoing coverup of the Epstein files with 3 million records still being hidden by Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, should tell every American what today’s Republican Party has become: a home for some of America’s most disgusting and despicable humans.

— A new book alleges Jared Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in Gulf money while running Middle East policy out of the White House, and Trump’s considered response is that the reports are “fake news.” Journalist Matthew Cole has a new book coming out soon titled “Princes and Thieves” and Vanity Fair just released an excerpt claiming that Jared Kushner became a signatory on a roughly $750 million account in the United Arab Emirates held through a charity, and the UAE’s ruler separately routed about $1 billion through Azerbaijan to Israel’s central bank at Netanyahu’s urging, money allegedly meant for Kushner’s personal benefit. While Trump calls it fake news, former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt isn’t buying the denials, calling it “financial treason” and demanding Kushner’s immediate removal from every diplomatic assignment as well as a criminal investigation. Even though Kushner holds no official title, doesn’t answer to the Senate or have any confirmation, and openly took $2 billion from a Saudi Prince, he’s still representing the US. That lack of status, by the way, lets him avoid all the disclosures and security checks actual government employees would have to do. Democrats in Congress are salivating over a chance to get Kushner before a committee with a subpoena, although most are betting that Trump and Kushner will simply ignore the law and Blanche will refuse to enforce any contempt of Congress referrals to DOJ. This is getting more like a bad mob movie every day.

— Climate Alert! The American West has lost nearly 300 of its original 1,450 glaciers since the 1960s. A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a real shocker: the total area of glaciers across six western states has collapsed by a third in sixty years, and the loss is accelerating. Some were even leftovers from the last ice age. Many of these glaciers were essentially the reservoirs for downstream towns, farms, and hydro dams, presenting some very real problems that are just now starting to manifest. Meanwhile, Trump calls the climate crisis a hoax, pulled us out of Paris again, gutted the EPA, and chants “drill, baby, drill” at every opportunity. All, presumably, because the industry has shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars at him and his GOP colleagues, who’ve been 100% entirely captured by the oil, gas, and coal oligarchs. Vote!

The Hill, Norman’s son says he’s ‘leaning’ toward voting for Andrews for South Carolina Senate, Sarah Davis, Oct. 23, 2026. The son of GOP Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.), Warren Norman, said Friday he is “leaning” toward supporting the Democratic candidate in South Carolina’s Senate race, pediatrician Annie Andrews.

Ralph Norman, who was defeated by Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the GOP primary, said in a radio interview this week he would back the Republican nominee in the November election but indicated that his family would not vote for her.

The Republican’s son made it official in an op-ed published in South Carolina outlet FITSNews, titled “Why This Lifelong Conservative Won’t Vote for Darline Graham.”

Warren Norman noted in his piece that the decision was not “personal,” extending his sympathy to Graham following the loss of her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

However, he claimed that there was “no true conservative to vote for in this election.”

“If Senator Graham wins, the establishment that backed her will protect her in every primary to come,” Norman wrote. “This seat could be hers for 24 years or more.

“If Annie Andrews wins and doesn’t stand up to her party the way she has promised, South Carolina voters can hold her accountable and replace her with a strong conservative in six,” he continued. “Six years we can hold accountable, or 24 years we can’t. To me, that isn’t a hard call.”

The Republican lawmaker’s son indicated that he was considering a vote for the Democratic nominee in the race instead. Despite disagreeing with Andrews “a lot,” the real estate partner said they agree “on some important things,” like opposing corruption and insurance reform.

“She struck me as genuine, and she has said publicly that she’ll stand up to her own party,” Norman wrote. “That is the standard I’m asking of every candidate, and I intend to hold her to it.

“As of today, I’m leaning her way,” he continued. “It will be the first time in my life I’ve voted for a Democrat in a partisan election.”

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim refuted by other sources

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t hide all the corruption forever, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 23-24, 2026. At 6:07 tonight, the president of the United States and the governor of Florida made a beeline straight to the press that were waiting beside Qatari Air Force One on the tarmac in Fort Myers, Florida.

As they got closer, Donald Trump fumbled with a coin in his hands just as DeSantis grabbed it and thrust it directly in front of the reporters and their cameras. With Donald Trump standing behind him, the right side of his mouth drooping downwards, DeSantis grinned from ear to ear as he showed the journalists the shiny gold-plated coin he had presented to the president, embossed with the words “YOU MISSED BITCHES” and a distorted image of Donald Trump holding up his middle finger.

What was apparently intended to exaggerate his “near-death experience” in Butler, PA, also made a perfect distraction from the news of the rampant corruption in Donald Trump’s administration.

On the eve of one of the most important elections of our lifetimes, Donald Trump is already trying to interfere with the election process before the votes are even counted. Yesterday, Trump’s Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Alaska seeking to delay certification of the Senate election if the results are close between incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and another candidate on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., in case there is confusion over their similar names. The DOJ argues in the lawsuit that if the margin is narrow enough for those potentially confused votes to change the outcome, the state should not certify the results until the issue is resolved.

The Alaska Supreme Court had already addressed this situation after state election officials tried to block Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the ballot, claiming his candidacy was intended to confuse voters. In June, after he challenged the decision in court, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling allowing him to stay in the race, with the state taking steps to prevent any such confusion by making sure the ballot clearly distinguished the two candidates with party designations and an incumbent label. The issue had already been settled by the state’s highest court, but the federal government still filed its lawsuit before a single vote had even been counted.

Derek Muller, a Notre Dame election law professor, described the case as “strange and unusual.” Former DOJ voting rights attorney Justin Levitt said he knew of no legal path for blocking certification simply because the government believed a candidate should not have been permitted to run. Democracy Docket identified this as the first Trump administration lawsuit seeking to block certification of a 2026 midterm result.

Earlier today, reporters had a chance to ask Donald Trump about the case, and he didn’t play his usual game of ignorance. Instead, he admitted he was the one who personally ordered it, saying, “I’m the one who said, ‘do it.’” That is the president of the United States of America admitting to meddling in our elections by personally ordering his DOJ to file a federal lawsuit against a state. All to potentially block the certification of a Senate election his party might lose, simply because he wants them to win instead. It is an insult and an attack on the very foundation of our democratic republic.

This was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the corruption coming out of the White House. We also learned about a different type, this time coming from inside the Trump family. Vanity Fair published an article with details from investigative journalist Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves. His investigation details how Russian military intelligence allegedly hacked the personal iPhone of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, while he was serving as a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term. It also shares a disturbing account of how Dutch intelligence supposedly discovered the breach after flipping a Russian hacker who gave them access to screenshots taken directly from Kushner’s phone. What they reportedly found went far beyond the regular messages that many of us might have on our own phones and allegedly exposed Kushner’s access to at least two foreign bank accounts containing roughly two billion dollars in funds linked to the leaders of Middle Eastern countries and showed that he transferred approximately 700 million dollars, some of which went to a mercenary, a warlord, and a hit man.

Beyond the enormous question of what the president’s son-in-law was doing paying these people and what the payments were for, Cole’s investigation featured four former senior Trump administration officials who told him that they knew of no presidential authorization that would have allowed Kushner to access a foreign government’s bank account. What this investigation alleged was that the president’s son-in-law, who held a security clearance he initially could not even obtain on his own, had access to billions of dollars in foreign government money while his White House position involved helping shape American policy in the Middle East.

Kushner called the allegations “completely insane and never happened.” Trump called it “a totally false story.” Kushner’s lawyers stated that he “does not know if his iPhone was hacked or monitored while serving in the White House.” They threatened legal action, but did not deny the possibility of a hack, which raises an urgent national security question: What did Russia collect, and could it give them leverage over a man who has played such a significant role in Donald Trump’s foreign policy while we are embroiled in a war in the Middle East and supposedly working hard to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine?

That is where we are right now, but we do not have to keep living like this. We do not have to wake up every morning wondering what fresh hell this president has unleashed or what we are going to learn about him trying to interfere in our elections or how much someone in his family or inner circle has profited at our expense.

It’s not just us in the United States being rocked by everything Donald Trump is doing. He continues to cause havoc and mayhem across the entire planet. His increasing instability is making nations rethink so many things, including their own protection, their very survival, not to mention their economies and financial stability. My heart hurts just thinking about the impact this is having outside our borders. I think back to a conversation I had in Hungary with a taxi driver back in 2019 and how he felt like they were just starting to fully recover from the Great Recession all those years later, long after our economy had recovered. And here we are again, causing economic hardship and uncertainty for people who are stuck living through the consequences of our failure in voting this corrupt man back into office.

When I learned that the United Kingdom had launched a nationwide emergency preparedness campaign this week called “Be Ready,” urging every household to stockpile at least three days of supplies, my stomach dropped. The government cited increasing hostile Russian activity, conflict in the Middle East, and major cyberattacks as part of a changed security environment. Without explicitly saying so, the United States is not innocent in its role in creating the very instability these countries are now scrambling to protect themselves against.

Of course, the UK is not the only one doing this. The European Union issued similar guidance last year, and Sweden has also begun building national reserves of food, fuel, and power. CNN reported that the EU’s renewed push for emergency preparedness was driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and also by “the Trump administration’s confrontational approach towards Europe, particularly on contributions to NATO and on the war in Ukraine, which has sparked a race on the continent to shore up its own military readiness.”

Most Americans care about their fellow human beings. They want people to be fed and housed, and they want peace for all people. They do not want wars, and they don’t want our allies suffering. They want to have good relations with our friends around the world. They simply don’t know how this is impacting people around the world. Our news organizations rarely cover news outside the US, especially during the Trump years when there are nonstop scandals coming from inside the White House. That is why it is on those of us who think as globalists to continue speaking out and make sure more Americans know how far Donald Trump’s destruction actually reaches.

We are not just voting for ourselves and the future survival of our country in eleven days. We are also voting for every person on this planet who has been caught in the crossfire of Donald Trump’s reckless decisions. I still believe in our country and the people in it to do the right thing. Donald Trump and his enablers have put us through hell, forcing us to live in a constant state of chaos and uncertainty, but that is going to change very soon. We are going to show up and vote in numbers never seen before and start the slow and painful process of building our country back into one that doesn’t cause fear and instability across the planet. One that stands by our allies, treats other nations with respect, and understands that our actions have consequences for people far beyond our own borders. We are going to vote like our lives and the lives of people everywhere depend on it, because they do. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More News Updates

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump’s Election Takeover Fails in Court, Orders Lawsuit to Block Alaska Results, Berates Female Reporter, and More Major Corruption, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. This morning [Friday], I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia, laying out the documented record in one place, from Soviet bloc surveillance files to waived sanctions and delayed air defense missiles for Ukraine. The response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of you read it, shared it, and sent it to people who needed to see it.

It has also made some people very angry. Since this morning, the attacks on our work have increased significantly. I want you to know that I’m safe, I’m taking the necessary precautions, and none of it will change what we do here. If anything, the pushback tells me the reporting landed exactly where it needed to.

And today’s news only reinforces why this work matters. The Justice Department is suing to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if the Republican loses, and Trump says he personally ordered it. The White House is taking credit for a ceasefire in Ukraine that Pope Leo was publicly pushing for a week ago. And yet, there’s real reason for hope: Trump’s campaign to take over our elections is failing in the courts and with voters, with at least 34 federal rulings against him and a new poll showing most Americans reject his fraud narrative. You’ll find all of it below.

I’m able to do this work because I’m fully independent. No advertiser dictates my coverage. No corporation can pressure me into pulling a story. No political office shapes my reporting. I answer only to you. With the midterms just 11 days away, this is the moment that matters most. If you believe in independent journalism that holds power accountable no matter the pushback, become a paid subscriber today. It’s the single most powerful way to make sure this work keeps reaching the people who need it.

Here’s what you need to know tonight.

Trump’s Campaign to Take Over Elections Is Failing in the Courts and With Voters

Trump’s attempts to seize control of how Americans vote are collapsing in court, with at least 34 federal rulings blocking his efforts. Judges across the political spectrum have ruled against him, including 22 appointed by Democrats and 12 appointed by Republicans, eight of them appointed by Trump himself. His March 2025 executive order requiring documents like a passport to register to vote has been largely blocked, with one judge writing that when it comes to running elections, “the President does not feature at all.” His second order, directing the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots to voters left off a new federal list, was also struck down, with a judge warning it could have disenfranchised millions of citizens. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand, guaranteeing voters can cast mail ballots in the midterms without interference. Ruling after ruling has delivered the same message: the Constitution gives the president no power over who votes or how.

Trump’s Justice Department has lost every single one of its 26 decided lawsuits demanding states hand over Americans’ private voter data. Since May 2025, the department has tried to force nearly every state to turn over complete voter rolls, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, and election officials from both parties have refused. Judges have called the demands baseless, and an Oregon court described as “chilling” the department’s plans to build a nationwide voter database for uses including immigration enforcement. Even a Trump-appointed judge in Maine rejected the department’s attempt to twist a Jim Crow-era civil rights law to justify the grab, saying it would “take a sledgehammer” to the balance Congress created. The administration’s one notable win came when the Supreme Court allowed it to keep using an expanded citizenship-checking program that a lower court had ruled illegal, but even that ruling is not expected to affect the midterms. Taken together, Trump’s legal push to control elections has been rejected at nearly every turn.

Trump’s effort to convince Americans the midterms will be rigged is failing too, with voters overwhelmingly rejecting his fraud narrative. A new YouGov poll for Protect Democracy found Trump hasn’t persuaded most voters, or even a plurality of Republicans, that the election will be fraudulent or that federal intervention is justified. A majority, 56 percent, believe he’s trying to control election rules to ensure Republicans win whether or not elections are fair, while only 37 percent think he wants fair elections regardless of the outcome. Nine in ten voters, including 88 percent of Republicans, say officials have a duty to certify results even when the other party wins. Election denial is also backfiring politically, with 58 percent saying they’d be less likely to support an official who tries to block or delay certification, compared with just 13 percent who’d be more likely. Election denialism remains stuck at roughly one in five voters, and the pollsters called its failure to spread a very positive sign for democracy.

Trump Says He Ordered DOJ Lawsuit to Block Certification of Alaska Senate Race if Sen. Dan Sullivan Loses

The Justice Department has sued to block Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, and Trump says he ordered it. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Anchorage, targets a second candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., whom the DOJ accuses of running to mislead the senator’s supporters into voting for him by mistake. It asks a judge to halt certification if the senator loses and would have won had all of Sullivan Jr.’s votes gone to him instead, pending an investigation into voter confusion. “I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday, calling the second Sullivan’s candidacy “a disgrace.” The suit was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump allies and Jan. 6 defendants before joining the department. It was filed 11 days before the Nov. 3 election, the same day Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters the DOJ never intends to improperly interfere with elections or certification.

The race could decide control of the Senate, and the second Sullivan’s place on the ballot has already been settled by Alaska’s courts. Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, led the August all-party primary with 49.5 percent, followed by Sen. Sullivan at 41.4 percent and Sullivan Jr. at 2.5 percent. Polls show Peltola tied or slightly ahead in a state Trump carried by about 14 points in 2024, with his approval hurt by high fuel prices and an unpopular conflict in the Middle East. Alaska’s Republican election officials tried to remove Sullivan Jr. from the ballot in June, but a state court and the Alaska Supreme Court kept him on. On the November ballot, the senator is listed as the Republican incumbent, while Sullivan Jr. appears with no party label. Sullivan Jr., a former teacher and Forest Service worker, denies any scheme and says he’s exercising his right to run, while Peltola’s campaign says it has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.

Election law experts say the lawsuit has little legal basis and is unlikely to survive. Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said federal law doesn’t let the DOJ block certification, called it one of the worst legal arguments he’s ever seen, and said it seems designed to win a press release rather than the case. David Becker of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research called it an unprecedented federal intervention, noting the Constitution leaves it to states to run and certify their own elections. Democrats warn it signals a broader willingness to contest midterm results, echoing Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee called it a “sham lawsuit” to steal an election. The DOJ says it is acting under the National Voter Registration Act to stop a “frivolous candidacy” from undermining the election’s integrity. The senator’s campaign wouldn’t say whether it supports the suit, saying only that it will let the complaint run its course.

Trump Lashes Out at Reporter Over Ramaswamy Ad Featuring Amy Acton’s Estranged Mother

Trump called an NBC reporter a “horrible little reporter” after she pressed him on his support for Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother. The ad, from Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ramaswamy, features Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar and urging voters not to elect her. NBC’s Monica Alba asked Trump Friday whether the sexual abuse allegations against Acton’s stepfather “mean nothing” to him, noting the mother had stayed with the man accused of raping Acton as a child. Trump asked which outlet she worked for, called NBC “one of the worst” networks, told her to be quiet, and said he didn’t know anything about “stepfathers from many many years ago.” He insisted the ad had “nothing to do with a stepfather,” called the mother “fair game,” and said he would be lucky to have an ad like it. At a rally in Iowa the night before, Trump said Ramaswamy had called him for advice and that he told him, “You’ve got to ride with it.”

Acton’s stepfather was charged with raping her when she was 12, and her mother lost custody of her and her brother. According to police and court records obtained by the Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested in July 1978 after Acton’s biological father reported him, accused of abusing her from December 1976 to April 1978. He pleaded not guilty and was indicted by a grand jury, then skipped a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981; he has since died. Acton, Ohio’s former public health director during the COVID-19 pandemic, has spoken openly about the neglect, abuse, and homelessness she experienced as a child, saying she shares her story to give others hope that they can escape similar circumstances. She told Spectrum News she won’t normalize someone who treats her childhood as “something I’m complaining about.” At a campaign stop this week, a supporter asked if she could give Acton a hug, one sign of the outpouring Acton says she has received since the ad aired.

Ramaswamy is doubling down, while some prominent Republicans have broken with him. Speaking in northeast Ohio Friday, Ramaswamy said the ad was about lying, not childhood abuse, and accused critics of “lying about an ad that is about lying.” He has argued Acton has spread defamatory claims about him and his family, pointing to a Democratic ad in which a man accuses him of promoting an Alzheimer’s drug that didn’t work. But Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed Acton as health director and has endorsed Ramaswamy, said “it’s wrong to run this ad” and called for it to be taken down. The race is one of the most competitive governor’s contests in the country, with Acton vying to become Ohio’s first elected female governor and its first Democratic governor elected in two decades. An election forecaster has already shifted its rating of the race amid the backlash.

Melania Trump Credited With Oleshky Ceasefire as Starshield Confusion and Russian Strikes Continue

The White House is now crediting Melania Trump with brokering a ceasefire in Ukraine, just one week after Pope Leo personally called Vladimir Putin to push for the exact same thing. On October 16, Pope Leo called Putin from his hospital bed to request a ceasefire in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky so desperately needed food and medical aid could reach civilians and those who want to leave could be evacuated. The Kremlin said afterward that Putin supported the Vatican’s effort and would cooperate. Fast-forward to Friday, and the White House announced that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire in Oleshky, claiming she initiated discussions with Russian and Ukrainian leadership to make it happen. The Associated Press reported the White House’s account without any mention of the Pope’s intervention a week earlier. So why is the White House taking credit for an initiative Pope Leo was publicly pursuing days ago?

The situation in Oleshky is dire, and key details of the deal remain unclear. Once home to about 24,000 people, the city has been occupied since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion and now has no electricity, heat, or running water, with mined roads and drones overhead. Around 2,000 residents remain trapped amid severe shortages of food and medicine. Under the plan, a ceasefire would be followed by aid deliveries and then the option for civilians to leave, which Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman called extremely challenging to carry out. Peskov would not say whether evacuees will be taken to Russian- or Ukrainian-held territory, or how long the evacuation will last. The first lady said an impartial American media organization would document the process, and the outlet chosen is Newsmax, founded by longtime Trump friend Christopher Ruddy.

Trump says Elon Musk has restored Ukraine’s military satellite access, but Ukraine says the restrictions are still in place. Ukrainian drones began dropping from the sky in mid-October when Starshield, the military version of Starlink, suddenly cut connections for drones flying faster than 100 miles per hour, disrupting frontline operations and Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian jet-powered drones. The New York Times reported that Trump called Musk last week asking him to restore access, and Trump said Musk “put it back,” though on Friday he said he had not spoken to Musk. Ukraine’s top diplomat in Washington said Friday that nothing had changed and the speed limits remain, while a Ukrainian drone commander described constant interruptions. Who ordered the limits is still disputed: Musk says the U.S. military and ultimately the president decide, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says no one in the administration requested changes, and The Wall Street Journal reported Musk ordered the slowdown himself. Sen. Richard Blumenthal has opened an inquiry, and a bipartisan group led by Sens. Mark Kelly and Thom Tillis urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to expand Ukraine’s Starshield contract so service can’t be cut again.

Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine’s power grid just as peace talks were said to be moving forward. Overnight strikes on energy facilities across six regions knocked out electricity for more than 500,000 people, and the private energy company DTEK said one of its thermal power plants stopped generating power. The attack came days after Trump envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin in St. Petersburg, after which Putin said Russia was ready to resume U.S.-mediated talks with Ukraine in November, with the Kremlin now pointing to Abu Dhabi in the first half of the month. Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” announced October 11, has produced no meaningful results, with Ukraine resuming strikes on Russian refineries after Russia kept hitting its infrastructure. Even U.S. diplomats in Kyiv are uneasy: the embassy’s deputy chief of mission sent staff a memo acknowledging public commentary had left many wondering where the U.S.-Ukraine relationship stands. Zelenskyy says he is ready for a ceasefire but that Ukraine needs strong security guarantees.

Kushner Threatens to Sue Over Report Alleging He Had Access to $2 Billion in Secret Middle East Accounts

A new book excerpt alleges Jared Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in secret bank accounts funded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia during Trump’s first term. The claims come from journalist Matthew Cole’s forthcoming book, “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East,” excerpted by Vanity Fair. According to the report, Dutch intelligence found screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone on a server run by Russia’s military intelligence agency after flipping a Russian operative in 2017, then monitored his phone activity. The report alleges that in 2018, Dutch officials saw Kushner log into an account at First Abu Dhabi Bank that had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. That account, held by a UAE government-funded charity, allegedly took in about $750 million, with Kushner listed as a signatory but not the owner. At the time, Kushner was serving as a senior White House adviser.

The report also alleges a second account in Israel received about $1 billion intended for Kushner’s personal benefit. According to the excerpt, the two accounts grew out of an idea by Gulf royals to create a slush fund to help advance the Trump administration’s foreign policy goals, an idea that eventually fizzled. A source quoted in the book says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged Kushner to have the money deposited in Israel. The report says Kushner communicated with Netanyahu about the transactions through then-Ambassador David Friedman, who called the allegations about him “100% false.” As a White House employee, Kushner would have been required to disclose accounts he could access, which is why the allegations carry potential legal weight if proven. The allegations have not been established as findings of wrongdoing.

Kushner, his lawyers, the White House, and Trump have all forcefully denied the report. Kushner called the claims “completely insane,” said they “never happened,” and noted the report included no bank statements, wire records, account numbers, or transaction dates. His attorney Chad Mizelle said the team sent the publisher a 13-page letter denying the allegations before publication and now intends to pursue legal action against those responsible. White House officials called the story “baseless smears” and fiction, and said it relied on anonymous sources who never saw the alleged events firsthand. Trump told reporters Friday it was “a totally false story” and “fake news.” House Oversight Committee Democrats, meanwhile, said Kushner must answer the questions publicly, calling it the latest in a series of allegations that he has been selling foreign policy to the highest bidder.

Other news:

The Trump administration has dropped some Canada tariffs, according to Sen. Susan Collins, in a move seen as an implicit acknowledgment that the trade war could be hurting Republicans before the midterms. Collins, who faces a tough re-election fight in Maine, announced she secured exemptions from 50 percent duties on certain agricultural and forestry products, including items crucial to Maine’s blueberry, potato, apple, and seaweed growers. The exemptions also cover packing materials, refrigeration equipment, labeling machinery, and other supplies that she said farmers can’t easily get from American suppliers. Her announcement credited Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick but did not mention Trump, who has repeatedly claimed the U.S. needs nothing from Canada. The 50 percent tariffs were imposed after Canada walked away from trade talks in August, and other Republicans, including Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, have said they want the trade war “wrapped up.” Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has turned to other partners and is set to sign a historic deal making Canada the European Union’s first-ever “associate member.”

A personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine is being hailed as a “game changer” after cutting the risk of the cancer returning or causing death by 42 percent. In the late-stage trial of 1,137 Stage 3 melanoma patients who had their tumors removed, 82 percent of those who got the vaccine plus the immunotherapy drug Keytruda had no recurrence after two years, compared with 70 percent who got Keytruda alone. The vaccine, developed by Moderna and Merck, is built from each patient’s own tumor genome to train the immune system to hunt down remaining cancer cells, and patients received their custom doses in a little over nine weeks on average. Side effects were mild, similar to those of COVID vaccines, which experts called a major advantage over past combination treatments that caused serious immune reactions. Some experts urged caution, noting the benefit over Keytruda alone is modest, the data hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and 17 percent of screened patients didn’t have large enough tumor samples to make a vaccine. Researchers are already testing the approach in advanced melanoma and in bladder, kidney, and lung cancers.

An Ohio father was found guilty of murdering a retired sheriff’s deputy hours after watching police body camera video of his son being fatally shot. Rodney Hinton was convicted Friday of charges including murder for striking and killing Hamilton County Special Deputy Larry Henderson with his car in May 2025. Earlier that day, Hinton had been called to a police station to view footage of a Cincinnati officer shooting his 18-year-old son, Ryan Hinton, who police said was armed and fleeing from a reportedly stolen car. Hinton’s defense sought a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, citing his mental health history, while prosecutors said he accelerated to over 43 miles per hour and steered toward Henderson as the deputy tried to step out of the way. Henderson had retired about five months earlier and was directing traffic near the University of Cincinnati during graduation. Hinton is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 16.

U.S. consumer sentiment has fallen to near its lowest point on record as Iran war-driven prices sour Americans’ view of the economy days before the midterms. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index slipped to 48.0 in October, the second-lowest reading since the survey began and just above the all-time low of 44.8 set in May, shortly after the war with Iran started. Sentiment is now 10 percent lower than a year ago and 15 percent lower than in February, before the conflict began, with the survey’s director saying purchasing power continues to dominate how consumers see the economy. The decline was driven largely by independents, a key swing-voter group, whose sentiment plunged from 47.7 to 42.4, while Democrats and Republicans saw slight improvements. Since January, the share of Republicans saying high prices are hurting their finances has jumped 52 percent, compared with 27 percent for independents and 15 percent for Democrats. Americans now expect inflation of 4.7 percent over the next year, up from 3.4 percent in February, as Trump’s approval hits a record low in Reuters/Ipsos polling and Republicans risk losing control of Congress.

The Justice Department has charged two former top FBI officials, frequent targets of Trump allies, with lying to Congress about the Hunter Biden investigations. Nikki Floris, former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and Bradley Benavides, who worked on election security and foreign influence, each face one count of a rarely charged crime that can be difficult to prosecute. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said the two surrendered Friday and alleged they lied about their roles in the Foreign Influence Task Force and the Hunter Biden probes. The case was brought by criminal complaint, not grand jury indictment, in a city where grand jurors have rejected several Trump-era cases, including an attempt to indict six Democratic members of Congress. Floris, the FBI’s security lead for the 2020 election, has been criticized by Republicans who allege FBI officials buried a report on Chinese election interference, which her lawyers and intelligence officials say was a standard administrative decision. Her attorneys called the charges “nonsense,” saying they were filed on “the say-so of politicians” just before an election.

Trump’s border chief is defending plans to build a wall in Texas’ Big Bend region despite a court-ordered pause and bipartisan opposition. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told the Associated Press that fortifying the border is “non-negotiable” and warned Big Bend would be “completely overrun” if left without barriers while other areas are walled off. Landowners, local businesses, environmentalists, and some Republican lawmakers argue the $46 billion project is wasteful and destructive in a region with historically low migrant crossings. A judge ordered construction in the region halted this month, and the administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift that order. Scott said plans for Big Bend National Park won’t include tall steel walls, after bulldozers seen tearing up ground there in August sparked an outcry. He says the overall wall is ahead of schedule, with about 12 miles built per week and the primary wall set to be finished by the end of 2027.

The Mississippi police officer who fatally shot 1-year-old Kohen Wiley has resigned, days after the state ruled the shooting justified. Hunter Foster left the Senatobia Police Department shortly after Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office called the June 14 shooting a “justified” use of force. State investigators say officers responding to a shoplifting report at a Walmart tried to stop a fleeing car, the driver nearly hit an officer, and an officer fired, killing Kohen, who was in the vehicle. Kohen’s mother, represented by Ben Crump, disputes that account, saying they had gone to buy diapers and that she held her baby up to show officers he was in the car. Newly released body camera footage shows officers approaching with guns drawn and an officer firing into the front passenger window as the car pulled away from him. Foster’s lawyer says he resigned to help the community heal and insists he didn’t know a child was in the car.

U.S. airlines are choosing higher fares over fuller planes as soaring fuel costs squeeze profits. Jet fuel prices have jumped roughly 90 percent since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began in February, rising from $2.43 to $4.63 a gallon on the Gulf Coast. Across Delta, United, American, Southwest, and Alaska, passenger revenue rose 18 percent in the third quarter even though passenger traffic grew less than 1 percent. U.S. airfares climbed nearly 23 percent year over year through September, far outpacing overall inflation of 3.6 percent, and airlines are still pushing new fare hikes. Airport security screenings fell nearly 3 percent in the quarter, raising questions about whether high prices are starting to keep travelers home, though executives insist demand remains strong. Despite record revenue, Delta and Southwest have cut their earnings forecasts and American expects a full-year loss.

The Oregon father who stopped a school shooter says he’s haunted that he couldn’t save everyone. Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter in Bend, ended up near Silver Rail Elementary on Oct. 15 only because he changed his lunch plans to go home for leftover tacos with his wife. He saw a gunman opening fire on a motorist and a woman mowing the school lawn, grabbed the handgun from his truck, called 911, and crawled into the school through a shot-out window, believing it would be the last thing he ever did. He found the 16-year-old shooter struggling with a teacher for his gun and fatally shot him, after the attacker had already killed a teacher and three young children. Police have credited his quick action with stopping the attack, but Giamanco, whose two daughters attend the school, says he can’t sleep and keeps reliving the screams. He says he wants to apologize to the families of the children who died for not saving them.

Israel has launched what critics call a campaign of collective punishment in Hebron after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a shooting near a checkpoint. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a siege on Hebron and nearby Halhul, promised mass home demolitions, and said residents of the gunmen’s neighborhoods would be forced out. Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly compared the plan to Gaza and to Jenin refugee camp, where nearly 20,000 people have been displaced, and Netanyahu said the largest West Bank military operation since 1967 is “on the way.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich posted a video in front of a bulldozer demolishing a Palestinian home, saying it was meant to “exact a price,” though no link was claimed between its owners and the attackers. Israel’s high court issued a temporary order halting the demolitions after human rights lawyers argued they violate international law. The escalation comes days before Israeli elections on Tuesday, with polls suggesting the governing far-right coalition could lose its majority.

Tech leaders are warning of a “vulnerability tsunami” after AI helped uncover a massive security flaw that may have left most of the internet exposed for years. Researchers used AI to find severe bugs in PHP, a programming language so widely used that some experts estimate 70 percent of all websites were at risk. Government and private websites across the U.S. and U.K. went offline temporarily to patch the flaws, and the NSA urged every site running PHP to update immediately. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said hacking attempts exploded from thousands before the announcement to millions afterward, and warned the next two years will be “incredibly fraught.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he no longer thinks every bug can be patched, and Anthropic’s deputy chief information security officer warned there won’t be enough time to fix critical infrastructure. Security researchers called it among the most severe vulnerabilities in software history, saying the flaws had existed for decades but were nearly impossible for humans alone to prove exploitable.

Epstein-linked billionaire Glenn Dubin has stepped down from the board of New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, which features heavily in the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Dubin, a hedge fund founder who once called Epstein a friend, had served on the board since 2007, and his wife, who dated Epstein before their marriage, also left the medical school’s board this year. Mount Sinai says their terms simply ended and they didn’t seek re-election, and won’t say whether its internal review of Epstein ties played any role. The files show Epstein’s donations gave him “VIP” status at the hospital, including an incident in which a Mount Sinai surgeon appears to have stitched up a young Russian woman’s forehead inside Epstein’s townhouse after she was injured on his island. Rep. Thomas Massie recently named Dubin on the House floor as one of 14 Epstein “co-conspirators” who should be investigated. A spokesperson for the Dubins says that had they known of Epstein’s conduct, they would have cut ties long ago.

Severe flooding in the Four Corners region has triggered rooftop rescues and mass evacuations across Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. In New Mexico’s San Juan County, National Guard boats, helicopters, and amphibious vehicles pulled people from rooftops and homes with three to four feet of water, as rivers kept rising past forecast levels. About 600 households were ordered to evacuate in Farmington, the region’s largest city, and a county spokesperson said even the local sheriff was close to losing his home. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis declared a disaster emergency in 11 counties, with mandatory evacuations along four rivers, while in Hurricane, Utah, floodwaters swamped about 80 homes and 50 RVs. The flooding follows two months of heavy rain that ended a summer of drought, leaving the ground too saturated to absorb more. At least one person has been injured, including from tornadoes that tore through Arizona earlier in the week.

More On Russian War Against Ukraine

The Geo Network, News and Opinion: Japan Just Stepped Into Ukraine… And Putin’s Drone War COLLAPSED , Staff Report, Oct. 24, 2026. Moscow is fuming after Japanese tech giant Terra Drone officially delivered its first state-backed batch of interceptor drones to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency on October 14, prompting Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova to threaten Tokyo with severe countermeasures.

Built via underground mobile workshops across Ukraine and powered by Japanese Terra DFC flight controllers, the $3,000 vertical-takeoff Terra A1, fixed-wing Terra A2, and instant-launch KT-1/KT-2 interceptors are now wiping out nearly 70% of propeller-driven Russian Shahed swarms—saving Ukraine’s $4 million Patriot missiles.

Even worse for the Kremlin, after Putin visited the disputed Kuril island of Iturup and deployed Bastion missiles, Tokyo signed mass-production deals for the Terra B1 and Ukrainian SkyFall P1-SUN "JetKiller" interceptors, building an 80,000-drone SHIELD network that threatens both Russia’s Pacific stronghold and Beijing’s Taiwan strategy. Subscribe to The Geo Network for heavy, no-nonsense OSINT and tactical geopolitical analysis.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 23, 2026 [Musk, Trump Helping Russia], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.

An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.

Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”

U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.

Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.

Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.

It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.

On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.

A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.

In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.

The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.

The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”

The Contrarian, Weekly Pro-Democracy News Roundup and Comment: Headed to California to Fight Trump’s Election Desperation, Norman Eisen, right, Oct. 24, 2026. As I write this, I’m packing my bags and my briefs (the legal kind). Next week, I’ll be in federal court in California to help argue against Donald Trump’s latest effort to sabotage our elections: his efforts to disrupt California voting using a demonstrably junky list of 20,000 supposed unauthorized voters.

What rubbish! My pro-democracy litigation colleagues and I defeated Trump’s prior election-denial initiatives, and we will vanquish this one as well. Indeed, I think he knows he’s going to lose here and in his other crazy lawsuits, including the one he just filed in Alaska. He is doing all this for one reason alone: to lay the foundation for his post-election sour grapes.

Let’s begin with California before we head up north to Alaska. Last week, while voting was already underway, Trump’s Department of Justice demanded that Los Angeles County set aside and refuse to count the ballots of more than 20,000 people it claimed were ineligible to vote. The evidence? A thumb drive full of names, assembled using opaque methods and unreliable citizenship data that the administration has refused to explain. The county tested a sampling of the data on the list and proved it was unreliable.

When California declined to play along, the DOJ sued the state — and now we’re fighting back. We at Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF), alongside our wonderful partners at the Campaign Legal Center, are intervening on behalf of LULAC and the NAACP to ensure eligible voters aren’t disenfranchised based on bogus allegations. In our filings in the case, we explain why Trump will lose, including because the law does not allow you to sit on these issues and then come swooping in weeks before an election. There is a hearing in the case on Tuesday, but that is not fast enough for the DOJ, which is asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule before then.

Either way, the DOJ is going to lose. But the case is about a whole lot more than just those 20,000-plus voters or the applicable law. It’s about a rogue administration trying to manufacture suspicion around legitimate votes, sow chaos in the run-up to an election, and lay the groundwork to challenge results it doesn’t like. That’s why we and the other lawyers in the case are waging the fight to stop this in court. And that is why we, with many others, are working around the clock to protect Americans’ right to vote from coast to coast.

My election-protection work in this and so many other cases is enabled by the generous and enduring support of our paid Contrarian subscribers. If you already are one, thank you for helping sustain what we do. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please consider doing so to support our efforts as the election fast approaches.Subscribed

In other California news, Trump’s DOJ has gone beyond the initial letter to Los Angeles County and reportedly sent letters to counties across the state, making the same unfounded claims and threatening criminal prosecution if its baseless demands are not met. To prove it means it, the DOJ has also charged 28 California residents with alleged election-related crimes. Note that this is a small fraction of the over 20,000 claimed in the civil lawsuit and it appears to have swept in some innocent voters. That and the timing of the charges makes clear that, like the civil case, the motive is to intimidate voters.

All of that is atrocious, but Trump’s new Alaska lawsuit is even less meritorious, if you can believe it. His favored GOP senatorial candidate, Dan Sullivan, is on the ballot with somebody else named Daniel Sullivan. The administration has sued, seeking to block the certification if GOP Dan Sullivan loses, and Trump is proudly taking credit for the idea. The lawsuit is utterly meritless because there is no law that allows Trump to file this kind of a case. On the contrary, these kinds of election issues are the province of the state, and the Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled that both candidates can be on the ballot. Certification is also a state issue. The case is a dead loser.

What is causing this freakout in the courts? Perhaps it’s early-voting numbers.

Despite the ongoing attempts at election sabotage and voter intimidation by Trump and his cronies, voters are already turning out in dramatic fashion for this midterm. As of this morning, the early vote was more than 25 million people and counting — setting records across the country. In Texas, for example, early voting is up 74 percent from 2022; in Kansas, it’s more than doubled. Early-voting data from key states also points to strong Democratic enthusiasm, building on a wave of increased Democratic participation in primaries across the country earlier this year. Of course, there is still a ways to go until Election Day, but these early signs are encouraging and should motivate us all to vote and to urge our family, friends, and neighbors to do the same. Every vote counts.

Whatever the cause of the Trump DOJ’s panicked meddling, we’re not going to let it happen. Last week, I shared a Washington Post column talking about the success of our legal resistance pushing back against Trump’s sweeping campaign to change the rules of the 2026 midterms. This week, the Financial Times detailed how hundreds of lawyers across the country are gearing up for the election. The article highlighted that DDF has enlisted more than a dozen national law firms to support our election-protection strategy, with draft legal complaints prepared and ready to file at a moment’s notice.Subscribed

Of course it’s not just my colleagues at DDF and DDA. Many others around the country are launching their most ambitious efforts yet. LULAC launched its largest-ever in-house voter-protection initiative. The ACLU also launched a historic election-safeguarding effort and has poured millions into voter education initiatives across the country. Common Cause launched its 2026 Election Protection program, mobilizing thousands of volunteers and legal experts. The list of extraordinary initiatives underway across our pro-democracy ecosystem goes on.

Above all, this coalition includes our state attorneys general. As I told the Guardian in an article about their efforts, I had the privilege of attending two state AG tabletop exercises and some of their online meetings. In all of my years working with the state AGs, I have never seen such preparedness, particularly for midterm elections. Trump is up against all of that — and all of you. That’s because your paid Contrarian subscriptions help make possible all of my legal work as well as the amazing journalism every week. Here’s my weekly roundup, so you can see for yourself.SubscribedMidterm watch (and beyond)

They Want Us to Fear the Ballot. We Can’t Give Them That Victory.

Diamond Brown and Jonathan Barry-Blocker wrote on the Trump regime’s desperate lengths to make Americans question whether they can safely cast a ballot — and how not to let them fool us. “The people trying to make voting harder are counting on confusion to do some of their work for them. Let’s give them something else to worry about.”

Words & Phrases: ‘Independent’?

Jennifer Rubin wrote on Sen. Susan Collins’s long-held “Independent Mainer” brand, under which is a far more apt label: coward. “Pick a topic — the Iran war, ICE funding, Kash Patel’s nomination, etc. — and Collins was never ‘independent’ enough to thwart Trump’s agenda.”

Elect Candidates Who Will Ban Presidents from Profiting in Office

Virginia Kase Solomón and Abigail Bellows wrote on a candidate pledge to support the banning of presidential profiteering — like, you know, the fact that Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025 alone. “We need a collective movement of voters to demand accountability from every candidate seeking to represent us.”

Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad Must Not Be Minimized

Shalise Manza Young wrote on the damning shame of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s line-crossing attack ad against his Democrat opponent, Amy Acton, which involved a shocking dismissal of her account of childhood sexual assault. “In nearly any other timeline … this attack would end Ramaswamy’s bid for governor.”

Did Jon Ossoff Take 2028 off the Table?

Jill Lawrence considered the near-future paths for one of the Democrats’ fastest rising stars. “Ossoff is not trying to be anyone’s nice guy, and he keeps landing lines that get at truths that Democrats are desperate to hear.”The global view

What Do the Israeli Elections and Houthi Attacks on Saudi Arabia Mean for the U.S.?

Council on Foreign Relations expert Steven Cook joined Jennifer Rubin to break down the recent headlines coming out of the Middle East, including Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia, Israeli elections, and the latest on Iran. “I think that successive administrations, both Democrats and Republicans, haven’t asked the hard questions about what it is that’s important to the United States in the Middle East.”

Rep. Adam Smith: Trump Should Face Impeachment

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) joined Jennifer Rubin to discuss what he says is clearly ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Trump’s dangerous relationship with Vladimir Putin, and oversight of the Pentagon’s actions in Iran and Venezuela. “It’s all part of Trump being a fascist dictator instead of democratically elected president.”

Brazil’s Election Is About More Than Brazil

Roberto Valadéz wrote on Brazil’s upcoming election, which will either be the greatest coup of a far-right wave across the Americas or see Brazil remain a democratic holdout and key hindrance to the “Donroe Doctrine.” “Security does not require surrendering freedom and prosperity should not depend on a political savior.”Fighting back

Meta Tried to Censor No Kings. They Only Made Democracy Forces Stronger.

In the wake of Meta suspending the No Kings instagram account without warning and with no feasible explanation, Jennifer Rubin spoke with Indivisible’s Ezra Levin about Meta’s history of cozying up to Trump — and how it makes this year’s push for early voting more important than ever.

This week, we featured last Saturday’s No Kings Vote Early rallies from coast to coast.

Party at the Polls; Become an Election Protector

In this week’s Calls to Actions: ways to turn Election Day into a party for turnout, how we can guard against post-election turmoil, how to join a union day of action, fighting for reproductive freedom, keeping gun control central, and more!Culture, Cartoons, & Fun Stuff

This week, our cartoonists looked at overlording (The Deep State, Michael de Adder; Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling); overstepping (Don’t Tread on Us, Nick Anderson; Clearing the Track, Michael de Adder); and overselling (To the Highest Bidder, Nick Anderson).

A Film over Fifty Years in the Making Has Never Felt More Urgent

Meredith Blake wrote on “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a filmed chronicle of a 1972 gathering of luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance that is as historically essential as it is engaging. “It’s a reminder that no movement is a monolith — nor should it aim to be.” 

New York Times, She Planned to Protest Trump. She Didn’t Plan on Getting Punched, Jessica Contrera, Oct. 24, 2026. Blake Miley yelled “fascist” as President Trump spoke at a midterm campaign rally. The violence that followed “was not right,” she said.

The night before President Trump spoke in Youngstown, Ohio, this month, Blake Miley stayed up past 4 a.m., cutting out felt letters for a T-shirt that would say “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”

The next evening, she went to the rally and stood up halfway through, revealing her shirt and yelling, “Fascist, fascist!” Almost immediately, Ms. Miley, 29, was tackled, held down and punched by male rally-goers as the president mocked her from the stage, calling her “scum,” “low-class,” and “a fat guy.”

As Mr. Trump barnstorms the country hoping to revive his base ahead of the midterm election, he is returning to an old habit: heckling protesters and encouraging violence against them.

In Georgia last week, he expressed his love for a supporter who had responded to a protester by “slapping the guy around,” and promised to bring the slapper to Washington. In South Carolina on Wednesday, he praised an “incredible” punch that a rally-goer landed on another protester, saying, “He got whacked, man!”

VideoTrump Supporters Tackle Protester at Ohio Rally0:52Blake Miley was tackled by several Trump supporters at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, after she yelled “fascist” and revealed a shirt that read “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”CreditCredit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Ten years after Mr. Trump shocked some voters by saying he would personally like to punch a protester in the face at one of his rallies, these skirmishes are now met by many with a shrug. Ms. Miley, who is identifying herself publicly for the first time, said she suspects that no one in power much cares that she got beaten up.

“I knew there was a really good possibility that this would happen,” she said. “But I don’t blame myself. It is not right what they did to me.”

Ms. Miley attended the rally alone, and had intentionally seated herself among people who seemed older, she said. She hoped it would keep her safe. But as soon as she started yelling, a man grabbed for her neck and then shoved her backward, video of the episode shows. When she stood back up, another man appeared to pull her to the ground, put her in a headlock, yank her hair and punch her in the face.

She remembers being hit twice, unable to get up until Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies intervened about 30 seconds into the brawl.

“What he doesn’t know is that his mother and father voted for me,” Mr. Trump continued about Ms. Miley, who is a woman. “Oh, he looks so terrible. And he’s going to get home and he’s going to get smacked.”

The deputies escorted Ms. Miley out of the arena. The men who attacked her were left alone. One raised his fists and high-fived those around him.

In the arena’s parking lot, Ms. Miley was shaking so severely that onlookers called her an ambulance. She said she spent a few hours at the hospital, was discharged, and drove in a daze to her mobile home north of Columbus. She threw her Epstein shirt in her closet and collapsed onto her bed.

Back in Youngstown, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Department was getting flooded with angry calls from people who had seen video of the incident, demanding to know why no one had been arrested. The sheriff, Jerry Greene, said he had as many 800 phone messages, many of them containing raw abuse.

Video footage, Sheriff Greene said, clearly showed a woman being punched in the face. “I know what people saw, and if I saw that video, too, I’d be like, ‘My God, why didn’t the police do anything?’”ImageDonald Trump does his dance.Donald Trump has encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Sheriff Greene, who had changed parties to become a Republican in 2023, said that he is, in fact, doing something. He reviewed body camera footage, which he said shows that his deputies were pushing through the crowd to reach Ms. Miley and did not witness the punch.Get updates when new midterm election polls are added to our poll trackers. When new polling data drops we’ll send an update straight to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.

He has identified three men who he said took part in the assault, including a New Jersey resident who said in a now-deleted Facebook post that he and two friends had “subdued her and threw her to the concrete.” Investigators believe the other two men, including the one who threw the punch, are local; none could be reached by The Times.

The sheriff said that all three would be interviewed in coming days. He is waiting for medical records from Ms. Miley’s trip to the emergency room, he added, to determine whether her injuries were severe enough to warrant felony charges instead of misdemeanors.

Three days after the rally, one of the sheriff’s investigators tracked down Ms. Miley through her mother, who, contrary to Mr. Trump’s presumption, does not vote.

She had not told her parents she was going to the Trump rally. Though she had been to a few local protests before, facing down the president and his most fervent supporters directly was out of character for Ms. Miley, who spends most of her days at home.

She frequently has seizures, she said, and after years of passing out while working at warehouses, nursing homes and retail stores, she has not held a job since April. Lately, she relies on financial help from her boyfriend, who works in an auto-parts store, and her mother, who is a nurse.

“Most days are quite monotonous for me,” she said. “I get up. I might wash dishes or do laundry. I work on my art.”

When she scrolls, her feeds seem to constantly be filled with news about Mr. Trump and how he is changing the country.

She is worried about the prospect of losing Medicaid, which is likely to happen next year unless she starts working, volunteering or going to school 80 hours per month under a new law that Mr. Trump championed. She is worried about the cost of gas and groceries for her grandparents, who are still working at ages 79 and 82. But Ms. Miley is particularly bothered about the millions of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, she said, because of her own experiences with abuse in a past relationship.

She has watched every documentary she can find on Mr. Epstein, who before his arrest and subsequent suicide routinely communicated with politicians, celebrities and business executives — including Mr. Trump. Many of their names appear in the files of documents, some of which the Justice Department started releasing, with redactions, last year after months of resistance from the president.

Most days this year, as she waited for her boyfriend to come home for dinner, Ms. Miley felt as though she could do little about the actions of Mr. Trump. But this month, a video came across her TikTok feed of a protester interrupting a Trump rally in Vandalia, Ohio, and being escorted out.

It was something simple, something doable.

The president, she realized, would be back in her state just a few days later.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Crimes Davey Hearn Claims Jeanine Pirro May Have Committed, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 24, 2026. Weaponized DOJ.  As a number of outlets have reported, Davey Hearn’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, has requested the DOJ and DOI Inspector Generals investigate how Hearn got charged for damaging the reflecting pool that Trump’s no-bid contractors damaged.

The existing coverage focused on the response DOJ IG Don Berthiaume (DOI IG’s Director of external affairs basically said, sure, we’ll read your letter) sent to Bromwich, stating that Office of Professional Responsibility, not DOJ IG, would have jurisdiction, a dumb jurisdictional that Inspectors General (including Bromwich when he was DOJ IG) have attempted to address going back decades.

But I want to look at something else Bromwich did: Lay out the crimes that Jeanine Pirro and her attorneys may have committed.

It starts in the first letter, where Bromwich not only lays out Pirro’s highly inappropriate press conference and the lies DOJ told in their motion to dismiss, but also described something I was not aware had occurred: when Hearn’s defense expert showed up to inspect the reflecting pool, Pirro mobbed him and pressured him to provide her with his assessment.

Beyond these instances of improper conduct, additional misconduct was committed at the highest levels of the USAO-DC. While the government’s own motion to dismiss places U.S. Attorney Pirro, right, at the Reflecting Pool on July 17, 2026, the motion does not describe what else occurred there. Accompanied by a group of armed government agents who positioned themselves around defense counsel’s expert, the U.S. Attorney personally approached the expert while he was conducting his inspection and questioned him about his conclusions, the results of his work, and why he was present. Even after the defense’s expert advised the U.S. Attorney that he could not speak to her about the matter—and members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask him such questions—the U.S. Attorney repeatedly pressured the defense expert to provide her with information. Defense counsel was given no notice that the encounter would take place and was not present for it, and the government has never produced any report, note, or record of the exchange. A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant’s testifying expert, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence—she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive. The DOJ OIG should determine who was present at this encounter; what was said by Ms. Pirro, the defense expert and others; whether the encounter was recorded or reported, and whether anyone in the USAO-DC office considered the propriety of it before or after the fact.

That first letter also reveals there was some kind of discussion between the FBI case agent and the National Park Service witness that, Hearn asserts, lied about what happened, but Hearn got no record of that meeting.

In the second letter, as part of an argument that DOJ IG can investigate if a crime is suspected, Bromwich lists out three DC and two Federal crimes that may have been committed. It describes that Pirro herself may have obstructed the case or made false statements.

Third, U.S. Attorney Pirro’s conduct prior to and at the time of the indictment constitutes evidence of obstruction that must be further explored by an independent investigation. As discussed in our October 6 letter, U.S. Attorney Pirro violated multiple ethical rules governing her conduct during the press conference in which she announced the charge against Mr. Hearn, including falsely characterizing the evidence against Mr. Hearn. Then, on July 17, 2026, Pirro engaged in inappropriate conduct toward the defense’s expert.17 DOJ OIG must explore whether the U.S. Attorney took these actions corruptly with the intent to influence the jury pool and/or witnesses, or otherwise obstruct the due administration of justice.

Finally, in addition to the specific evidence of obstruction described above, the OIG should investigate false statements in the government’s July 31 Motion to Dismiss, in which it represented that its personnel first learned of widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool on July 17, a representation flatly contradicted by the government’s own document production, which indicates that they knew of this information well before July 17, and even before seeking the indictment on July 2.

Then after laying out how this might be a conspiracy, Browmich suggests that DOJ personnel conspired to deprive Hearn of his civil rights, 18 USC 241, a law that has a civil counterpart (albeit its application to things other than race is uncertain).

Moreover, the DOJ OIG should investigate whether DOJ personnel engaged in a conspiracy to deprive Mr. Hearn of his civil rights. Under 18 U.S.C. § 241, it is a crime for two or more persons to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person…in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States or because of his having so exercised the same.”

The evidence developed in the litigation warrants investigation into whether multiple prosecutors, and potentially supervisory and political-level officials, participated in conduct that deprived Mr. Hearn of his due process rights, including through abuse of the grand jury process and in connection with his June 19 arrest. The investigation can and should determine whether DOJ personnel had any role in authorizing his June 19 arrest, and it should fully explore the apparent violations of his right to due process under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution in connection with the actions of DOJ personnel in securing the indictment. It is now undisputed—by everyone except President Trump—that Mr. Hearn should never have been arrested and certainly should not have been indicted. The OIG must now investigate whether the DOJ personnel responsible for this travesty engaged in misconduct that violated Mr. Hearn’s civil rights.

At the very least, all this is a bowtied package for Congress to untie in January (another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, was one of the House impeachment lawyers on Trump’s first impeachment).

There have been a number of attempts to try to fight back after Trump’s DOJ targets Trump critics. This may turn into a test of possible methods to do so. 

Oct. 23

Special Report

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• The Parnas Perspective, Major Deep Dive: How Russia Spent 50 Years Getting Close to Donald Trump — Trump’s Ties Exposed, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. How five decades of business deals, intelligence contacts, and political favors led to a president who now sides with the Kremlin in a war killing Ukrainian civilians.

The news cycle slowed down, so I felt like it was time to drop this investigation that I’ve been working on. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. This week, as they sheltered through another night of missile and drone attacks, the president of the United States stood in front of reporters and said, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller in a park in the Kharkiv region.

That is not a slip of the tongue. It is the latest chapter in a story that stretches back nearly 50 years.

Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia began long before he entered politics. It runs through Soviet bloc surveillance files, Manhattan condo sales, a Moscow beauty pageant, a secret tower deal, a campaign riddled with Russian contacts, a first term defined by investigations, and now a second term in which his administration is waiving sanctions, holding up air defense missiles, and pressuring Ukraine to stop fighting back.

More Top Headlines

• New York Times, Opinion: The Meaning of the Republican War Over Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad, Michelle Goldberg, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Donald Trump 2.0 — younger and brainier but just as brash — has managed it.

More News Roundups

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 22, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.

The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.

More On Musk Influence On U.S. Foreign Affairs, Elections 

• New York Times, Trump Asked Musk to Reverse Limits on Ukraine’s Military Internet Use, Michael Crowley, Maggie Haberman and Siobhán O’Grady, Updated Oct. 23, 2026. The call from the president about the Starshield network came after officials in Ukraine reported that they found new limits on the use of military drones in their war against Russia.
• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Is It Time to Nationalize Starlink or Even SpaceX? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Squeals of “socialism!” aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it’s about saving the world…
• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Musk Sucks, Sam Osterhout, Oct. 23, 2026. He’s gotta go. We can have democracy, or we can have Elon Musk, but we can’t have both. His wealth and his impact on our social fabric, on our democracy, are obscene to the point of total abstraction.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, When a Candidate Is Wealthy, and Many of the Voters Are Not, Emma Schartz, Oct. 23, 2026 (print ed.). In a year when the wealth of the rich soared while workers lost ground to inflation, class has become political, especially in the Nebraska Senate race.
• More On U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs Leadership
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Everything Hegseth Touches Breaks, Bill Kristol, Cathy Young and Andrew Egger, Oct. 23, 2026. Pete is no Ike.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Hegseth Drops the Globe, William Kristol, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It was February 3, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was riding high. He’d survived his rocky start in the job, and early staff turmoil, and Signalgate. He’d started firing generals who might have stood in his way—and there’d been surprisingly little pushback. He’d kicked the media out of the Pentagon.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• New York Times, Does Congress Need to Approve the Arch? Trump Says It Did 100 Years Ago, Emily Badger, Oct. 23, 2026. Over the past year, President Trump and his allies have offered a series of explanations for why the nation needs a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch: It will mark 250 years of American independence. It will befit Washington’s place among Western capitals. It will honor the nation’s veterans. It will serve the military, the president added last month, as a platform for snipers.

Top Stories

Special Report

The Parnas Perspective, Major Deep Dive: How Russia Spent 50 Years Getting Close to Donald Trump — Trump’s Ties Exposed, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. How five decades of business deals, intelligence contacts, and political favors led to a president who now sides with the Kremlin in a war killing Ukrainian civilians

The news cycle slowed down, so I felt like it was time to drop this investigation that I’ve been working on. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. This week, as they sheltered through another night of missile and drone attacks, the president of the United States stood in front of reporters and said, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller in a park in the Kharkiv region.

That is not a slip of the tongue. It is the latest chapter in a story that stretches back nearly 50 years.

Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia began long before he entered politics. It runs through Soviet bloc surveillance files, Manhattan condo sales, a Moscow beauty pageant, a secret tower deal, a campaign riddled with Russian contacts, a first term defined by investigations, and now a second term in which his administration is waiving sanctions, holding up air defense missiles, and pressuring Ukraine to stop fighting back.

Investigations like this take time, resources, and a willingness to put on the record what powerful people would rather keep buried. There is no corporate owner or billionaire backer behind this work. There is you. Paid subscribers are the reason I can keep digging, keep documenting, and keep getting this record in front of the people who need to see it. If this work matters to you, please become a paid subscriber today.

PART ONE: BEFORE POLITICS (1977 to 2015)

A Soviet bloc intelligence service opens a file

In April 1977, Trump married Ivana Zelníčková, a model from communist Czechoslovakia. Because she had left a Soviet bloc country and married a wealthy American, she drew the attention of Czechoslovakia’s secret police, the StB, an intelligence service that worked closely with the KGB.

According to files declassified in 2016, Czech agents kept watch on the couple in Manhattan and opened letters Ivana sent home to her father, Miloš. Her father had a working relationship with the secret police, who would ask him about his daughter’s life abroad in exchange for permitting her visits home. When Ivana brought Donald Trump Jr. to visit, the StB monitored those trips as well.

Later reporting by The Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt, based on newly obtained archive records, found that the StB carried out a long-term spying mission on Trump and stepped up its interest after the 1988 U.S. presidential election, hoping to gain information about the “upper echelons of the US government.” One StB agent reported on a 1989 meeting at Trump Tower. The files also show that Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics, and that the agency took a particular interest after Trump began talking publicly about running for president.

It is important to note what the files do not show. They do not say whether the Soviet Union ordered or shaped the StB’s operation, and most StB records were destroyed after the Cold War. But they establish that, from the late 1970s on, a Soviet bloc intelligence service was building a file on Donald Trump.The televisions and the émigrés

In the early 1980s, as Trump redeveloped the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, the project bought hundreds of televisions from a store run by Soviet émigrés Semyon Kislin and Tamir Sapir.

This is where documented history gives way to allegation. Former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, a key source for journalist Craig Unger’s books House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, has claimed that the store had ties to Soviet intelligence and that Kislin helped identify Trump as a potential target. Kislin later provided mortgages to buyers of apartments in Trump World Tower, and the Sapir family would remain in Trump’s orbit for decades, including during his 2013 trip to Moscow.

Shvets’s claims about Soviet intelligence cultivating Trump have never been independently proven, and Trump has always denied any relationship with Russian intelligence. Unger himself distinguishes between an intelligence “agent,” who knowingly works for a foreign service, and an “asset,” whose relationship can be far less formal and even unwitting.The 1987 trip to Moscow

In July 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump traveled to Moscow and Leningrad. According to The Guardian, the visit followed a personal invitation from the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Yuri Dubinin, and was arranged through the Soviet state tourism agency, which operated under KGB oversight. Trump said he was scouting locations for a luxury hotel.

Shortly after returning, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page ads in major newspapers attacking America’s alliances and arguing that the United States should stop paying to defend other countries. The ads stunned observers at the time and prompted speculation about a presidential run.

The timing of the trip, the invitation, and the ads has fueled questions for decades.Russian money becomes central to the Trump empire

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, money from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump properties. As Trump’s casinos and businesses went through multiple bankruptcies and major American banks grew wary of lending to him, that money became increasingly important.

According to Unger’s reporting, in 1984 a man named David Bogatin, whom FBI files linked to the Russian mob, bought five Trump Tower condominiums for $6 million in cash, a transaction a New York State investigation later tied to money laundering. Unger has identified 13 people with alleged Russian organized crime connections who lived in or owned property in Trump Tower, and estimates that more than $1 billion in Russian money passed through Trump-branded properties over the years. Those broader figures are Unger’s own estimates and are disputed.

More concrete numbers come from a 2017 Reuters investigation, which found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded towers in South Florida alone. Reuters found no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or his company, and noted that the nationality of many buyers couldn’t be determined, meaning the true figure may be higher.

Trump also repeatedly tried to build in Russia itself. He returned to Moscow in 1996 to explore a luxury residential project. In the mid-2000s, he partnered with the Bayrock Group, a development firm with offices in Trump Tower, where Russian-born businessman Felix Sater worked. Sater reportedly carried business cards identifying him as a senior adviser to Trump, though Trump later testified under oath that he barely knew him. Donald Trump Jr. traveled to Russia six times in 18 months starting around 2006 looking for deals, and in 2008 told a real estate conference that Russians made up “a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”Miss Universe in Moscow

In 2013, Trump finally pulled off a major deal in Russia. He brought the Miss Universe pageant, which he then owned, to Moscow in partnership with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer with close ties to the Kremlin.

Agalarov paid $20 million to bring the pageant to his Crocus City Hall. That same month, Putin awarded Agalarov the Russian Order of Honor. The New York Times later found that the 2013 pageant was the most profitable year of Trump’s Miss Universe ownership, with Trump and NBC splitting $4.7 million.

Trump was eager to impress Moscow. Months before the event, he tweeted asking whether Putin would attend and whether he would become his “new best friend.” In video recorded in Las Vegas, Trump called the Agalarovs “the most powerful people in all of Russia.” After the pageant, he boasted that “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” Among the VIP guests was an alleged Russian mobster who had been charged months earlier in connection with an illegal gambling ring run out of Trump Tower.

The Agalarov relationship would become central to the 2016 investigation three years later.

PART TWO: THE 2016 CAMPAIGN

The secret Moscow tower

As Trump campaigned for president, he repeatedly told voters he had nothing to do with Russia. In reality, his company was pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow deep into the campaign.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, later pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project. Cohen had claimed the talks ended in January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses. In fact, they continued until June 2016, after Trump had become the presumptive Republican nominee.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office wrote that if the project had been completed, Trump’s company could have received “hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.” Prosecutors said the deal likely required “the assistance of the Russian government,” and that Cohen discussed it with Trump at a time of “sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere” in the election. Cohen and Sater had even discussed a trip to Russia to meet top Kremlin officials, and a Russian national repeatedly proposed a meeting between Trump and Putin that he said could have a “phenomenal” impact on politics and business.

In other words, while Russia was working to help elect Trump, Trump was secretly seeking a deal that would have required Kremlin approval.The Trump Tower meeting

In June 2016, a publicist for the Agalarovs emailed Donald Trump Jr. offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s support for his father. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” On June 9, he met at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, along with campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.

Mueller found that the meeting did not produce useful information for the campaign, and he declined to charge Trump Jr. because prosecutors didn’t believe they could prove he acted “willfully” in potentially violating campaign finance law. But the meeting showed the campaign’s senior leadership was willing to accept help from a foreign government.

Days later, Agalarov sent Trump an expensive painting for his birthday. Trump wrote back thanking him for the “sensational gift.”Manafort and a Russian intelligence officer

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman in the summer of 2016, had spent more than a decade working for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, including ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republicans, concluded in its final report that Manafort’s longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. It found that Manafort shared internal Trump campaign polling data and strategy with Kilimnik during the campaign, and that it obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to Russia’s hacking of Democratic emails.

The committee’s conclusion was stark: Manafort’s access and his willingness to share information with individuals closely tied to Russian intelligence “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” The committee also found that Deripaska has acted as a proxy for the Russian state and Russian intelligence services since at least 2004.Michael Flynn and the RT gala

In December 2015, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn traveled to Moscow for the 10th anniversary gala of RT, the Kremlin’s state-run television network. RT paid more than $45,000 for his appearance, plus flights and a luxury hotel stay for him and his son. At dinner, Flynn was seated at Putin’s table. Within two months, he was advising the Trump campaign.

Flynn also told security clearance investigators that he had been paid by “U.S. companies” for the trip and had only “insubstantial contacts” with foreign officials, according to House Oversight Committee Democrats.“Russia, if you’re listening”

In July 2016, Trump stood at a press conference and said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” According to Mueller’s later findings, Russian military intelligence officers attempted to hack into Clinton’s personal office for the first time within hours of that statement.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Putin personally ordered Russia’s hack-and-leak operation against Democrats, and that WikiLeaks very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort.What investigators concluded, and what they didn’t

Fairness requires being clear about the limits of what was proven. Mueller did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its interference efforts. The Senate committee’s Republican chair at the time, Marco Rubio, said the committee found no evidence of collusion.

But the same bipartisan report described what its top Democrat, Mark Warner, called “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives” that posed “a very real counterintelligence threat.” The absence of a proven criminal conspiracy is not the same as the absence of a troubling relationship.Following the money

A 2018 Center for American Progress report traced a web of Russia-linked financial transactions around the campaign and inauguration. Among them:

Days after the Trump Tower meeting, Agalarov moved nearly $20 million from Russia to a U.S. bank account through a Swiss account and an offshore shell company, a transaction bank officials flagged as suspicious.

Russian state media network RT’s parent and a Kremlin-backed troll farm spent heavily on pro-Trump influence operations, with the Internet Research Agency running a budget of more than $1 million a month.

A Russian-American oil executive who boasted to a Kremlin official of being “actively involved” in Trump’s campaign donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s committees and inaugural fund.

None of the individuals involved in those transactions have been charged in connection with them, and some may have legitimate explanations. But the report argues they raise serious questions that Congress has never fully answered.

PART THREE: THE FIRST TERM (2017 to 2021)

Trump’s first term was dominated by the Russia investigation. But it was also defined by a striking gap between Trump’s personal behavior toward Putin and the policies his administration sometimes carried out.Flynn’s 24 days

Trump named Flynn his national security adviser. He lasted just 24 days before being forced out after it emerged that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which they discussed U.S. sanctions during the transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in 2020.Firing Comey, then hosting the Russians

On May 9, 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the investigation into Russia’s interference and possible links to Trump’s campaign. The next day, Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office, with American press barred and only Russian state media allowed to photograph the meeting.

During that meeting, Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence about an ISIS threat that had been provided by a U.S. ally, potentially jeopardizing a critical intelligence source, The Washington Post reported. He also reportedly told the Russians that firing Comey, whom he called a “nut job,” had taken “great pressure” off him. CNN later reported that U.S. officials were so alarmed by Trump’s handling of classified information that they extracted a top-secret source from inside Russia.Helsinki

On July 16, 2018, standing beside Putin in Helsinki, Trump was asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president about election interference. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

The statement came just three days after the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for hacking Democrats. Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, publicly contradicted him. Republican Sen. John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” adding, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”Lifting sanctions on Deripaska’s companies

In December 2018, Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would lift sanctions on three companies tied to Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch whom the Senate committee described as a proxy for Russian intelligence and who had employed Manafort for years. The companies included aluminum giant Rusal.

Eleven Republican senators joined Democrats in trying to block the move, but the effort fell three votes short, 57-42. Treasury argued Deripaska had agreed to give up control of the companies. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer questioned whether the administration was “doing Russia’s bidding.”The first Ukraine pressure campaign

In 2019, Trump turned his attention to Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

By July 2019, Trump had placed a hold on nearly $400 million in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. On July 25, he spoke with Zelenskyy by phone. When Zelenskyy raised the need for more Javelin anti-tank missiles, Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” He then pressed Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden and his son, and to look into a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election.

That theory, the Senate Intelligence Committee later found, was one that Russian intelligence officer Kilimnik had almost certainly helped start.

The call led to Trump’s first impeachment. The aid was eventually released after a whistleblower complaint became public.The guardrails of the first term

To be fair, Trump’s first-term administration also took some significant actions against Russia, often driven by Congress and senior officials. It approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, which the Obama administration had declined to do. It expelled 60 Russian diplomats after the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain in 2018. Congress passed, and Trump reluctantly signed, a major Russia sanctions law in 2017.

But many of those actions came over Trump’s objections or with little public enthusiasm from him. Officials like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats served as guardrails. By the end of the term, Trump had pardoned Manafort, Flynn, and longtime adviser Roger Stone, all of whom had been convicted or pleaded guilty in cases stemming from the Russia investigation.

PART FOUR: THE SECOND TERM (2025 to Present)

If the first term was defined by investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia, the second term has been defined by policy. The guardrails are gone, and Trump’s personal sympathies have increasingly become official U.S. policy.February 2025: Turning on Ukraine

Within weeks of returning to office, Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator”, a label he has never applied to Putin. On February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the United States voted alongside Russia against a United Nations resolution condemning the war, joining countries like Belarus and North Korea. The U.S. pushed its own resolution that did not identify Russia as the aggressor. Russia’s UN ambassador praised it as “a constructive step.”

Four days later, Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in front of the cameras. Vance accused him of being “disrespectful” and demanded to know whether he had said “thank you.” Trump told him, “You’re gambling with World War III.” Zelenskyy was asked to leave the White House. Days later, the administration briefly paused military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.August 2025: The red carpet in Alaska

On August 15, 2025, Trump welcomed Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, the first time Putin had set foot on American soil in a decade and despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him over the deportation of Ukrainian children. Trump rolled out a red carpet and applauded as Putin approached, and the two rode together in the presidential limousine.

The summit produced no ceasefire. Putin called Trump a “dear neighbor” and suggested their next meeting be in Moscow. Trump again postponed stronger sanctions on Russia despite Putin’s refusal to commit to a ceasefire, and increasingly put the burden on Zelenskyy to “make a deal.”The president’s son and a Putin ally

In May 2026, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. ProPublica later revealed that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Putin who received a Kremlin honor this year and has been sanctioned by Ukraine, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the celebrations, including about $100,000 a night to rent a private island and roughly $70,000 for fireworks.

Trump Jr. and his wife acknowledged the payments and called them a gift from a friend. President Trump said he had “no idea who Umar is” and called it “not a big deal.” A retired FBI counterintelligence official told ProPublica that such a gift should be “unthinkable” for the son of a sitting president. Trump Jr., notably, was also the family member who took the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.Trump’s political team works for a pro-Russian government

In early October 2026, as Trump campaigned for Republicans in the midterms, his top political advisers James Blair and Chris LaCivita were in the Balkans. The two men, who lead the Trump-backed super PAC MAGA Inc., were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to advise the government of Republika Srpska, a pro-Russian territory in Bosnia, ahead of its elections, according to The New York Times.

The party that controls that government, led by Milorad Dodik, has aligned itself with Putin. Dodik thanked Putin in his victory speech. Trump-connected lobbyists have been paid more than $4 million by the Srpska government since early 2025, and the Trump administration lifted U.S. sanctions on Dodik, his family, and aides late last year. Even Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called Blair and LaCivita “grifters.” Trump responded by saying he would fire them if there was a conflict, then concluded there wasn’t one.Signing sanctions, then gutting them

On September 19, 2026, Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, named for the late senator, after it passed the Senate with 86 votes. The law gave the administration powerful tools to punish Russia and the countries buying its energy.

Within three weeks, the administration began unwinding it. On October 9, the Treasury Department issued a license allowing Russian diesel sales as part of a deal Trump struck with Putin to bring down fuel prices before the midterms. A bipartisan group of 12 senators called the diesel deal a “betrayal of the people of Ukraine.” On October 16, Trump waived key sanctions under the law he had just signed. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he had warned the White House of “unintended consequences.”Cutting off Ukraine’s defenses

At the same time, Ukraine says its access to U.S. intelligence and to Starshield, the military satellite network its forces rely on to fly drones and defend against attacks, has been degraded. Kyiv reports it has repeatedly received no early warning from the United States before Russian ballistic missile strikes on the capital. Rolling Stone reported that, according to multiple officials, the White House delivered an ultimatum that Ukraine stop striking Russian oil refineries or lose U.S. intelligence. The White House and Elon Musk deny responsibility for the satellite restrictions, and the administration insists nothing is being withheld.

The Washington Post reported this week that the administration is holding up the transfer of Patriot interceptor missiles that allies want to send Ukraine, because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not signed off. A Ukrainian official told the Post that “only a couple” of interceptors remain. Secretary of State Rubio called suggestions that Ukrainians are dying because of reduced U.S. support “scandalous.”“Russia has been fine”

And this week, Trump said it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” suggesting the country’s elected president should be sidelined. He said “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” as Russian strikes killed at least 16 people in a single day, including a baby in her stroller. He also said he is ready to meet Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping next month, with Ukraine’s future potentially on the table, a meeting Ukraine’s foreign minister warned would “only encourage Putin to continue this war.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, asked three times on national television whether the United States considers Ukraine an ally, would not say yes.

PART FIVE: FIRST TERM VS. SECOND TERM

Comparing the two terms reveals a clear evolution: from a president whose admiration for Putin was restrained by his own government, to one whose instincts now shape policy.

On Ukraine aid: In the first term, Trump secretly froze aid to Ukraine for political leverage, was impeached for it, and ultimately released it. In the second term, his administration has paused aid and intelligence openly, and is now reportedly slow-walking air defense missiles in the middle of a full-scale war.

On sanctions: In the first term, Congress forced sanctions on Trump, and his Treasury lifted penalties on Deripaska’s companies over bipartisan objections. In the second term, Trump signed a sanctions law and then waived it within weeks, while cutting a separate diesel deal directly with Putin.

On Putin: In the first term, Trump sided with Putin at a press conference in Helsinki and faced a bipartisan backlash. In the second term, he rolled out a red carpet for Putin on U.S. soil, voted with Russia at the UN, and now says Russia “has been fine.”

On Zelenskyy: In the first term, Trump pressured Zelenskyy privately for political favors. In the second term, he has called him a dictator, berated him in the Oval Office, and suggested he should be replaced as Ukraine’s negotiator.

On accountability: In the first term, a special counsel, the FBI, and a bipartisan Senate committee investigated Trump’s Russia ties, and several associates were convicted. In the second term, those associates have been pardoned, the officials who investigated them have been targeted, and the Justice Department is led by Trump’s former personal lawyer.

On the people around him: In the first term, figures like Mattis, McMaster, and Coats publicly pushed back on Trump’s approach to Russia. In the second term, his inner circle includes officials who echo his criticism of Zelenskyy, advisers paid by a pro-Russian government, and a son whose wedding was funded in part by a Putin ally.

PART SIX: THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN

After nearly 50 years, many critical questions remain unanswered:

Does Russia hold any leverage over Trump? There is no public proof of kompromat, and Trump has always denied it. But his own lawyer lied to Congress to conceal a Moscow deal that required Kremlin approval, and the Senate found his campaign chairman was sharing data with a Russian intelligence officer.

What do Trump’s tax returns and financial records show about Russian money? Despite years of litigation, the full picture of Russian investment in Trump’s businesses has never been made public.

Why did a Putin-aligned oligarch pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations, and what, if anything, was expected in return?

Who decided to restrict Ukraine’s satellite access and intelligence sharing, and why does the administration’s account keep contradicting Ukraine’s?

Why is the Pentagon holding up Patriot missiles that allies have already paid for?

What did Trump and Putin discuss privately in Helsinki, Anchorage, and their phone calls, where no full readouts have ever been released?

House Democrats have signaled that they plan to investigate if they win control of Congress next month. Whatever happens, these questions deserve answers.

CONCLUSION

You do not need to believe any unproven theory to be alarmed by the documented record. A Soviet bloc intelligence service watched Trump’s family for more than a decade. Russian money flowed into his properties for years. He secretly pursued a Kremlin-dependent deal while Russia worked to elect him. His campaign chairman shared data with a Russian intelligence officer. As president, he sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, handed classified information to Russian officials the day after firing the FBI director investigating him, and withheld aid from Ukraine to pressure its president.

Now, in his second term, the pattern has become policy. Sanctions are waived. Air defenses are delayed. Ukraine’s president is attacked while Russia’s is welcomed on a red carpet. And as a baby is killed in her stroller in a Ukrainian park, the president of the United States says Russia “has been fine.”

For my family in Ukraine, and for millions of Ukrainians who go to sleep each night not knowing whether a missile will hit their home, this is not an abstract political debate. It is life and death.

Americans deserve to know why their president keeps siding with Vladimir Putin. And they deserve to know before it’s too late.

New York Times, Opinion: The Meaning of the Republican War Over Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad, Michelle Goldberg, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Donald Trump 2.0 — younger and brainier but just as brash — has managed it.

By releasing what may be the most disgusting ad in American political history, he’s done more than just reveal his own low character. He’s opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.

As you might know by now, the story behind Ramaswamy’s ad involves child sexual abuse. His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, was 12 when her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, known as Bud, was arrested and indicted on charges of raping her, though he skipped town before he could be tried. Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, stood by him and lost custody of her children; she never saw her daughter again. (Bud Arthur died in 2004.)

In 2020, when Acton was serving as Ohio’s health director, Donna Arthur, fashioning herself as a concerned Christian, gave an interview to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue attacking her estranged daughter. It was deeply if unintentionally self-incriminating. Arthur speculated that Acton got the idea to say Bud Arthur raped her from his daughter from a previous marriage, who’d made a similar claim. By Donna Arthur’s own account, then, she brought a man accused of sexually abusing his child into her children’s home.

Now Ramaswamy’s campaign has dug up this elderly woman to make a video calling her daughter a liar who can’t be trusted to lead the state. At first, the ad featuring Arthur circulated online, without attribution. As outrage about it grew, Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted that it created the spot, and then, in Trumpian style, doubled down, saying it would spend millions to air it on television and promote it online.

By tacitly siding with a man indicted on charges of child rape, Ramaswamy has shown us all who he is. But he’s also given conservatives space to reckon with the ethical degradation of Trumpism, though without quite admitting that that’s what they’re doing.

Take, for example, the conservative magazine National Review. Early in 2016, it put out an issue with the words “Against Trump” emblazoned in gold on its cover. “Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself,” said the lead editorial.

Over the following decade, some of the issue’s contributors remained anti-Trump stalwarts, but several — along with the magazine as a whole — turned into apologists and bootlickers for the president. As long as Trump offered the right new peaks of political power, many of his onetime conservative critics were happy to swallow their qualms. Now, as the whole gaudy edifice of MAGA crumbles — with Trump so unpopular that Republicans risk losing states like Texas and Kansas — at least some of his enablers may be feeling ashamed.

Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter. National Review, tellingly, has helped lead the charge. It ran a sober article backing up Acton’s story, and then several columns lambasting Ramaswamy, including one titled, “When Character Was Obliterated.”

The conservative broadcaster Erick Erickson has taken a similar line. He was one of the contributors to “Against Trump” who then turned around and endorsed Trump for re-election. “I still struggle on the character issue,” he wrote in 2019, but argued, “We cannot have the Trump administration policies without President Trump, and there is much to like.” Now Erickson is back to believing that character is crucial. “We keep being told we must surrender our decency to win and then we lament how indecent the country is becoming,” he wrote about Ramaswamy, as if he had not been one of the ones counseling such surrender.

If conservatives were to suddenly decide that moral depravity is disqualifying, it would be bad news for Trump and those closest to him. It’s not surprising, then, that on Wednesday, JD Vance praised Ramaswamy’s “audacity” in running the spot, declaring himself “disgusted” by Republicans who are “whining” about it. Trump, on Thursday, celebrated the ad on Truth Social, writing, “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse.” Both men seem to understand that Republicans who criticize Ramaswamy are also implicitly criticizing them.

That’s particularly true of Vance, because he and Ramaswamy are such similar figures. The two men were friends at Yale Law School. Both worked in venture capital and developed ties to the tech right before positioning themselves as inheritors of the MAGA movement. Both have to contend with anti-Indian bigotry — Vance’s wife is Indian American — which has cost Ramaswamy some far-right support. And both are charmless, awkwardly imitating the president’s cruel provocations without his dark charisma or comic timing. If Ramaswamy loses a state as red as Ohio despite Trump’s imprimatur, Vance might start to look like a bad bet in 2028.

Seventy-two years ago, Joseph Welch, the attorney representing the U.S. Army, rebuked Joseph McCarthy with the immortal line, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Despairing observers have been asking the same thing of the Republican Party for the last 10 years. Both Ramaswamy and Vance better hope that the answer is still no.

More News Roundups

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 22, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.

The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.

Whitaker told the Fox News Channel yesterday: “They are a private company. Obviously they have terms of use that are applied to all of their customers, including the Ukrainians, and I think it’s more of a dispute along those lines…than anybody in this administration trying to change the way that Starshield or Starlink is used.”

Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”

But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy.

This afternoon, asked about the call, Trump told reporters: “[I]t was a very interesting situation. So I don’t want to comment one way or the other, but, uh, my re—, my relationship with Elon is a very good one.” He reiterated: “I don’t want to comment on it. You know, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference. I guess the bottom line, he put it back.”

It remains unclear if the Ukrainians do, in fact, have full use of the networks again. Siobhán O’Grady, Carlotta Gall, and Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported yesterday that a senior Ukrainian commander told them he had lost more than a million dollars worth of drones when Starshield went fuzzy from the slowdown. For the next three days, he had to stop almost all operations, endangering his troops by hampering their ability to stop Russian advances by striking Russian command posts and fuel hubs.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported today that officials from Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, say sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes that are pushing deeper and deeper into Russia threaten the company’s survival. Profits for the company, which produces about a third of Russia’s oil, are falling and its debt is rising as the strikes cause fuel shortages.

Ukrainians are repeatedly hitting the refineries, one as far as 2,500 kilometers (about 1,553 miles) from the border, first damaging the structures and then destroying repairs after workers have rebuilt the structures, forcing the company to take on more and more debt as it shovels money into repairs that don’t survive. Even when it can find the money, sanctions limit its ability to replace equipment. The officials say even a few more months of war could destroy Rosneft.

The crisis explains why Putin and Trump are so desperate to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refineries and to lift sanctions on Russia. Rosneft’s loans from the Credit Bank of Moscow are becoming problematic, straining the bank.

In a sign this year’s writers are straining to make things as obvious as possible, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post broke the story today that in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently decided he wanted to display in his office one of the two floor globes General Dwight D. Eisenhower used during World War II.

Eisenhower was the erudite five-star general who oversaw the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily before directing the Allied invasion of France and Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is widely credited with defeating the Nazis.

After the war, Eisenhower went on to the presidency of Columbia University, where he devoted his energies to founding the American Assembly, a think tank to gather the world’s greatest minds to bring the understanding of history, foreign affairs, and philosophy to address the problems of the post–World War II world.

In 1952, when the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination vowed to cut U.S. support for the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower ran for president to protect the new postwar institutions that he believed were vital to global security in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. He won the Republican nomination and then the presidency with almost 55% of the vote, retaking the White House from Democrats for the first time since 1933.

During the war, Eisenhower had visited Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, a week after soldiers liberated it. He was shocked to the core. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote to his wife. Determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again, he urged reporters and congressmen to visit the camp to ensure there were witnesses, pictures, and films to contradict anyone who might, in the future, try to deny the horrors that had taken place.

After the war, Eisenhower embraced the work of San Francisco philosopher Eric Hoffer, who explained in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that economically or culturally dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated to back a demagogue who promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such a leader was dangerous enough during the Nazi era, Eisenhower thought, but with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, such a strongman could destroy humanity.

Eisenhower believed that it was crucial for the U.S. to build alliances and to help increase standards of living around the globe in order to prevent such a scenario. He built NATO and began the Food for Peace initiative, a program that later was absorbed into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the same agency that Musk and Trump shredded in 2025.

In their story about Eisenhower’s globe, Horton and Lamothe reported that Hegseth was so eager to get the historic object in place that rather than waiting for trained curators to move it, as is expected for any such priceless historic artifact, Hegseth’s staff decided to retrieve it on their own.

They dropped it.

The artifact smashed into its base, and the stand impaled it, ripping a gash through the fragile globe.

It never did end up in Hegseth’s office.

It is currently undergoing repairs.

More On Musk Influence On U.S. Foreign Affairs, Elections 

New York Times, Trump Asked Musk to Reverse Limits on Ukraine’s Military Internet Use, Michael Crowley, Maggie Haberman and Siobhán O’Grady, Updated Oct. 23, 2026. The call from the president about the Starshield network came after officials in Ukraine reported that they found new limits on the use of military drones in their war against Russia.

President Trump called Elon Musk last week and asked him to restore Ukraine’s full access to the Starshield satellite communications network, according to a senior administration official and a person briefed on the exchange.

Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Musk, who owns the Starshield network, came after Ukrainian officials reported that they were encountering new limits on their ability to operate the military drones that have become essential to their war against Russia. The development raised alarms in Ukraine that Mr. Trump, who has demanded that Ukraine stop its drone attacks on Russian diesel refineries, might have instructed Mr. Musk to impose the limits.

Asked on Thursday whether he had made such a call to Mr. Musk, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump declined to say. “I don’t want to comment on it, you know, whether I called or whether ⁠somebody else called — doesn’t make any difference, I guess. The bottom line — he put it back,” the president ​told reporters.

When asked for comment, the White House pointed to Mr. Trump’s remarks.

It remained unclear on Thursday whether access to the Starshield network had been fully restored. Some Ukrainian officials said that was not yet the case.

But supporters of Ukraine were cautiously optimistic.

“If these reports are true, this is a welcome development,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, posted on X. Mr. Tillis said it remained unclear who, if anyone, had made the initial decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starshield access. But he said that anyone who objects to its restoration should “have the courage to raise your hand, and explain your justification for allowing Putin to continue to mow down toddlers in strollers in Ukrainian parks.”

The issue emerged when Ukrainian drones began dropping from the sky in mid-October. Ukrainian commanders discovered that drones flown against Russian targets at high speeds were suddenly losing their connection to Starshield, a military version of the Starlink satellite communications network owned by Mr. Musk. Ukraine relies heavily on Starshield to operate its drones and for other military purposes as it battles Russia.

The restrictions came without warning or explanation. But Mr. Trump recently demanded that Kyiv halt its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have helped cause diesel prices to surge ahead of the midterm elections. That has led Ukrainian officials and backers of the country to suspect that Mr. Trump might have been looking to constrain or even punish Kyiv for continuing those attacks.

The episode has confused Ukrainian officials and supporters of the country in Washington, and much uncertainty remains. Here is a look at some of the key questions involved. 

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Is It Time to Nationalize Starlink or Even SpaceX? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Squeals of “socialism!” aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it’s about saving the world…

In response to reports in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk personally ordered the deadly slowdown of internet access to Ukraine and that Trump then called and begged him to get it restored, Nobel Prize winning economist and all-around genius Paul Krugman called yesterday for the United States to nationalize Musk’s Starlink/Starsheild array of thousands of satellites providing internet service around the world.

On MS NOW, former Bush speechwriter and columnist (and guest on my show) David Frum echoed the sentiment in an interview with former Bush White House Communications Director Nicole Wallace. And Matt Stoller — often brilliantly on the monopoly beat — is also writing thoughtfully about what to do about this terrible situation.

Senator Adam Schiff framed the issue when he wrote on Musk’s Nazi-infested social media site:

“Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine. This deserves a full investigation by the Senate. Elon Musk should be compelled to testify before Congress and under oath. National security decisions should be made in our national security interests, and not based on the personal whim of an unstable executive.”

Politico then followed up with an article titled “Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk” citing both Republican and Democratic members of Congress calling for Musk to be called before Congress under oath. That simple call for a normal political process provoked an imperious and apparently furious Musk to reply with an implied threat:

“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”

If ever there was a business that merited nationalization, Starlink is it. It only exists because it’s been heavily subsidized by US government contracts and facilities, uses the internet that the US government invented, and — those in favor of nationalization argue — shouldn’t be subject to the whims of an eccentric, ketamine-addled, Nazi-saluting, election-buying CEO whose apparent decision just cost Ukrainian lives.

There’s even an argument to be made for nationalizing the rocket ship part of SpaceX (which owns Starlink/Starshield) and, like during the years when we first put men on the moon, handing it over to be owned and run by NASA.

But is it even possible? Turns out that American history says an emphatic, “Yes!”

During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward (as Krugman brilliantly details). He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.

After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of our nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.

Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.

In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.

In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.

In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.

Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation. Reagan investigated over 1000 CEOs, dragged some before Congress, and threw many of those bankers into prison.

When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize all 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.

When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline’s security system was entirely in private hands.

They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.

President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.

Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.

As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.

GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized.

Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.”

Toward its end, he summarizes the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — what could reasonably include America’s space-based infrastructure :

“In such times of political and economic crisis, policymakers of all ideological persuasions in the United States have never been hesitant to use one of the most powerful tools at their disposal: nationalization of private enterprises and assets.

“This included the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who nationalized railroads, and the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries (among others), and the Republican Ronald Reagan, who nationalized a major national bank; the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who nationalized dozens of mining and manufacturing facilities, and the Republican George W. Bush, who nationalized airport security and various major financial institutions; the Democrat Barack Obama, who nationalized auto manufacturers, and the Republican Richard Nixon, who nationalized all passenger rail service.”

So, if America were to decide that Musk’s satellite and/or rocket business really should be the property of the taxpayers instead of the world’s richest man and his investors, how would that be done?

Instead of trying to regulate or engage in a protracted and expensive PR battle with him, why don’t we just buy them now?

The entire market capitalization of SpaceX is a mere $2.16 trillion if we were to simply force a purchase of all it’s stock, and that includes things that we don’t need to buy like his AI and social media company that have all been rolled in together. Just the satellite business could cost about half of that, depending on whose valuations you’re using.

While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s less than the budget deficit Trump has run up so far just this year alone. And remember, we poured fully $6 trillion into keeping our economy afloat during the Covid pandemic year of 2020.

Today’s crisis — with Trump sucking up to Putin and Starlink/Starshield being used to kneecap Ukraine — could easily lead to World War III, something that could dwarf the threat of Covid, Nazism in the 1940s, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations. A nuclear war between major powers literally threatens all life on Earth.

Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly.

This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s about saving both America and the world.

Congress needs to have a serious discussion about the merits and dangers of nationalizing Starlink/Starshield and SpaceX the way we have so may other renegade but vital companies in the past.

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Musk Sucks, Sam Osterhout, Oct. 23, 2026. He’s gotta go. We can have democracy, or we can have Elon Musk, but we can’t have both. His wealth and his impact on our social fabric, on our democracy, are obscene to the point of total abstraction.

When I was a kid, my family went through a rough patch. It’s not an unusual story. It happens. I was able to get an off-the-books job at a bottling plant when I was 12. I made $4 an hour putting labels on bottles of engine oil additive at the end of the line, and got my checks made to cash. Sometimes, the man who owned the operation would accidentally forget to sign my checks.

At 20 hours a week, the checks I couldn’t cash were for $80.

As of this writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is around $1,000,000,000,000, give or take a few billion or a few tens of billions of dollars. So far, he’s reportedly given around $366,000,000 to federal committees supporting Republican candidates for national office. Most of it — about $275,000,000 — landed between July and September of this year.

$366,000,000 is the floor of his giving. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that he’s giving to groups that don’t disclose donors.

We can look at these numbers and shake our heads and say something like One guy shouldn’t have that much power. But it’s important to sit with it a second. We have to at least try to wrap our heads around what this kind of wealth means for us, personally. It’s almost impossible.

When I got to high school, I found an above-board job in a restaurant making $4.25 an hour — minimum wage in Kansas at that time. Twenty hours’ worth of pay was just a little over $60. I was lucky because home life had settled down. I had food and friends and a place to live, so $60 was a bonus. It didn’t go towards rent, in other words. I was lucky.

In college, restaurants wouldn’t schedule anyone for more than 30 hours a week because they didn’t want to risk hitting 40+ hours and having to pay overtime. And why not do it that way? They didn’t have any trouble staffing. For me, that meant two minimum wage jobs. I could work 60 hours a week without overtime because I only worked 30 hours at each job.

This story isn’t unique. Again, I was and continue to be incredibly lucky. But I have a chip on my shoulder. You should, too.

Money is speech, and speech is power. That’s not my arithmetic. That’s the prevailing theory according to Citizens United. But it means that the essential gauge of your power within our system is based on your ability to fund campaigns. And I hate to break it to you, folks, but you might be a millionaire right now, reading this piece while sitting on a chaise lounge overlooking the sea (what I imagine millionaires do all day), but you still ain’t sh*t.

Some reports suggest that canvassers funded by Musk’s money are making around $3 per door knocked. Musk’s wealth grows $3 every .0002 seconds. Every four seconds, Musk’s wealth grows roughly the equivalent of a typical American worker’s ANNUAL income — around $65,000.

In thirteen seconds, he has amassed the equivalent value of everything a typical American family owns.

That $366,000,000 he’s given to Republicans this cycle? Over the past year, his wealth grew that much every 6 hours. That’s about 0.037 percent of his wealth. If he were a member of a median family and gave the same proportion of his wealth, he’d have written a check for around $79.Subscribed

I think about that kid taking an unsigned check from his illegal job at a bottling plant to the bank and not being able to cash it. I think about the stink of a restaurant on my clothes and the $60 checks on payday. I think about my mom who scraped by at Casual Corner, going into student loan debt in her 40s to save the family, and the women she worked with who didn’t take out the debt and ended up restocking at Walmart.

These are the Americans with a true stake in our politics. These are the Americans most of us know, who we have been or who we might someday become. Or who we are at this very moment. We populate the cities and towns. We ride our bikes in the cul-de-sacs and hand out candy at Halloween. We worry about our kids’ schools and spend too much time thinking about co-pays. We wave at each other as we pass.

In our world, my power does not diminish your power. Together we become more powerful.

In Elon’s world, we are ants.

But we do not live in Elon’s world, as much as the oligarchs would like to persuade you otherwise. This is our world. By all accounts, his third-of-a-billion in spending won’t convince Texans that Ken Paxton isn’t a piece of shit. The doors his money is paying to be knocked won’t persuade every farmer that they are somehow doing great, or people with cars that gas is cheaper than it used to be.

His money should be repugnant to every voter who watches a political ad it paid for. Elon’s money should be untouchable, unspendable. It’s tough times, but anyone who takes it should be similarly made repugnant, untouchable.

Thing is, we have skin in the game, and we have power. Our vote counts the same as his. His money is an unsigned check made out to cash, dangling over our election. In the end, the story of Elon Musk will be the story of one isolated citizen. The story of America will be written by us.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, When a Candidate Is Wealthy, and Many of the Voters Are Not, Emma Schartz, Oct. 23, 2026 (print ed.). In a year when the wealth of the rich soared while workers lost ground to inflation, class has become political, especially in the Nebraska Senate race.

With a fortune estimated at more than $200 million, Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska is among the richest members of Congress. His independent challenger, Dan Osborn, reported an income last year of $108,089.91 from the heating and air conditioning company where he works as a mechanic.

That yawning gap, between a middle-class salary that is falling behind inflation and generational wealth that has soared over the past two years, is at the heart not just of Nebraska’s competitive Senate contest but House, Senate and governor’s races across the country. It’s not just the price of gas and groceries. It’s about those who struggle watching in wonder at those who don’t.

“The perspective has changed from left versus right,” said Jim Begley, director of the William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “Now it’s top versus bottom. And people on the bottom are wondering what the hell is going on.”

Democrats from Western Montana to Northeastern Pennsylvania are running against what they say is a “billionaire class” that has supposedly rigged the political and economic system. In Ohio, Amy Acton, the Democrat seeking the governor’s mansion, is airing an ad using her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s own words — “I’m like dirty, dirty rich, not quite filthy rich” — to portray him as out of touch.

In a House district around Palm Beach, Fla., Democrats are running against Republican Casey Askar’s wealth. In Maine, a new attack ad on Senator Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican, pits “working class people” against the “very rich.”

But perhaps nowhere are such class attacks more stark than in the Nebraska Senate race where Mr. Ricketts, the Republican scion of the TD Ameritrade finance fortune, faces Mr. Osborn, a mechanic who made his name leading a strike at a Kellogg plant in Omaha.

Two years ago, Mr. Osborn ran and lost against another Republican incumbent, Senator Deb Fischer, figuring that he couldn’t beat the vast personal fortune of Mr. Ricketts, who was also on the ballot in a special election to complete the term of retired Senator Ben Sasse.

This year, Mr. Osborn is running against that personal fortune. In advertisements and social media posts, he has portrayed Mr. Ricketts as a spoiled rich kid, whose father, Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade, bought him a Senate seat.

“The system’s working exactly like it’s designed to work — for them,” Mr. Osborn said after a town hall in Tekamah, Neb. this month. He added, “Nebraska has to make this decision and tell the rest of the country we’re not for sale.”

The portrait ignores Pete Ricketts’s tenure as governor and deep connections to Nebraska.

“Senator Ricketts delivers for Nebraskans; Dan Osborn lies to them,” said Max Oberg, a spokesman for the Ricketts campaign.

And Democrats and their allies have run class-conscious campaigns for years, often to no avail. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont failed to win the Democratic nomination for president twice on crusades against oligarchs and billionaires.

But in a year of economic struggles, class differences may be striking a nerve.

More On U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs Leadership

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Everything Hegseth Touches Breaks, Bill Kristol, Cathy Young and Andrew Egger, Oct. 23, 2026. Pete is no Ike.

Much of the political world was horrified this week by Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad that enlists his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother to attack her character. Donald Trump, however, loved it. “Who wouldn’t use such an ad?” he wondered in a lengthy Truth Social post yesterday. “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse.”

Later, a reporter asked Trump: “Amy Acton’s mother has not cared for her in about fifty years after her stepdad was indicted for raping her. Why should anyone listen to what the mother has to say?”

“Well, I know nothing about it. All I know is the mother said very bad things about Acton, who I guess is running for governor against Vivek,” Trump replied. “The mother said very bad things about the one who’s running for governor, and I think you have to take that seriously.” Happy Friday.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos Getty, Shutterstock)

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Hegseth Drops the Globe, William Kristol, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It was February 3, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was riding high. He’d survived his rocky start in the job, and early staff turmoil, and Signalgate. He’d started firing generals who might have stood in his way—and there’d been surprisingly little pushback. He’d kicked the media out of the Pentagon.

He liked to call himself the “secretary of war,” and it was clear why. He’d blown up small boats in the Caribbean, and Congress was doing nothing to stop it. The one-day expedition in Venezuela in January had gone well. He was looking forward to trumpeting a similar success in Iran.

His mind apparently turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s true that there’s no evidence that Hegseth has ever been a particular fan of Ike. And in fact, Hegseth’s temperament, his bearing, and his character couldn’t be more different from Ike’s. Still, Pete likely thought of Eisenhower for one reason: Ike didn’t rest on his military laurels. He made it all the way to the Oval Office. That’s what Pete’s always aimed for. So, Pete thought, 2026 could be the year he became like Ike, a lauded military commander. And then in 2027 he’d leave, enjoy the accolades, and respond to a groundswell demanding he run for the presidency in 2028.

In any case, in the midst of his daydreams Pete apparently recalled seeing Second World War–era photos of Ike standing next to a big floor globe. Someone had told Pete that the Army kept a couple of those around the Pentagon. He ordered his staff to get one for his office.

It didn’t go as planned.

As Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe reported in the Washington Post,

Two floor globes said to be used by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II are housed in the Pentagon, where subsequent generations of Army leaders became custodians of the artifacts . . . The historical significance was attractive to Hegseth . . . and his staff requested that the secretary’s office become the new home to one of the 30-inch globes.

There was a process for moving historical items within the Pentagon, involving professional movers and trained curators. But the boss didn’t want to wait. And Hegseth’s staff wanted to make the boss happy:

Hegseth’s staff dispatched its own team to relocate an Eisenhower globe. They lost control of the artifact and dropped it, sending the globe crashing onto its base and impaling the fragile shell . . . The resulting gash appears to be several inches wide.

So, moved by vanity and vainglory, and acting arrogantly and impatiently, Pete broke Ike’s globe.

As David Simon, head writer and producer of The Wire, remarked, “This metaphor is ridiculously obvious and unsubtle. Fire the writers. They’re hacks.”

Fair enough! But perhaps it’s appropriate that a hack metaphor conveys the truth about a hack like Hegseth. After all, he is, to say the least, no Dwight Eisenhower. He’s more like Tom Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .” Hegseth has smashed up things and creatures. He’s made a mess that will be difficult to clean up. He’s damaged a U.S. military of great value and worth. He’s broken a world order that will be difficult to repair.

One of the first orders of business of the next Congress will be the impeachment of Hegseth and his removal from office. I don’t suppose breaking Ike’s globe will actually make it into one of the articles of impeachment. But if you’re engaged in the drama of politics, being handed an apt if obvious metaphor never hurts.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

New York Times, Does Congress Need to Approve the Arch? Trump Says It Did 100 Years Ago, Emily Badger, Oct. 23, 2026. Over the past year, President Trump and his allies have offered a series of explanations for why the nation needs a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch: It will mark 250 years of American independence. It will befit Washington’s place among Western capitals. It will honor the nation’s veterans. It will serve the military, the president added last month, as a platform for snipers.

But as the mega project planned for Memorial Circle heads to a final vote by the National Capital Planning Commission Nov. 5, the Trump administration has circled around one argument crucial to the project’s legal defense: The arch will at long last bring to life, officials say, a proposal that has languished on hallowed land for a century.

“It is a national embarrassment that policymakers have neglected for more than 100 years to build a congressionally authorized monument on this circle,” Mark Paoletta, an administration lawyer and the new chair of the planning commission, wrote this month in an essay in The Federalist that offers a kind of closing argument for the project. Construction could start as soon as Nov. 5, once the commission votes, the government has said in court.

This framing ties the legal rationale for the arch to a historical one. And it rebuts critics who say the monument is a vanity project of the president; on the contrary, this history implies, the whole thing isn’t even his idea. Expanding on his essay, Mr. Paoletta told The New York Times it was a “betrayal” of historical plans for Memorial Circle that the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery today is a “pathetic empty grass traffic circle.”ImageMemorial Circle, with the bridge and the Lincoln Memorial in the background.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The fight over the project isn’t just about whether something should go there; even some of the president’s critics agree the grass is underwhelming. The issue is whether a law passed in 1925 empowers Mr. Trump to make his arch the answer when Congress has since said only it can authorize new monuments in the capital.

The administration argues that Congress effectively authorized the arch a century ago. That’s because it says the project fulfills the “historic design intent” of a never-built proposal from the 1920s by the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission.

That proposal: a pair of slender and widely spaced columns at the western end of a new bridge spanning the Potomac River.

New York Times, Military Boards Are Defying Orders and Letting Trans Troops Serve, Dave Philipps, Oct. 23, 2026. The service members at Navy and Marine Corps hearings are finding ways to keep trans troops in uniform.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a slur to proudly announce to an auditorium of Marines in September that he was ridding the military of all transgender troops.

The Pentagon had set up review boards at bases around the globe, manned by everyday uniformed service members with narrow orders that all but ensured that the trans troops appearing before them would be voted out.

But just steps from the auditorium where Mr. Hegseth spoke, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, boards assigned to carry out those orders were doing the opposite. Instead of firing trans Marines, the boards were voting to keep them.

The same was happening in the Navy: Boards given strict rules instructing them to force out sailors were rebelling and voting to let them stay.

It is not just a few outlying individuals. Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases.

The Pentagon keeps the proceedings secret. Outsiders — even spouses — are not allowed to attend. Officials won’t release numbers. Leaders won’t discuss the outcomes. The New York Times compiled the figures through interviews with service members and lawyers involved in the hearings.

The number of Navy and Marine cases is small and could easily change as more hearings are conducted. The same pattern has not been seen so far in the Army or Air Force, which have overwhelmingly voted to discharge trans service members.

Still, the votes are a stunning rebuke from the armed forces, where following orders is bedrock. And they suggest the military’s transgender ban is being rejected by the very troops the administration says the ban is meant to serve.

“These boards are being told to do something that they know is wrong — to rubber-stamp a non-choice given to them by the administration,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor at Southwestern Law School who has been tracking the cases. “We are seeing them say they’re not going to play that game. We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”

The board decisions are only recommendations, and could be reversed by the politically appointed secretaries overseeing each service branch. There are also pending legal challenges that could pause the ban or rescind it entirely.

The Trump administration claims that trans troops, who account for about 4,250 people or about 0.1 percent of the military, are a costly burden on military effectiveness — a position that military findings contradict. President Trump signed an executive order barring trans troops during his first week in office, saying the action was needed to weed out dishonorable radicals who poison morale and waste resources.

“For the sake of our Nation and the patriotic Americans who volunteer to serve it, military service must be reserved for those mentally and physically fit for duty,” the order read.

The Pentagon designed a policy that paid transgender troops to leave voluntarily. Hundreds of highly qualified people left, including doctors, lawyers, pilots and nuclear technicians. The troops who stayed to challenge their dismissal waited in limbo, sometimes for more than a year.

While they waited, the administration set up a system of three-member separation boards to process the remaining cases using a narrow set of instructions. Under the rules, any evidence of transgender feelings or tendencies — even if there is no formal transition — requires dismissal.

The three-person boards are made up of everyday officers and enlisted personnel plucked temporarily from their normal jobs to hear one case, like civilian jurors. They are not allowed to consider whether a person is a top performer, a specialist in a critical career field or a decorated combat veteran.

The members are given a one-page findings sheet and instructed to circle a few words to find that a service member exhibits evidence of being transgender and therefore is not qualified to serve and should be discharged.

At least, that was the plan.

Trans Marines and sailors who went before boards said in interviews that after months of being vilified by top government officials, they expected a quick dismissal, but instead encountered thoughtful respect from fellow service members who voted to keep them.

Ms. VanLandingham, the former military lawyer, said the votes might be influenced by growing concern in the ranks that the current Pentagon is preoccupied with wedge issues and gives little thought to the welfare of the force.

Mr. Hegseth in his speech to the Marines, she noted, said the force should have “No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals," but did not mention those killed or wounded in the war with Iran.

“There’s been a chipping away at any kind of confidence that Hegseth actually cares about service members,” she said. “I think that’s given the boards license.”

There may be cultural factors, too, she said. The board instructions in all the branches are nearly identical. But each branch has different values. The Army is often seen as the most bureaucratic and least likely to buck orders. The Navy is the most diverse. The Marine Corps prides itself on a culture of loyalty.

The Navy has nearly twice as many people who identify as gay, bisexual or transgender — 9 percent — compared to other branches, according to a 2015 report by the RAND Corporation.

That was clear to a Navy paramedic who was retained by a board in July. The paramedic, who asked to not be named because he feared retribution, said he was stunned when his lawyer asked a chief, a lieutenant commander and a commander sitting on his board if they knew any trans sailors.

“They all said yes,” the paramedic recalled in an interview. “The chief said his liberty buddy in Thailand was transgender and was a phenomenal sailor. The lieutenant commander said her first work center supervisor was transgender, and she learned a lot from her. The commander said he’d worked with several transgender sailors, and he barbecues with his next-door neighbor, who’s trans.”

There were other factors working in his favor. He had been meritoriously promoted twice for superior performance; remained able to deploy his entire five years in the Navy; and had saved several lives working in emergency rooms.

For his last assignment he was attached to Marines deployed to the southern border. “I never ran into people who cared if I was trans,” he said. “They just cared that I did my job well.”

More On Middle East, Wars

New York Times, Gadi Eisenkot Couldn’t Be More Unlike Netanyahu. Can He Beat Him? David M. Halbfinger, Natan Odenheimer and Johnatan Reiss, Oct. 23, 2026. Mr. Eisenkot, an ex-military chief leading in the polls, calls the Israeli prime minister an “anti-leader.” But his low-key campaigning style is worrying supporters.

Gadi Eisenkot doesn’t speak like a politician. He runs through his plans matter-of-factly, like a commander spelling out a mission to his troops.

It’s an unusual style of campaigning, and scarcely electrifying; he doesn’t so much appeal to voters as state what he sees as the obvious.

But for Mr. Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief and the leading candidate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday’s election, it reflects who he is, how he approaches leadership and how serious he believes Israel’s problems have become.

It also reflects the grief he felt as father to a son killed two months into Israel’s war in Gaza — grief that was on vivid display when he delivered a eulogy on national television.

Mr. Eisenkot, 66, says he is running to “save Israel.” In his view, Mr. Netanyahu has embroiled Israel in forever wars, destroyed its international standing and decimated its support in the United States. He’s pushed the country toward authoritarianism, Mr. Eisenkot argues, and turned segments of society against one another. Extremist Jews are marauding through Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Organized criminals are killing Arab citizens. Army reservists are called up again and again because ultra-Orthodox Israelis dodge the draft.

And Mr. Netanyahu has not accepted responsibility for the security failures that led to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack.

More Global News

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Yellow (Vest) Journalism, Cathy Young, Oct. 23, 2026. Much of the American right, from Donald Trump downward, has seized on the violence in France as a dire warning about “mass immigration” — from Muslim countries and generally from the “Third World” — whose ravages supposedly threaten America if the Democrats win the midterms. Aside from the absurd hyperbole of cries that “France has fallen,” more level-headed observers, including our own Mona Charen, have also noted that the riots have little if anything to do with migrants or Muslims.

Yes, young men from the low-income suburbs or banlieues, where the population is disproportionately of North African descent, have been caught on camera stealing from vandalized shops. But much of the violence appears to have been at the hands of activists from far-left extremist movements. The man arrested for burning down the Limoges City Hall, for example, had previously been under surveillance for ties to a radical environmental group (and is the son of a Spanish anarchist). That’s exactly the kind of detail the American right of just a few years ago would have savored — but now, it’s not enough.

Another group that has played a prominent role in the disturbances is the populist Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests)! — which brings us to a curious twist. When the Gilets Jaunes—named for the visibility vests French drivers are required to wear in emergencies — first burst onto the political scene eight years ago, most American rightists reacted very differently. They glossed over the violent turn of the Gilets’ protests to focus instead on their grievances against the carbon tax, environmental regulations, and “globalism.”

Take this December 8, 2018 Twitter post: “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money much to third world countries (that are questionably run) in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

Yes, that was one Donald Trump. Yes, there’s always a tweet. No, the protestors in this case weren’t chanting for Trump to take over the Élysée Palace.

Trump had a lot of company back in 2018. The Federalist praised the Gilets’ “carbon tax riots” as a libertarian uprising that might begin the undoing of “European socialism”; now, it invokes the riots in France as a nightmare that awaits us “if we don’t put an end to Muslim immigration.” Breitbart blasted Emmanuel Macron for calling the Gilets Jaunes “hate-filled”; now, it approvingly quotes Trump’s comments blaming Macron for the unrest because he didn’t close the borders. National Review softballed the Gilets’ as MAGA’s Euro-cousins, put-upon “deplorables” with French accents; now, it excoriates the media for soft-pedaling the French student protests as they descended into mayhem.

But maybe the Gilets Jaunes protests that erupted in late November 2018 were much nicer than the current unrest? Hardly. On December 1, rioters in Paris torched about a hundred cars as well as numerous storefronts; they also pillaged dozens of restaurants and shops. In the first month, nearly 3,000 people—a third of them police officers—were injured in clashes between the Gilets and the police. By May 2019, there were eleven dead. And while those riots did not have a shattering iconic moment like the blaze that gutted the Limoges city hall on Sunday, the Gilets certainly didn’t show much reverence for France’s cultural heritage. Among other things, the rioters defaced the Arc de Triomphe with graffiti and vandalized its interior, smashing statues and trashing the gift shop.

One could debate whether the Gilets were ever really right-wing; their populism was mostly of the far-left kind. But that doesn’t change the basic point: When large portions of the MAGA-friendly American right decided that the Gilets Jaunes were rebels against the hated globalist elites, they were more than willing to overlook lawlessness, vandalism, and violence. Now that it suits their political purpose of demonizing migrants and Muslims, they regard such acts as civilization-ending barbarism.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Already Building His Excuse for Losing the Midterms… Dramatic arrests and last-minute lawsuits are advancing a familiar lie with the power of the federal government behind it, argues AMANDA CARPENTER.
• The Tao of Norm Macdonald… GEOFF EDGERS joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss his book on Macdonald and the new Netflix doc, ‘The Tale of Norm Macdonald.’
• Fake Polls and Hateful Ads Are Poisoning American Politics… Michigan State Senator MALLORY MCMORROW joins SAM STEIN for her take on how a fabricated poll had real consequences for her Senate campaign, drying up donations, rattling volunteers, and prompting reporters to ask when she would drop out.
• Vivek’s Hideous Ad Has Republicans at Each Other’s Throats… Trump celebrates Vivek’s attack as some Republicans beg him to stop. ANDREW EGGER and WILL SOMMER discuss on Bulwark Takes.
• To Motivate Base, GOP Cites Ancient Fear: France… Plus, in the latest Press Pass, JOE PERTICONE reports which corporate PACs are paying for Ramaswamy’s despicable new ad campaign.
• Military Sources Sound the Alarm… Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are already divvying up how to investigate Musk, the one-time shadow president who’s still making foreign policy decisions about the war in Ukraine. ADAM KINZINGER joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.

QUICK HITS

LACKEYS ONLY: When it comes to hiring, firing, and promoting career civil servants, it’s against the law for a president’s political appointees to make decisions based on those employees’ party affiliation. But the Washington Sun reports that the State Department appears to be violating that law, asking foreign service officers up for promotion whom they voted for in the three elections where Trump was on the ballot:

Top officials in the State Department made clear that only candidates who voted for President Donald Trump would be eligible for the mid-to-upper level foreign service roles. They also told candidates that their campaign donation history would be examined and any donation to Democrats would be disqualifying. . . .

A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the voting history questions but emphasized the importance of “fidelity” in a statement.

“Fidelity means upholding the Constitution and the law and executing policy with loyalty to the American people and their interests,” the spokesperson said. “It emphasizes the critical importance of service, integrity, and policy alignment across the Foreign Service. It is not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.”

Trump believes that the only way to be loyal to America is to be loyal to him personally. Marco Rubio’s State Department seems to find following that belief more important than following the law. Read the whole thing.

MAHA DISILLUSIONMENT: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have made his peace with the Trump administration’s cuddliness with agribusiness. But some of his true-believer MAHA lieutenants seem less tolerant of the status quo. Calley Means, the health influencer and top Kennedy ally, resigned from his government post yesterday, amid reporting he was frustrated by the glacial pace of Trump’s supposed food-policy agenda. (Means minded his manners in his resignation statement, talking of his “tremendous respect” for Trump and RFK Jr. and saying that the MAHA movement is “in the first inning and just getting started.”)

The Wall Street Journal has more:

Means was greatly frustrated by White House delays of some of Kennedy’s most popular policy ideas and blamed others in the administration for allowing food companies and special interests to have too much sway, people familiar with the matter said. One of them described Means as “disillusioned.” . . .

Means’ exit comes after administration officials deferred announcements of two of Kennedy’s food priorities: a definition of ultraprocessed foods aimed at eventually labeling them as such, as well as a regulation mandating less added sugar and more protein in school meals.

In recent months, Means clashed with other White House officials, sometimes raising his voice and growing visibly frustrated, the Journal previously reported. Some found him difficult to work with and unwilling to make practical concessions to ensure policies were feasible, the Journal previously reported.

Kennedy had originally intended to bring both Calley Means and his sister,Casey Means—a fellow influencer—into government with him. On Kennedy’s recommendation, Trump nominated Casey Means for Surgeon General, before ultimately withdrawing that nomination a few months later.

SEIZING (EQUITY IN) THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION: Donald Trump may style himself America’s last, best defense against socialism—even while insisting the government take greater ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. The White House has taken more than forty equity stakes in companies, with more on the way—and as Semafor reports, Democrats seem more interested in using this precedent than undoing it:

“The Trump administration’s approach to government equity stakes has completely lacked transparency and accountability,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told Semafor. “While this is something future administrations may want to consider, it’s clear that to actually serve Americans, it would require a totally different approach.”

Thanks to the precedent Trump has set, a future Democratic president could reap multiple benefits from equity stakes in private companies. Among them, as former Biden administration officials suggested: reining in the AI industry, shrinking defense spending, boxing China out of critical sectors, and pressuring gun and oil companies.

Even demanding an equity stake as a condition for government assistance—whether it’s a loan, grant, or other federal permit—is a powerful tool that’s now more readily at the White House’s disposal, no matter which party controls it.

On the one hand, you can hardly blame them. On the other hand: How bad do things have to get before lawmakers learn the lesson that presidents have far too much discretionary power and they should probably do something about it?

Oct. 22

Top Headlines

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• New York Times, News Analysis: Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing, Valerie Hopkins, Oct. 22, 2026. Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.
• New York Times, Judge Restricts D.H.S. Field Operations Aimed at Unearthing Voter Fraud, Zach Montague and Shawn Hubler, Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling largely blocked homeland security agents from carrying out field interviews in nine states, including California, as part of a sprawling effort to find noncitizens registered to vote.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Monsters Among Us, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 22, 2026. There is a morbid phenomenon in our politics, apparent both domestically and abroad. "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Exposing What the Pentagon is Hiding, DOJ Refuses to Rule Out Blocking Election Certification, Trump Order Under Oath, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. We just published something the Pentagon has spent eight months trying to keep from you. I obtained never-before-seen photos and videos from U.S. bases across the Middle East, along with accounts from troops and families who describe barracks burning with service members trapped inside, troops digging their own foxholes, and families left behind in Bahrain because an evacuation would “look bad at home.”
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Grows Confused at Rally Leaving Advisors Concerned, Trump Threatens Reporters, Russia Bombs Ukraine, Hegseth Breaks Globe, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Last night, an 80-year-old President of the United States stood on stage in South Carolina and asked his own crowd to help him remember the name of the Nobel Peace Prize. He shrank his favorite investment number by a factor of 1,000, wondered how Europe would feel about renaming the Pacific Ocean, and cheered as one of his supporters appeared to hit a protester.

Special Report: Accountability For Big Tech Moguls?

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute -- a gesture at a Trump Inauguration event that Musk described as innocent.

Montgomery Ward leader Sewell Avery Carried Out of His Office By Two Soldiers during World War II (Bettmann Archive photo).

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy. Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. We now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. 
• Politico, Elon Musk pours another $76 million into boosting Republicans, Jessica Piper, Oct. 22, 2026. The additional funds bring his total spending this cycle to $442 million.
• New York Times, How a Legal Backlash Against Big Tech Is Forcing Big Changes, Cecilia Kang, Oct. 22, 2026. A series of lawsuits has created a new de facto regulatory regime as courts order companies like Meta and Google to change their business practices — and pay up.
• Big: Report On Monopolies, Analysis: Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority, Lee Hepner, Oct. 22, 2026. Perhaps Dems’ best response to Musk’s “live by the sword, die by the sword,” should draw on another scripture: The government gave, and the government can take away.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Just How Much Are Young Voters Backing Democrats Now? See the Shift, Claire Cain Miller, Oct. 22, 2026. In the new Times/Siena poll, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way — a jump from just two years ago.
• New York Times, James Talarico Made His Name Fighting Republicans. He Made Laws With Them, Too, Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 22, 2026. He described himself as a progressive fighter. Now, he is seeking Republican votes.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With 12 Days To Go Trump And The Rs Are In Retreat, Their Battlefield Is Eroding, And The Election Is Breaking Towards The Democrats, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 22, 2026. To make the big blue wave that is emerging bigger we need to keep driving the early vote. For as Anderson Clayton told us a few weeks ago: "Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October."
• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Democrats Lead In Ohio, Texas, And Iowa As Midterms Start To Look Like A MAGA Extinction Event, Jason Easley,right, Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races. 
• New York Times, He’d Be the First Openly Gay Man in the Senate. He Rarely Brings It Up, Jess Bidgood, Oct. 22, 2026. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, would make history if he won. On the campaign trail, he doesn’t dwell on it.
• Politico, Kevin McCarthy predicts GOP will lose House majority, Mia McCarthy, Oct. 22, 2026. “What are the three things Republicans will do if they win the majority?” the former speaker asked. “I can’t tell you what that is.”

More On U.S. Economy -- And Election Interference

• New York Times, Opinion: In Six Decades of Public Life, I Never Thought I Would Write This Piece, Robert E. Rubin, right, (a senior counselor to Centerview Partners and was the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999), Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). Many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections.

More On Ohio Candidate's Despicable Child Rape Ad  

Vice President JD Vance (Image by Sarah D. Rogers for The Bulwark).

• The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: JD Vance Is a Sociopath, Jonathan V. Last, Oct. 22, 2026. America’s vice president is an Elizabeth Holmes–level sociopath. Today I want to take you through four statements from JD Vance that illustrate what a terrible human being he is.
• New York Times, Election Dispatches:Trump Defends Ramaswamy’s Attack Ad as Ohio’s Republican Governor Joins Backlash, Bayliss Wagner and Campbell Robertson, Oct. 22, 2026. President Trump on Thursday lashed out at critics of an attack ad that has roiled the Ohio governor’s race, and urged the Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, to continue airing it. Mr. Trump weighed in on social media hours after Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a fellow Republican, called on Mr. Ramaswamy to stop running the ad, which featured the estranged mother of the Democratic opponent.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The corporate cash behind Vivek Ramaswamy’s "despicable" TV ad, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 22, 2026. At 12 years old, Amy Acton was the victim of sexual abuse. After her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping Acton, her estranged mother, Donna Arthur, took her stepfather’s side and left the state with him as he fled justice.
• False Flags via The Bulwark, Political Commentary: MAGA Media Learns to Love Vile Vivek Ramaswamy Ad, Will Sommer, Oct. 22, 2026. For these supposed moral authorities, the only question is whether it works.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Sick Ad Against Amy Acton is Already Backfiring, Sarah Jones, right,  Oct. 22, 2026. Amy Action called Vivek Ramaswamy’s sick ad exploitive. It’s also backfiring according to a top election forecaster.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Oct. 22, 2026. Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.
• New York Times, Strike on Saudi Airport Kills 2 as U.S. Tells Some Diplomats to Leave, Ismaeel Naar, Oct. 22, 2026. For weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis have been attacking the kingdom’s aviation and energy sectors.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

President Trump, who has actively suppressed his transcripts from his schooling and falsely implied repeatedly that he graduated college with high honors, insulted CNN's Caitlin Collins and another female reporter at the White House on Oct. 22, 2026.

• Hope for America, Commentary:Trump's newest ABSURD attack on Kaitlan Collins was stunning, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 22, 2026. Just after 4:00 this afternoon, Donald Trump walked out of the Oval Office and spent barely seven minutes with reporters before turning questions about Russia sanctions into another ugly attack on women.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 21, 2026 [Out of Whack?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Everything feels out of whack in the United States. First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.

And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.

• Defiance.org, They threw us out while filming Trump’s corruption. We’re releasing the film anyway, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 22, 2026. I spent the fall quietly filming a documentary about what Donald Trump has turned Washington into. One week before the election, you’re going to see all of it. The government ejected our film crew from the Washington Monument. It tells you everything about why we made this documentary.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, Opinion: Impeachment. It’s Not Just for Presidents, David French, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America.
• Politico, DOJ indicts Virginia Democrat who led redistricting push on drug trafficking, money laundering charges, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Oct. 22, 2026. State Sen. L. Louise Lucas publicly bashed the White House while helping engineer Virginia’s ill-fated push earlier this year to draw a 10-1 map ahead of the November midterms.

More Global News

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump vs. The Law of Non-Contradiction, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Yesterday, Russia released a wrongfully detained American: Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired schoolteacher who was imprisoned in 2022 after being accused of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine.
• New York Times, Looted Goods From French Stores Flood Resale Sites After Riots, Jenny Gross, Oct. 22, 2026. Officials in France are pressing online platforms like eBay and Vinted to remove items that were stolen during public disturbances over the weekend.

Future U.S. Politics 

• The Contrarian, Opinion: MAGA Hubris Fuels the Blue Wave, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Like many authoritarian cults, the MAGA crowd does not believe their reign will ever end or that their opponents will ever gather their wits to respond to assaults on their rights, liberties, and physical safety. But some savvier Republicans (including White House staffers who are already lawyering up) are getting a wake-up call. In the run-up to the midterms, it seems to be slowly dawning on some of them that their abusive conduct has lit a fire under the Resistance, and that a reckoning is coming.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Gramsci’s Foreshadowing, William Kristol, right, Oct. 22, 2026. There’s a remark by the early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, that’s been much quoted in recent years: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

More On U.S Media, High Tech

• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s BBC Lawsuit Nightmare Gets Worse As Judge Orders President To Testify, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Trump tried to shake down the BBC with a defamation lawsuit, but the broadcaster has fought back at every turn, and now Trump must testify by December 11.
• New York Times, Why a Pillar of Christian Journalism is in Turmoil, Ruth Graham, Oct. 22, 2026. Former employees of Christianity Today say new leadership has been pushing back on independent journalism. About half of its staff members have left or been laid off over 14 months.
• New York Times, From Kenya to Japan, Rush to Fix Security Flaw Takes Sites Briefly Offline, Lynsey Chutel, Amelia Nierenberg and Brian O. Otieno, Oct. 22, 2026. Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language

Top Stories

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

New York Times, News Analysis: Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing, Valerie Hopkins, Oct. 22, 2026. Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.

Last October, President Trump imposed significant sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, complaining that negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin over ending the war in Ukraine “just don’t go anywhere.”

A red-carpet welcome for the Russian leader in Alaska had done nothing to bring peace. A planned summit in Budapest had fallen apart. Mr. Trump had started to acknowledge that Mr. Putin might just be playing him, with no intention of making peace. Faint Ukrainian hopes glimmered of a Trump-Putin break.

But the Russian president was playing a longer game.

Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.

Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would buy Russian diesel, asking for no concessions from Mr. Putin in return. The Trump administration went on to pressure Ukraine to stop striking oil refineries — Kyiv’s most powerful lever — and suspended Russia sanctions that Mr. Trump had just signed into law. Mr. Trump declared that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”

The diesel deal was in part a political calculation by Mr. Trump before the midterm elections, as he tries to lower fuel prices. But that action and others that followed also reflect the president’s long-evident affinity for Mr. Putin, which the Russian leader has assiduously cultivated even while continuing the war and denying Mr. Trump a coveted prize.

Ever since Mr. Trump returned to office, Russia has sought to separate the conflict in Ukraine from potential business agreements and closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The Trump administration held back, even as it slashed aid to Ukraine, largely continuing a Biden administration policy of refraining from economic deals with Russia until Mr. Putin stopped the war.

The White House now says such deals will help Russia see the benefits of peace. The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Mr. Putin, meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, had agreed to talks with Ukraine and the United States next month. But they would involve relatively low-level representatives, and a Russian official played down the Kremlin’s openness to forging a comprehensive agreement now.

Newly emboldened, Moscow is moving to assert itself as a global power equal to the United States and China, promoting a trilateral summit among them in November. 

President Trump frequently portrays himself on his Truth Social or via White House as an all-powerful king (as at top) or emporer annointed by God and backed by security forces and the military, as in this portrayal above by former Repubicans who organized the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. The political, military and economic chaos extends to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, selective tariffs helping insiders and Trump's transformation of U.S. longstanding alliances with Canada, Europe and NATO into adversaries whom he disdains while courting profitable deals from Russia, as newly documented this week, benefiting his family and allies.

New York Times, Judge Restricts D.H.S. Field Operations Aimed at Unearthing Voter Fraud, Zach Montague and Shawn Hubler, Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling largely blocked homeland security agents from carrying out field interviews in nine states, including California, as part of a sprawling effort to find noncitizens registered to vote.

A federal judge in California on Wednesday blocked the Homeland Security Department from carrying out most field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters.

The ruling came less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The Trump administration has launched a blitz of operations focused on finding evidence of noncitizen voting or tying up election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote.

The ruling covered stops and field interviews being carried out by hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents assigned to fan out across the country in search of instances of voter fraud, under what the administration has referred to as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”

In a concise 19-page ruling, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote that the stops appeared likely to hamper voter engagement and registration by a coalition of local governments and nonprofit groups. As with other initiatives in which the Trump administration has used federal immigration data to infer the citizenship status of people on state voter rolls, she wrote there were already signs that the “target lists” the government had generated contained errors and included naturalized citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended its methods, saying federal officials had used multiple data sources in addition to the public voter data they pulled to further verify the identity of registrants and eliminate false positives.

Judge Martínez-Olguin stopped short of halting field operations. But she barred agents from carrying out interviews that “involve or are likely to involve persons” who agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.” Given the unreliability of federal citizenship data at issue in the case, it was unclear how significantly that would hamper the department’s activities.

The interests of the entities suing, “and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation,” she wrote, “far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens.”

Internal documents introduced in the case indicated that agents were directed to focus on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

Judge Martínez-Olguin, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that the scope of the operations also raised concerns about voter intimidation. She noted that according to agency memos, the Homeland Security Department “surveils, covertly infiltrates and interrogates the staff of nonprofits and churches conducting voter engagement” and had targeted nearly 150 such nonprofit groupsas of July.

The government had indicated it could target naturalized citizens in instances where data suggested an individual had voted before they were naturalized.

The case arose as the Trump administration has mounted a series of legal fights with election officials across the country, aiming to show a pattern of large-scale illegal voting in U.S. elections. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part because many of the state and local authorities that administer and supervise elections have refused to comply with demands for access to sensitive voter rolls.

As a result, the federal authorities have compiled their own databases, underpinned by public, commercially available information that they have compared with federal records. The process has led to mistakes in some states, in part because public voter rolls do not include unique identifiers like Social Security numbers. Federal immigration records also sometimes fail to capture changes in citizenship status. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Monsters Among Us, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 22, 2026. There is a morbid phenomenon in our politics, apparent both domestically and abroad.

What’s driving the coming blue wave? More than anything else, the latest New York Times/Siena poll finds, it’s a sharp reversal among young voters, who got Trump-curious in 2024 but have snapped back hard ever since.

Voters 65 and older have crept back toward Democrats by two points, voters 45 to 64 have stayed put, and voters 30 to 44 have slid five points left. But voters aged 18 to 29 have jumped back toward Democrats by fifteen points—55 percent to 70 percent. Happy Thursday.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Exposing What the Pentagon is Hiding, DOJ Refuses to Rule Out Blocking Election Certification, Trump Order Under Oath, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. We just published something the Pentagon has spent eight months trying to keep from you. I obtained never-before-seen photos and videos from U.S. bases across the Middle East, along with accounts from troops and families who describe barracks burning with service members trapped inside, troops digging their own foxholes, and families left behind in Bahrain because an evacuation would “look bad at home.”

Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche said it was possible DOJ could try to block states from certifying the midterm results, a judge halted Trump’s noncitizen voter hunt in nine states over bad data, and another judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his BBC lawsuit after his “matter of national importance” turned out to be a rally and a fundraiser.

Not everyone is happy with today’s reporting, and the reaction has been intense. We’re going to keep pushing. I’ve also moved my Trump-Russia investigation to this weekend for more vetting, because with my family in Ukraine under Russian missiles, I want every claim in it to hold up.

Here’s what you need to know today:

EXCLUSIVE: Never-Before-Seen Images Show Damage to U.S. Bases in the Iran War as Troops and Families Say They Were Left to Fend for Themselves

I worked with VALOR Media Network and MeidasTouch on a bombshell exclusive that shows what the Iran war has done to American troops, which the Pentagon has kept from the public. We obtained dozens of never-before-published photos and videos showing damage to U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain, along with firsthand accounts from people who were there. Since the war began in late February, there have been no embedded journalists, casualty details have come out slowly, and images of damaged American bases have been almost nonexistent. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they say they’ve been repeatedly threatened with discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for speaking out or sharing images. “It’s so much worse than people realize,” one source said.

Images from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia show destroyed dining halls, damaged dorms, and aircraft burning on the tarmac. One photo shows a U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS surveillance plane that sources say was damaged in an attack that injured 10 to 12 service members and also damaged two KC-135 refueling tankers. Another image shows bunkers built to protect troops from missiles and drones, but their doors had never been mounted. A source also provided an image they say shows a fully destroyed C-17 cargo plane that was piled up to speed cleanup and limit knowledge of the loss, though the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed it and we couldn’t independently verify it. Video we obtained shows U.S. interceptors failing to stop a ballistic missile that then hit the base. “We had no defense against the drones,” one service member said.

At Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, sources say three service members were killed when Iranian missiles and drones hit their barracks, and others could hear them calling for help from inside the flames. Service members described about three months of near-constant fire starting in March, coming so often that “the alarms couldn’t keep up.” Sources say F-15s, F-35s, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and helicopters were damaged, and the July 17-18 attack on the barracks left three dead and four more evacuated. Sources say inadequate emergency response and a lack of preparation kept them from reaching the trapped troops, and that people on the ground were surprised more weren’t killed in the overcrowded base. Troops repeatedly ran out of basic hygiene supplies, housing areas were blown up twice, and a hangar holding everything they were preparing to ship home took a direct hit. In July they were told they were going home, then ordered to stay while sitting in the terminal, after many had already thrown away their bedding.

In Kuwait and the UAE, troops say they had no warning the war was starting and were left to protect themselves. In Kuwait, sources say some service members scattered into the desert after the first attacks and lived out of a van for three months until they could be sent home. Photos from September show Camp Buehring almost completely abandoned by the U.S. military, and sources say no one is allowed in parts of it at night. In the UAE, service members said they learned about the war from the news and had no shelters, and only small security teams were armed. Some went into hotels and had to find their own food, including by ordering takeout, while others dug their own foxholes. They described their leadership as “rudderless.”

In Bahrain, military families say the Pentagon refused to evacuate them because it would “make the situation look bad at home.” Sources say local commanders had evacuation plans ready, with planes waiting at the Bahrain airport, but the Pentagon wouldn’t allow it, and then the airport was hit and closed. Some families paid tens of thousands of dollars to get out on their own, and sources say some senior leaders were evacuated under what was presented as a training exercise while other families were left behind for more than a week. During the first wave, some families hid in a mall parking garage for hours, and sources say some children were so traumatized they couldn’t eat for days. “We were used as pawns in the war,” one military spouse said, blaming leaders in Washington and saying “Pete Hegseth thinks he’s a version of Call of Duty where the consequences aren’t real.” A contractor’s wife who escaped through Saudi Arabia at her own expense said, “As an American citizen, I felt completely abandoned by my own government.”

State Department Asked Diplomats Up for Promotion Whether They Voted for Trump, and Privately Tells Asylum Officers Latin America Is Safer Than U.S. Cities

The State Department asked some foreign service officers up for promotion who they voted for in the last three presidential elections, the Washington Sun reports. Six current and former State Department officials told the outlet that top officials made clear only candidates who voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 would be eligible for certain mid-to-upper level roles. Candidates were also told their campaign donation history would be checked, and that any donation to Democrats would disqualify them. Federal law clearly prohibits making personnel decisions for career civil servants based on political affiliation. The State Department declined to comment on the voting questions, saying only that the department values “fidelity” and that this is “not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “These are critical national security positions and individuals should be chosen for their experience and ability, not their political loyalty,” and that Democrats are working with House committees to investigate.

The loyalty questions are part of a broader push by Trump and Rubio to remake the diplomatic corps in their image. Last year the State Department added a “fidelity” section to performance reviews, requiring managers to judge employees on “completely aligning oneself and one’s team” with the administration’s goals. It also redesigned the Foreign Service Officer Test, and one recent test taker said it included questions about Reagan’s tax policies and Mike Pompeo’s accomplishments, adding that it seemed they were looking for “people who answered a certain way.” The department has cut nearly a quarter of its workforce and gave a $1 million no-bid recruiting contract to a firm whose CEO has said hiring had become too “woke.” Veteran diplomats have been pushed out of senior roles, and the administration previously had to drop job application questions asking about applicants’ favorite Trump policies after a court order. “This is yet another shocking example of the Trump administration hurtling our government back in time to the spoils system of the 19th century,” said Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service.

The State Department publicly warns Americans about violent crime in Latin America, but internal documents tell asylum officers those countries are no more dangerous than some U.S. cities, CNN reports. The new assessments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador compare their violent crime rates favorably with Baltimore, Houston, and Memphis, and claim many areas of Mexico and El Salvador have crime rates “at least one order of magnitude lower” than major U.S. cities. That’s despite the department’s own public travel warning against going to Honduras because of violent crime and terrorism. Because asylum seekers have to prove a “well-founded fear” of persecution, the documents will likely make it harder for migrants to win their cases, at a time when 94% of asylum cases were already being denied as of June, up from about 50% two years ago. The documents also claim Honduran police are “willing to and able to respond” and that people can safely relocate within their countries. “That clearly understates the degree to which police forces are in collusion with organized crime groups,” said Andrew Selee of the Migration Policy Institute, who called it “a wholesale shift” that raises “red flags.”

Judge Halts Trump’s Noncitizen Voter Hunt in Nine States, Orders Trump to Sit for BBC Deposition, and Arch Construction Could Start Days After the Midterms

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop investigating whether noncitizens are registered to vote in nine states, ruling that it relies on bad data and is intimidating voters. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in Oakland halted the probes in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin until polls close on November 3, though she put the ruling on hold until Friday so the administration can appeal. Court filings showed investigators were told to target naturalized citizens to check whether they had voted before becoming citizens, using lists the judge called “voluminous and unreliable.” During a “surge” that started in late August, agents had no more than 12 minutes per person to decide whether someone was legally allowed to vote. “Even under the best conditions, there is a high likelihood of error in review because there is no federal database containing citizenship status of U.S. residents,” she wrote, adding that citizens’ fears of being wrongly targeted “are well understood as intimidation.” Noncitizen voting is rare, as even the administration’s own investigations have shown, and the Justice Department has lost every one of its lawsuits against the 30 states that refused to hand over voter roll data.

A federal judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC by December 11 or risk having the case thrown out. Trump was supposed to be deposed on October 16 but canceled for what his team called a “matter of national importance.” The BBC’s lawyer told the judge that matter was actually a political rally and a fundraiser. “He was participating in party politics and prioritized that over sitting for the deposition,” attorney Charles Tobin said. Trump’s lawyers had asked to push the deposition to late January, after the December 18 deadline for discovery, but Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett refused and ruled the deposition can be videotaped over their objections. She also ruled the BBC can subpoena records from Mar-a-Lago, since Trump claims the documentary, which spliced together parts of his January 6 speech, hurt him “in his profession, occupation and trade.”

Construction on Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington could begin as soon as November 5, two days after the midterms. The Justice Department told a judge in one of the lawsuits trying to stop the project that a federal planning commission could approve final plans that day. Trump has said the arch would store drones and serve as a post for military snipers with a large stockpile of ammunition, but the final plans released last week leave all of that out and describe it as a “ceremonial gateway.” The arch would sit directly across from Arlington National Cemetery, where nearly 430,000 service members, veterans, and family members are buried. Veterans suing to stop it say it would disrupt the solemnity of funerals, and preservationists say it would block views of national landmarks including the Lincoln Memorial. “What better way to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary than to shut down the legally required review process, ignore some 100,000 negative public comments, and fast track the construction of a bloated and deeply unpopular monument,” said Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

A shareholder of the crypto company Circle is suing Trump, alleging he illegally profited from more than $2 billion in deals tied to a top UAE government official, in violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments. Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, directly competes with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, and the suit argues that money from a foreign government seeking Trump’s favor steered business away from Circle. According to the complaint, four days before the inauguration an entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, agreed to buy 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500 million, and Trump’s own financial disclosures show he received at least $75.5 million of it after taking office. Weeks later, a UAE government fund chaired by Tahnoon paid for a $2 billion investment in Binance using World Liberty’s brand-new USD1 stablecoin. The suit notes that Trump then pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the Commerce Department approved advanced Nvidia chip exports to a Tahnoon-chaired AI company, and regulators gave conditional approval to a World Liberty trust bank now co-owned by the Trump family and the UAE government. “President Trump has turned his office into a source of private profit on a scale without precedent in American history,” said Matt Pelikan of Evergreen Legal, which filed the case in federal court in Washington and is also seeking to bar Steve Witkoff from soliciting emoluments on Trump’s behalf.

U.S. and Israel Reportedly Plan Major New Strikes on Iran After the Midterms as Tehran Threatens “Zero Red Lines”

The U.S. and Israel are reportedly planning major new strikes on Iran for after the November 3 midterms, according to the New York Times. Pete Hegseth met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss the timing and goals of a joint attack, and possible targets include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenals. The Guardian reports that Netanyahu told Hegseth he would prefer Iran attack first, and that the two also discussed what a strike could mean for Netanyahu’s re-election chances ahead of Israel’s October 27 vote. Trump plans to have three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter jets, and special operations forces in the region by early November, before a possibly Democratic Congress takes office in January. Trump hasn’t approved the strikes yet, and he has backed away from hitting Iran again seven times in the past four months. Still, last month he said, “I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” and he has openly floated using the “mother of all bombs” on an underground nuclear site.

Iran is threatening to hit oil facilities, undersea internet cables, data centers, and AI facilities in as many as seven Gulf countries if the U.S. and Israel attack again. Mohsen Rezaei, who leads Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said there can be no deal in which Iran’s economy comes under attack while “the economic architecture enabling those attacks” stays untouched. “We see the next conflict as an existential threat,” said Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s top negotiator. “Our strategy is ‘zero red lines,’” he said, adding that the war “will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates.” Fars, a news agency close to the Revolutionary Guard, reported that Iran has told its military units that if Iranian officials are assassinated or civilians are killed in a new war, the response “will also include political targets.” A lawyer close to Iran’s foreign ministry warned that power grids, desalination plants, and ports across the region “would burn,” leaving tens of millions without water or electricity.

Trump accused Iran of making up attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz to drive up oil prices before the midterms. “They are even making up fake hits, mines, and everything else,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, claiming more oil is now moving through Hormuz than before the war. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it struck four ships transferring oil and that three more hit mines, all along the southern route near Oman that the U.S. uses to escort tankers out of the Gulf. Neither claim has been independently verified, but Brent crude hit $112 to $113 a barrel, its highest level since May, driven partly by reports of new U.S.-Israeli strikes. Middle East oil exports did top prewar levels last week as shippers use alternate routes, but escorting tankers is costly and instability is keeping prices high. The U.S. naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Iran’s offshore oil stockpile, which it had been selling to China, ran dry in mid-October.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels say they hit four targets inside Saudi Arabia in 48 hours, including the Defense Ministry in Riyadh, as the war spreads across the region. The Houthis claimed strikes on the Defense Ministry, the airport in Dammam, an Aramco facility in Yanbu, and the airport in Abha, though CBS News hasn’t verified the claims. A Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted four more drones over Riyadh and the holy city of Medina on Thursday, and the Houthis have denied targeting Mecca or Medina. Saudi Aramco has reportedly told staff to evacuate its Dhahran headquarters, and the State Department has ordered non-emergency U.S. employees and their families out of the country. The IMF expects Saudi Arabia’s economy to shrink 3.3% this year and the region’s economy to contract 4.8% because of the war. Foreign ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt meet in Istanbul on Friday to try to coordinate a response, amid growing alarm that a new war is now the working assumption in both Tehran and Washington.

Trump Tells Ramaswamy to “Keep It Up” With Ad Featuring Acton’s Estranged Mother, Attacks GOP Governor Who Condemned It

Trump defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother and said he “should keep it up,” attacking Ohio’s Republican governor for asking him to pull it. In a long Truth Social post, Trump called Gov. Mike DeWine a “RINO” who was “as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party” and said DeWine “probably wants a Dumocrat to win.” He praised Acton’s mother for taking “a lot of courage” to appear in the ad, which suggests her daughter has mental health issues. “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt,’” Trump wrote. He also called the Democratic nominee “Lyin’ Amy Acton,” while admitting he had “never even heard of” her before. Hours earlier, DeWine had called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and urged Ramaswamy to take it down.

Trump’s defense of the ad puts him on the opposite side from a growing number of Ohio Republicans who have condemned it. Acton’s brother has said he and his sister have been estranged from their mother since Acton was 12 because their mother stayed married to the man who sexually abused Acton as a child. Sen. Jon Husted, who faces a tough reelection fight in Ohio, said he “would not have run the ad.” JD Vance has sided with Trump, saying he’s “a little bit disgusted” to see Republicans “whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats... want to do.” The fight comes less than two weeks before Election Day in one of the country’s most closely watched governor’s races. The Hill also reports that Acton’s fundraising has surged since the ad aired.

Other news:

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department could try to block states from certifying the results of the midterm elections. Blanche made the comment in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday, where he and FBI Director Kash Patel announced racketeering charges against Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas. Asked whether DOJ might move to stop states from certifying the 2026 results, he said it was possible, though he insisted the department did not intend to improperly interfere. States certify their own election results under state law, so any federal attempt to block certification would be a major and likely legally contested escalation. The comment comes less than two weeks before Election Day, as the administration pushes a hunt for noncitizen voters that a federal judge just halted in nine states for relying on error-filled data. Democrats have urged Blanche to recommit to longstanding DOJ policies against interfering in elections.

House Democrats are already reaching out to Pentagon whistleblowers who are ready to “spill their guts” about Pete Hegseth if Democrats win the House, according to the Daily Telegraph. Democrats are reportedly preparing subpoenas for Hegseth and his closest advisers, including his top aide Ricky Buria and his wife Jen Hegseth. “There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to very quietly go to the chair of the Armed Services Committee and are going to spill their guts,” one source told the Telegraph. “It’ll be horrendous. It’ll be consistent embarrassment.” An unnamed Democratic member of Congress said impeachment is the ultimate goal, but only after “a thorough investigation.” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie already filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth last month, and a former senior administration official said Hegseth’s “arrogance” has made former allies willing to work with Democrats, adding, “I hope he and his inner circle have some very strong legal insurance.”

The Justice Department charged Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats and a frequent Trump critic, with racketeering just 12 days before the midterms. The 82-year-old surrendered Thursday on charges including money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute marijuana, connected to a cannabis business she co-owns, and half a dozen others, including her daughters, were also charged. Prosecutors allege she used her Senate seat to shield the business from scrutiny and quote an intercepted call in which she allegedly said, “I’ve gotten too old to not be greedy.” The investigation began before Trump took office, but DOJ typically avoids overt steps against political figures within 60 days of an election, and Attorney General Todd Blanche brushed that off, saying, “It’s not even a rule, it’s a practice.”

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam said his own communications with Lucas were monitored and accused the DOJ of becoming Trump’s “own personal law firm.” “Today, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the full weight of the federal government have been wielded against an 82-year-old great-grandmother,” Lucas said. “I grew up under Jim Crow... I’m not stopping now.”

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, called on Vivek Ramaswamy to pull an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother, calling it “deeply, deeply troubling.” The Ramaswamy campaign put $4 million behind the minute-long spot, in which Donna Arthur calls her daughter a “liar.” Acton has said she was sexually abused as a child by her mother’s husband, which her brother has corroborated, and she hasn’t spoken to her mother in nearly 50 years. DeWine, a former prosecutor, said the man was indicted and fled with the mother, and that knowing this “makes it just more wrong.” Sen. Jon Husted also said he “would not have run that ad,” but JD Vance told Republicans to “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.” DeWine still isn’t withdrawing his endorsement of Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy’s campaign says Acton was the first to bring up her opponent’s mother.

Russia hit Kyiv with ballistic missiles, including cluster warheads, hours after Putin agreed to resume talks and Steve Witkoff called him “a humanitarian.” The overnight strikes killed at least two people and wounded 22, including four children, hitting a bridge over the Dnipro River, homes, energy infrastructure, an ambulance station, and a clinic. “The choice of weapon was deliberate; the choice of target area was deliberate, and so was the intent to inflict as much loss and damage on civilians as possible,” Zelenskyy said. Downing Street said it did not recognize Witkoff’s description of Putin, and Ukraine’s foreign minister said “appeasement, servility and flattery” won’t stop Russia. The White House still hasn’t reversed the slowdown of Starshield, the military version of Musk’s Starlink, and the New York Times reported dozens of Ukrainian drones fell from the sky when it was cut. “Our drones can no longer reach the speeds needed to intercept enemy targets,” said a Kyiv air defense commander, who said he felt betrayed by Washington.

The CDC refused to approve a faster, high-volume measles test that West Coast states requested as the outbreak grows. California and Washington asked the CDC in May to validate a test that could run on machines labs already bought during COVID, which can process up to 500 tests in eight hours. After two months, the CDC said no, citing “other competing priorities.” Health officials from California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington have now written to CDC Director Erica Schwartz asking her to reconsider. “If a large outbreak were to occur in our region, without high-throughput capacity, it would be more difficult to scale up diagnostic testing appropriately,” they wrote. HHS said the CDC is “prioritizing emerging technologies” but wouldn’t say whether it plans to approve such a test.

Major U.S. banks are finding unauthorized AI agents operating inside customer accounts, and some appear to be acting on their own, Axios reports. Banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Citi are racing to contain the risk. In most cases, users gave AI assistants their login credentials, which breaks bank rules, but some banks have tracked agents calling customer service lines or taking actions that appear independent of what the user asked. Bank executives described the situation as horrifying, especially when agents can make purchases or move money. Many banks say they can’t even tell whether an agent was authorized by a user or has “gone rogue.” Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are now restricting third-party AI agents, and Chase reminded customers not to give their passwords to anyone.

French President Emmanuel Macron says “illegitimate” protests will be banned after some of the worst riots France has seen in years. Macron blamed “seditious” ultra-left groups “whose aim is to bring down the Republic” for last weekend’s looting and car burnings. Protests planned Thursday in Paris, Lyon, Lille, and Grenoble were banned, and night curfews are in place in parts of Paris and other cities, which critics say infringes on the right to protest. The demonstrations began last month at a high school near Paris over staff shortages and spread nationwide into broader anger over the soaring cost of living. A bigger protest is expected Saturday, when the “yellow vest” movement is set to join, and unions are planning another major day of action on November 5. The unrest comes just months before France picks Macron’s successor in next year’s presidential election.

“Looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular pleaded not guilty to rape charges in Massachusetts. The 20-year-old, whose real name is Braden Peters, is charged with rape, drugging someone for sexual intercourse, and supplying alcohol to someone under 21. The charges stem from allegations by 18-year-old influencer Aleksandra Mendoza, who says that in May 2025, when she was 17, Peters got her drunk during a livestream at his family’s Cape Cod home and assaulted her while she was asleep. Peters has denied wrongdoing, and his lawyers argue that Mendoza kept working with him afterward and only came forward after her brand deals dried up. A judge set bail at $10,000, which Peters paid in cash. He was previously sentenced to probation in Florida after pleading no contest to unlawfully firing a gun in public in an incident where shots were fired at an alligator.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Grows Confused at Rally Leaving Advisors Concerned, Trump Threatens Reporters, Russia Bombs Ukraine, Hegseth Breaks Globe, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Last night, an 80-year-old President of the United States stood on stage in South Carolina and asked his own crowd to help him remember the name of the Nobel Peace Prize. He shrank his favorite investment number by a factor of 1,000, wondered how Europe would feel about renaming the Pacific Ocean, and cheered as one of his supporters appeared to hit a protester.

Earlier in the day he called one reporter a “dummy” and another “stupid” for asking about his decision to waive sanctions on Russia. Hours after his envoy called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian,” Russia hit Kyiv with 21 missiles. Meanwhile, the war with Iran is spreading. Oil is above $110, Americans are being ordered out of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. military is quietly pulling troops back from bases across the region.

This administration doesn’t want you to see a lot of what’s happening right now, so I’m about to release two investigations that I know will ruffle feathers.

The first lays out Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials, from his first term through today. The second is about the truth of the Iran war: what’s actually happening to American troops and their families overseas, and what the government has kept from you.

People will push back on both, and some will be angry. I’ve already seen what happens when I report on things powerful people want buried. Some of you unsubscribed over my Epstein work, and some may leave over this. However much pressure there is, I’m not going to stop, because you make it possible for me to keep going. I don’t answer to a corporate owner or a billionaire. I answer to you.

Here’s what you need to know today:

Trump, 80, Appears More Confused Than Usual at South Carolina Rally, Mixing Up Prizes, Numbers, and Oceans

Trump appeared noticeably more confused than usual during a roughly 90-minute rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, stumbling through a string of gaffes. The 80-year-old president was at Clemson University to campaign for Sen. Darline Graham, who is facing Democrat Annie Andrews. At one point, while complaining about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he couldn’t seem to remember its name. “They gave the wonderful peace prize, right, does anybody know the name of that peace prize? The peace prize?” he asked the crowd, before saying, “They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady.” He was referring to Navi Pillay, the 85-year-old former U.N. human rights chief who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, not the Pulitzer. “Something is off with Trump tonight,” many posted. “The gaffes, the glitches, the confusion are well beyond his usual.”

Trump also tripped over his own talking points, shrinking his signature investment claim by a factor of 1,000 and floating a plan to rename the Pacific Ocean. “We secured commitments for $22.2 trillion in new investments,” he said, then corrected himself: “$22.2 million. Uh, billion. Sorry. Billion with a B, not an M.” He ended by saying “$22 billion,” even though he usually claims $22 trillion, a figure the White House itself puts at about half that and economists say isn’t real. Later, after describing a conversation with Google’s CEO about renaming the Atlantic, he said, “Pacific Ocean, we were going to call it the ‘American Ocean.’ How do you think Europe would feel?” No part of Europe touches the Pacific. He also briefly forgot his own nickname for the superfans who follow him to rallies, calling them “front-row Jacks” before switching to “front-row Joes.”

The rally was also marked by protesters, and Trump cheered as one was apparently hit by a supporter. According to the White House press pool, one protester called Trump a “traitor,” and another shouted, “Release the Epstein files!” Trump reacted giddily when a supporter appeared to strike a heckler who was being removed from the arena. Protesters have become a regular feature at Trump’s midterm stops, including four interruptions at his Kansas rally earlier this week. Trump urged the crowd to pretend he was on the ballot himself. The rally came hours after he called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and an ABC News reporter “stupid” for asking about his Russia sanctions waiver.

Trump Calls Reporters “Dummies” and “Stupid,” Kicks The Independent Off Air Force One, and Truth Social Hits an All-Time Low

Trump lashed out at reporters again Wednesday, calling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and an ABC News reporter “stupid” for asking about his decision to waive sanctions on Russia. When Collins pressed him on waiving the sanctions in a law he signed just last month, Trump waved her off: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.” An ABC News reporter then asked, “How is waiving those sanctions on Russia to secure the release of Hubbard not giving something to Russia in exchange?” Trump replied, “Are you a stupid person? Who do you work for?” and added that ABC is “the worst of all.” Trump has insisted Stephen Hubbard’s release required “no swap,” but said that if sanctions had taken effect, the negotiations “would obviously come immediately to an end.” The reporters were asking the obvious question that Trump’s own words raised.

A day after his Oval Office tirade, the White House pulled The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg from the press pool on Air Force One. Feinberg was scheduled to be the print pooler on Trump’s trip to a campaign rally in Iowa, but the press office emailed him Wednesday night to say he would “not be the print pooler on tomorrow’s trip,” with no explanation. The move came after Trump told Feinberg in the Oval Office, “you better be careful,” asked if he was “a sick person,” and said, “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.” The White House’s official rapid response account then attacked him with an ableist slur, and JD Vance called him an “imbecile.” Feinberg’s offense was asking why Trump’s new fraud tip program pays whistleblowers 1%, when existing federal law already pays 10% to 25%. “That is retaliation,” said White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich, who works for Fox News.

The Independent is at least the third outlet barred from Air Force One in recent weeks, even after a federal judge ruled the White House’s press bans were likely illegal. Last week, Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the administration to restore press passes for journalists at CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, writing that Trump’s own statements showed he targeted them for their coverage. “Simply put, that is unlawful viewpoint discrimination,” the judge wrote. The administration appealed within 24 hours, and reporters from CNN and Politico are still being kept off Air Force One on days their outlets are scheduled to cover the president’s travel. The White House argues that restoring press passes is “different than allowing the pool” into the Oval Office or onto the plane, calling travel on Air Force One “a privilege not a right.” The Justice Department has claimed the bans were for national security reasons, though Trump himself never made that argument, and the White House raised it only after the outlets sued.

The White House counsel’s office has threatened Politico with unspecified “consequences” unless it retracts or corrects stories about turmoil involving Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, with the deadline expiring today. In a letter to Politico’s editor in chief, White House Counsel Will Scharf demanded the outlet retract three recent stories, publicly apologize to Trump and Wiles, and scrub the reporting from its archives, writing that “freedom of the press is not a professional exemption from accountability.” The stories reported that Trump was considering replacing Wiles, that he “blew up” over that report, and that Wiles helped set up former press secretary Katie Zacharia’s Fox News interview before her exit, claims the White House denies and says it provided text messages to disprove. If Politico doesn’t comply, Scharf warned of an “immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House” and “all other appropriate and available legal remedies,” and a White House official said “all options are on the table.” Politico, along with CNN and MS NOW, is already banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One, even after a judge restored the outlets’ access to White House grounds. Communications Director Steven Cheung has also called Politico, which is owned by the German company Axel Springer, “a foreign-op designed to interfere in American politics,” raising concerns the administration may try to target it as a foreign influence operation.

Shares of Trump Media, the company behind Truth Social, hit an all-time low as users leave the platform. The stock fell more than 7.5% on Monday to $6.40 before closing at $6.43, down 29% over the past month. Truth Social averaged about 260,000 daily users last month, down more than 30% from a year ago and well below its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to Similarweb. That’s a tiny fraction of Facebook’s more than 2 billion daily users and X’s roughly 130 million. The company has tried to turn things around with gambling and crypto ventures, a proposed merger with a nuclear fusion firm, and even an offer to give users early access to Trump’s posts for $100,000 a month, but none has paid off so far. Trump remains the platform’s dominant voice, at one point averaging 27 posts a day, including a string of posts around 1 a.m. this week attacking a federal judge who has received death threats.

Zelenskyy Mocks Russian “Humanitarians” as Missiles Hit Kyiv Hours After Witkoff’s Praise for Putin

Russia hit Kyiv with three waves of ballistic missiles just hours after Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian,” and Zelenskyy threw the word right back. Zelenskyy said the missiles were launched at Kyiv “by Russian ‘humanitarians’ since yesterday evening,” with Moscow firing 21 missiles in total. The strikes damaged homes, energy facilities, a railway station, the metro, shopping centers, and businesses. “Even a monastery is among the damaged sites,” he said. Across 12 regions under attack, at least two people were killed and 34 injured, including 15 in Kyiv, two of them 15-year-olds, and one person was killed in Kharkiv. Zelenskyy said the timing, “almost immediately after another round of talks,” showed “no real change” in Russia’s attitude.

Russia agreed to new talks with Ukraine and the U.S., but signaled it sees little to discuss. Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said Russia is ready to resume three-way talks at the technical level, not between leaders, starting around November 10, likely in Abu Dhabi. But he dismissed the “new approaches” Witkoff brought from his meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders in Oslo, saying, “there wasn’t much there that was useful.” The BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg wrote that Putin “doesn’t feel under pressure right now to end the war,” knowing that Ukraine’s air defenses are strained, winter is coming, and the U.S. president wants a “more profitable relationship with Moscow.” A Russian lawmaker told the BBC that Trump is “the only leader in the Western world who is doing something for peace,” and when asked if he meant peace on Russia’s terms, replied, “Of course!” Even Witkoff conceded that “there is still important work to do.”

Russian commentators are already calling a possible Trump-Putin-Xi meeting “The New Yalta,” a summit that would leave Ukraine out. The Kremlin has floated a three-way meeting with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in China, where Ukraine’s future would be discussed without Ukraine at the table. The nickname refers to the 1945 Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt carved up postwar Europe. A Kremlin spokesman later said no Trump-Putin talks are currently planned, though they could be arranged. Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev also said Wednesday that Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to Europe will “inevitably” resume operations. A former U.K. defense official said Russia “has given back very little of consequence” while “all the concessions have been on the American side,” adding that Hubbard’s release served Russia’s “purpose.”

Ukraine is hitting back, knocking out key Russian data centers and launching hundreds of drones toward Moscow. This month, Ukrainian drones struck three major data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, which the AP described as Russia’s version of “Uber and Amazon and Google” combined, plus centers serving Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, and VKontakte, its version of Facebook. The attacks disrupted banking, e-commerce, ride-hailing, and AI chatbots, and even forced some Russian courts to postpone hearings. Experts say the damage to Yandex’s supercomputers, one of which ranked 19th in the world, could take months or years to repair, and sanctions on high-end chips will make it worse. “This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race,” one analyst said. Overnight, Ukraine also launched 630 drones toward Moscow, most of which were shot down, according to the city’s mayor.

Musk Vows to “Come For” Democrats Who Investigate Him as They Plan a Wave of Probes Into His Empire

Democrats are preparing to investigate Elon Musk and his companies if they win back control of Congress in November, Politico reports. Senior Democrats are discussing how several committees could go after the world’s richest man, who is also the GOP’s top donor. One possible target is Musk’s possible role last week in slowing Starlink internet access for Ukraine’s military, at a time when Trump is pressuring Ukraine to make a peace deal with Russia. “What happens when one guy gets a giant contract from the government and then uses it to do something that shuts down communication in a war that has been extremely important to the United States to support Ukraine?” Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked. Democrats also want to look at DOGE’s role in cutting more than 250,000 federal jobs, withholding money Congress appropriated, accessing sensitive data like Social Security records, and dismantling USAID. “The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, pointing to the billions in federal contracts and subsidies that go to SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk responded by threatening to retaliate against the Democrats who investigate him and the people he thinks are behind them. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Musk wrote on X in response to the Politico story. “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.” He didn’t say who he thinks is “pulling the strings” or what he would do. The threat is aimed at members of Congress carrying out oversight, one of their basic constitutional duties. Some Democrats aren’t waiting for the election: House Homeland Security Democrats have demanded that Musk testify under oath about a watchdog report finding DOGE overstated its savings, and Ways and Means Democrats have called for an investigation into DOGE’s alleged data theft from Social Security records. Musk’s spokespeople didn’t respond to Politico’s requests for comment.

As the threats of investigations grow, Musk is floating a merger between Tesla and SpaceX. On a call with SpaceX investors Tuesday, Musk said combining the two companies would be a “good idea” and that “there’s a lot of merit” to it, and both boards have set up special committees to explore a deal. On Tesla’s earnings call Wednesday he refused to say more, saying, “I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield.” Tesla beat Wall Street’s expectations with $28.05 billion in third-quarter revenue, but revenue was down slightly from last quarter, car sales revenue fell 3% from a year ago, and the stock is down more than 11% this year. Musk has also repeatedly missed his own big promises: he once said “probably half the population of the US” would be using Tesla’s Robotaxi by the end of 2025, but rollout has been slow. A merger would combine two companies that hold major federal contracts, which is exactly what Democrats say they want to investigate.

Iran Claims It Hit Seven Tankers Near the Strait of Hormuz as Oil Surges and the U.S. Quietly Pulls Back Troops

Iran says it attacked seven ships in and near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, sending oil prices surging. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it “simultaneously” struck four vessels transferring oil ship-to-ship in the Persian Gulf, leaving them “burning,” and that three other ships hit sea mines and were forced to stop. Iran says the ships were using southern shipping routes near Oman that the Trump administration has encouraged vessels to take to avoid Iranian fees and controls, routes Tehran considers illegal. If confirmed, it would be the most vessels damaged in the Gulf in a single day since the war began on February 28. Brent crude jumped more than 3% to about $112 a barrel, U.S. crude rose to nearly $100, and stock futures fell. The Revolutionary Guard warned that if this continues, “the confrontation will extend to the bases of the aggressors in the region.”

The U.S. military is quietly reducing its presence at bases in the Middle East because of threats from Iran and the Houthis, CBS News reports. A U.S. official and a senior military official confirmed the drawdown, which NBC News first reported. U.S. Central Command wouldn’t discuss the moves, saying only that it “regularly” moves troops “to optimize mission readiness.” The State Department has also ordered all non-emergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, citing Houthi attacks on “civilian airports and other critical infrastructure.” Several other U.S. embassies in the region have cut staff under a “restricted operations” status created in August. The moves come as Trump insists “we’re doing very well with Iran” in a war he said in March would take only a few weeks.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels are pounding Saudi Arabia, hitting airports and oil facilities and killing more than 20 people in recent weeks. An attack on King Fahd International Airport in the eastern city of Dammam on Wednesday killed two people and injured eight. On the same day, debris from an intercepted drone aimed at the Shaybah oil field killed two more, and Saudi forces intercepted another drone over Riyadh on Thursday. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, has reportedly told staff to evacuate its headquarters in Dhahran and work from home, after a missile struck one of its buildings there last week. Riyadh’s main airport, where a strike killed 13 people including an American earlier this month, is only partly reopened. Despite spending $83 billion on defense last year, more than any other Middle Eastern country, Saudi Arabia has struggled to stop the attacks.

Iran says indirect talks with the U.S. over a ceasefire are still going, even as the fighting escalates. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the two sides are still negotiating through mediators like Pakistan and Qatar over a seven-day ceasefire proposal Iran offered in September, which Trump rejected. That proposal calls for ending the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, lifting oil sanctions, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and releasing frozen Iranian assets, and Araghchi says the U.S. is now trying to add new conditions. “Iran is prepared to give diplomacy another chance,” he wrote, but warned that if the U.S. “chooses war over diplomacy, it’ll certainly result in an even greater strategic failure.” Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that Trump blocked an Israeli plan for major new strikes on Iran to avoid escalating the war before the midterms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he ordered his military and intelligence services to topple Iran’s regime.

Other news:

Democratic leaders are suing the Trump administration to stop what they call an illegal attempt to take control of the midterm elections. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Washington, two weeks before the November 3 election. They are asking a judge to bar the administration from purging legally registered voters from state voter rolls or denying them ballots, and to rule that it has illegally threatened state election officials with prosecution. The suit points to the Justice Department’s case in California, where it is trying to stop officials from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has flagged as “likely” noncitizens. “For over a decade now, President Donald J. Trump has bombarded the American people with lies and misinformation about American elections and voter fraud,” the suit says. The case went to Chief Judge James Boasberg, whom the White House has repeatedly attacked, and the Justice Department says its actions are “grounded in law.”

Pete Hegseth’s staff broke a World War II-era globe used by Dwight Eisenhower while trying to move it into his office, the Washington Post reports. Hegseth’s team wanted one of two 30-inch Eisenhower globes kept at the Pentagon, which date to the 1930s, for the defense secretary’s office. Trained curators normally oversee moves like this, but the Army’s history experts were furloughed during a partial government shutdown, so Hegseth’s staff did it themselves. They dropped the globe, and it crashed onto its base, leaving a gash several inches wide near Antarctica and knocking the sphere off its mount. The Army confirmed the damage happened during an “attempted move” on February 3, the same day the shutdown ended, and one source blamed an “apparent lack of patience.” “Hegseth is no Ike. The globe won’t give him Ike’s attributes of humility, intellect and judgment,” said retired Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, a former West Point history professor.

A fake brochure telling trans kids how to leave home for gender surgery is being mailed to Republican voters across Texas, and the trans group it names says it had nothing to do with it. The mailers are addressed to “Students of” each household and went out to people on conservative mailing lists, including homes with no children. They’re branded with the name of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, which says it “did not author, approve, or distribute” them, doesn’t work on emancipations or gender surgeries, and has sent cease and desist letters to two companies that sent texts in its name. Right-wing accounts including Libs of TikTok used the mailers to stir up outrage just weeks before the midterms, and a Republican congressional candidate claimed “the radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children.” The brochures were produced by a newly created Wyoming LLC with a Houston P.O. box. The Texas Tribune traced a mailer ID on two of them to SnailWorks, a Maryland direct mail company the National Republican Congressional Committee has paid $57,300 over two years to rent mailing lists, though that link alone doesn’t show who paid for these mailers. Meanwhile, Republicans are furious that anti-trans ads are teaching their kids about what transgender means:

Rep. Ilhan Omar says federal agents pounded on her doors at 6 a.m. to “freak” her out, and she now has to move out of her home for safety reasons. Speaking to MS NOW, the Minnesota Democrat gave her first detailed account of the October 12 search of her Washington home by Homeland Security Investigations agents, which lasted four or five hours. She said agents surrounded the house and asked her to sign a paper waiving certain rights she has as a member of Congress, which she refused. They took 17 items, including old phones belonging to her and her daughter, and her husband’s notebooks, a camera passed down from his uncle, and a Somali phrase book. A person familiar with the investigation told NBC News the possible charges include conspiracy and making false statements on immigration paperwork, and the timing so close to the midterms has alarmed Justice Department veterans. “He’s got everything to do with it,” Omar said of Trump, who denies involvement, adding that “the people who knocked on my door, searching for papers, literally have his papers,” referring to her late father’s immigration file.

Michigan’s Senate candidates clashed in their final debate, with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed tying Republican Mike Rogers to Trump’s war with Iran. The two are in a neck-and-neck race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, and the debate in Detroit came less than two weeks before Election Day. El-Sayed blamed rising gas and grocery prices on the war and called for a war powers resolution “rather than a senator who is going to stand hip to hip with Donald Trump.” Rogers has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, cutting an ad calling for the war to wind down and saying Canadian tariffs “were not well thought-through.” Rogers again accused El-Sayed of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which El-Sayed has repeatedly denied, and El-Sayed fired back, “To bring into question my commitment to the Constitution is really beneath you.” Asked a yes-or-no question on universal background checks for guns, Rogers said it “depends” and then that he was “in the middle.”

Experts are alarmed that the CDC is hiding information about measles deaths as the outbreak keeps growing. The agency added a third measles death to its dashboard on Wednesday but refused to say which state it occurred in, citing privacy laws it wouldn’t name. Legal experts say there is no privacy reason for withholding a state, with UC Law San Francisco professor Dorit Reiss saying, “I don’t buy it.” The CDC dashboard lists only three deaths this year, even though Pennsylvania alone has confirmed five, with a sixth still under investigation. Cases jumped 8% in one week to 4,410 this year, nearly double last year’s total. Infectious disease expert Paul Offit wondered if the secrecy is “coming from the top,” noting reports that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CDC Director Erica Schwartz have ordered the death count lowered, and said state officials may now ask, “Can you trust them?”

A new United Nations report says the U.S. is a major reason the world is losing ground in the fight against climate change. The U.S. was the only major economy last year that failed to cut its carbon pollution or at least slow its growth, according to the UN Environment Programme. America’s emissions rose by 133 megatons, far more than any other country, driven by higher electricity demand and a rebound in coal power, and the U.S. accounted for 70% of the world’s emissions increase. The report says Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will likely add a tenth of a degree Celsius to global warming by 2100. One scientist said that extra warming would push another 140 million people into dangerously hot conditions, and another estimated it would cost the global economy about $1.2 trillion. “It is looking at the fire, denying there is a fire, and then pouring more petrol on it,” Australian climate scientist Bill Hare said of the U.S.

Mark Zuckerberg threatened to leave California over a proposed billionaire tax, and Meta gave him a deal to stay. Zuckerberg, whom Forbes ranks as the world’s sixth-richest person with about $240 billion, told Meta he was considering moving because of Proposition 40, a ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on California’s roughly 250 billionaires. Under the arrangement Meta announced Wednesday, Zuckerberg will get new non-voting shares to cover a potential multibillion-dollar tax bill, so he won’t have to sell shares that give him control of the company. In return, he committed to staying a resident of California, or wherever Meta is headquartered, for eight years. A special board committee called it “critically important” that he remain at the helm, citing AI competition. Political analysts say Proposition 40 is far from certain to pass, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has been rallying in support of it.

North Korea says it will restart propaganda broadcasts along its border with South Korea as tensions rise. Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister and top spokesperson, said loudspeakers for psychological warfare will be running “along the whole border” by the end of October. She made the announcement after touring front-line areas where North Korean troops are adding mines, barbed wire, and anti-tank barriers to one of the world’s most heavily armed borders. Tensions have spiked since land mine blasts injured three South Korean soldiers in September, which Seoul blames on North Korea and Pyongyang denies. Kim warned that if South Korean warning shots harm North Korean soldiers, border guards “will show no mercy for the armed gangsters bereft of reason.” South Korea’s top military officer called the threats “intolerable,” and the defense ministry said Seoul will take “proportionate measures.”

The U.S. military failed to tell British police about a drunk-driving allegation against an American airman stationed in England, the Guardian reports. Christopher Mooty, then a 21-year-old airman at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, allegedly drove two other airmen to a kebab shop around 4 a.m. in March 2023 after hours of drinking. A British woman he’d been in a relationship with reported him to his superiors, saying he was “the most drunk I’ve ever seen him.” Under an agreement in place since the 1950s, British police usually have primary responsibility for investigating off-duty crimes by U.S. personnel, but Suffolk police say they were never notified. The U.S. Air Force handled the case itself, though the verdict was later quashed, and Mooty was then arrested a year later for drunk driving again and convicted in a British court. The case is part of a Guardian investigation that has already prompted a UK government inquiry into whether U.S. troops based in Britain are being properly held accountable.

Nearly 100 students and staff at a Kansas elementary school came down with norovirus in an outbreak that spread unusually fast. The outbreak hit Bentwood Elementary School in Overland Park, outside Kansas City, with the first case reported October 5. Within a week, there were enough similar illnesses that county health officials were called in. Ninety-five people at the school and two family members got sick, though the county health director said the real number is likely higher given how contagious norovirus is. “It never usually balloons that fast or takes out that many kids at a time,” one parent said. Health officials declared the outbreak over Wednesday, since no new cases have been reported since October 13.

A huge shark that became a tourist attraction in a South Korean canal swam right back in just hours after workers finally got it out. The 9.8-foot female dusky shark, nicknamed Bukangi, was first spotted in a canal in the port city of Busan in mid-September. On Wednesday, after two failed attempts, dozens of workers used a floating platform to push her out to open water. But that night, she swam under a barrier net and back into the canal, where she is now stuck between two nets. Officials say there are no signs she has been eating regularly and that falling water temperatures could put her health at risk. Busan has made Bukangi a city mascot, and officials say she has drawn more than 1.7 million visitors.

Special Report: Accountability For Big Tech Moguls? 

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute -- a gesture at a Trump Inauguration event that Musk described as innocent.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy.

Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”

Now, perhaps Donald Trump told him to do it, sotto voce, Mafia-style: (“This Zelenskyy guy is a problem. Someone should do something about it.”) And Trump could demand, but hasn’t, that Musk restore Ukraine’s access.

However, given that there is now finger-pointing going on and there are credible statements that Musk himself was the instigator, we now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict. It helped Russia, our long-time adversary, and hobbled Ukraine, during a very critical time in this war. It also helped Russia at a time when Putin is increasingly emboldened to menace Europe through acts of sabotage, intimidation and support of the extreme right such as the AfD in Germany. (Recall that Musk has openly supported the AfD.)

While Trump and Musk are now openly supporting Vladimir Putin, their actions are unpopular with the American public. Very few Americans agree that the U.S. should be supporting, not opposing, a brutal dictator’s attempt to conquer a democracy:

Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”

Now, perhaps Donald Trump told him to do it, sotto voce, Mafia-style: (“This Zelenskyy guy is a problem. Someone should do something about it.”) And Trump could demand, but hasn’t, that Musk restore Ukraine’s access.

However, given that there is now finger-pointing going on and there are credible statements that Musk himself was the instigator, we now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict. It helped Russia, our long-time adversary, and hobbled Ukraine, during a very critical time in this war. It also helped Russia at a time when Putin is increasingly emboldened to menace Europe through acts of sabotage, intimidation and support of the extreme right such as the AfD in Germany. (Recall that Musk has openly supported the AfD.)

While Trump and Musk are now openly supporting Vladimir Putin, their actions are unpopular with the American public. Very few Americans agree that the U.S. should be supporting, not opposing, a brutal dictator’s attempt to conquer a democracy:Let’s be clear about the current state of the war between Russia and Ukraine. On the military battlefield, Ukraine has been gaining the upper hand. Hence Putin has turned to attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, electricity in particular. If Musk doesn’t restore that access quickly, the result will be the deaths of thousands of innocent Ukrainians. Moreover, he will embolden Putin to further menace and attack our Nato allies, as well as supporting neo-Nazis like the AfD.

Some may object as follows: Musk owns Starlink. Doesn’t he have the right to do what he wants with a business he owns?

No.

Yes, America has a market economy. And to make this economy work, we need to respect property rights. But we are, first and foremost, a democracy. And in a democracy, the rights of private property don’t and never have included the right to act against the nation’s interest — where democratically elected representatives of the people, not business owners, should decide what is in the nation’s interest. Capitalism is not an excuse for treason.

Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Taiwan’s air force flies F16s made by Lockheed Martin. Imagine that for some reason — perhaps as part of a business deal with China — Lockheed Martin suddenly moved to degrade Taiwan’s military capability by cutting off access to spare parts, upgrades, munitions, computer networks and more. Would anyone consider such action acceptable, a legitimate exercise of property rights? Surely not. There would be immediate demands that Lockheed Martin reverse its actions — and if it refused, the federal government would step in to temporarily take control of the company.

This has actually happened in the past.

U.S. mobilization during World War II relied overwhelmingly on private contractors. But these contractors weren’t free to do as they pleased. Among other things, the federal government was anxious to avoid labor conflict that might impede the war effort. So the National War Labor Board negotiated mandatory settlements between management and workers.

Some businessmen didn’t want to go along. In particular, Sewell Avery, the chairman of Montgomery Ward, simply refused to comply with the terms of collective bargaining agreements that had been hammered out with the United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

At the time, Montgomery Ward was both a major retailer and a major manufacturer, whose production of tractors, auto parts and more were important parts of the war effort. But Avery placed a higher priority on resisting unionization than on defeating the Nazis.

So in April 1944 FDR ordered the Army National Guard to seize Montgomery Ward’s main plant in Chicago. National Guard troops literally had to carry Avery out of his office:

Montgomery Ward leader Sewell Avery Carried Out of His Office By Two Soldiers during World War II (Bettmann Archive photo).

Later that year the federal government also seized a number of other Montgomery Ward facilities.

It’s important to realize that none of these actions were attempts to impose long-term government control of the economy. There was never an intent to permanently nationalize Montgomery Ward. But the principle was clear: private individuals do not have the right to undermine national security. And if temporary nationalization is the only way to stop them from doing so, so be it.

So, back to Elon Musk: In modern warfare, where communication and real-time information are as important as rockets and artillery, Starlink is as central to national security as Lockheed Martin. Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate U.S. high-tech weapons.

Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals. This would be true even if these individuals were patriots who supported democracy and American values. They definitely shouldn’t be left in the hands of this guy.

Musk will surely, and rightly, be the focus of many investigations if Democrats win the midterms. But don’t expect this to chasten him: His response to the prospect has been to make menacing threats:

Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.  

President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).

Politico, Elon Musk pours another $76 million into boosting Republicans, Jessica Piper, Oct. 22, 2026. The additional funds bring his total spending this cycle to $442 million.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave another $76 million to boost Republicans in the first two weeks of October, bringing his total giving this cycle to more than $442 million.

The additional funds, which Musk gave to his super PAC, America PAC, make the group one of the biggest super PACs this cycle. America PAC has already spent tens of millions of dollars on digital advertising, mailers and text messages as it targets competitive House and Senate races across the country.

Musk — the world’s wealthiest man — is by far the biggest single donor this cycle, with his political giving this year far exceeding even the roughly $290 million he spent in 2024. There is no precedent in modern American history for any donor spending as much as he has.

While the Tesla CEO and former DOGE leader has spent significantly to help Republicans, he has not been joining GOP candidates on the campaign trail this fall like he had in the past. Republicans privately acknowledged Musk could be politically toxic after the party lost a major Wisconsin judicial race in the spring of 2025 where Musk had become both the biggest funder and a campaign issue.

Still, Musk’s money has been instrumental for Republicans this fall. His earlier giving this cycle includes $158 million for Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, which was transferred to a super PAC boosting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a tight Senate race against Democrat James Talarico. Democrats have looked to make his money a campaign issue: Talarico recently responded to an attack from Musk on the Musk-owned X social media site by saying that there was “deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.”

Musk has also given to House Republicans’ super PAC arm, President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, and a group seeking to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, along with a smattering of GOP candidates.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: Musk and Thiel are allied with Russia and China, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and formery Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Oct. 14, 2026. Trump supporting billionaire high-tech ultra-right data and election manipulators Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are every American’s enemies.

New York Times, How a Legal Backlash Against Big Tech Is Forcing Big Changes, Cecilia Kang, Oct. 22, 2026. A series of lawsuits has created a new de facto regulatory regime as courts order companies like Meta and Google to change their business practices — and pay up.

For decades, tech giants grew at breakneck speeds as Congress struggled to keep pace with the consequences of the companies’ rapidly booming businesses.

But a new de facto regulatory regime has emerged over the past year as courts clobber the biggest internet companies. And for the first time, their product designs and their advertising models — which critics say treat users like products — are costing the companies serious money.

The latest blow came on Wednesday, when a New Mexico judge ordered Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay a record $25 billion penalty for abusing consumer privacy. In a 20-page ruling, the judge scolded the company for deceiving consumers and allowing their data to be harvested by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

“Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” wrote Judge Francis J. Mathew of the State District Court in Santa Fe.

The decision, and others like it, amount to a comeuppance for tech behemoths, whose fortunes have been built on the business model of winning the attention — and data — of users. Now, trials and court decisions have laid bare many of the allegations over deceptive and harmful business practices that critics have said long propelled the companies’ growth.

New consumer guardrails are emerging through the courts’ record financial penalties and order of changes to designs of the companies’ technologies, legal experts said.

“We’re witnessing an inflection point in the regulation of social media,” said Nora Engstrom, a professor of law at Stanford. “Courts, not Congress, are promoting accountability and forcing concrete change.”

The changes stem from thousands of lawsuits filed against Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, TikTok and others by individuals, schools, and state and federal officials. Their claims include that the internet giants harmed consumers by creating addictive platforms, abusing their power through their collection of valuable data and deceiving users.

For years, the tech industry successfully fought off many threats by invoking a legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The law protects the companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. The companies have also said that there is plenty of competition, and that they have benefited consumers with free services like search and social media connections.

The arguments have long worked to deter new laws. But courts have recently decided differently.

“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” Judge Mathew said in his ruling Wednesday. “It relates to the way in which Facebook induces people onto the platform and ultimately keeps them there,” he said, “which in turn is what has allowed Facebook to become as profitable as it is.”

The legal backlash was nearly a decade in the making.

In March 2018, concerns over data privacy boiled over with revelations that Cambridge Analytica, which was based in Britain, obtained large tranches of data on U.S. Facebook users without their consent. Employees said the data was used to sway voters during the 2016 presidential election.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, was called to testify on Capitol Hill in two days of marathon hearings on privacy abuses related to the scandal. But Congress did not pass any related legislation.

Executives from Meta, Amazon, Google and others were also called to testify in Congress about how their products and monopolistic power abuses over the years have caused potential harms. Again, there was little effect.

Big: Report On Monopolies, Analysis: Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority, Lee Hepner, Oct. 22, 2026. Perhaps Dems’ best response to Musk’s “live by the sword, die by the sword,” should draw on another scripture: The government gave, and the government can take away.

A few months ago, Paramount owner David Ellison succeeded in forcing California and Democratic states attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against his acquisition of Warner Brothers. He used a variety of tactics, including a threat to move the studios out of the state, and ultimately bluffed the elected officials into folding. BIG predicted at the time that Ellison’s threatened capital strike, along with political coercion, was a preview of what is to come if voters choose Democrats as a Congressional majority.

And sure enough, that’s what one of Ellison’s close allies - Elon Musk - just did. Earlier this week, following reports that Musk had throttled Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, Politico ran a story that several Dem members of Congress are gearing up to hold oversight hearings if the midterms go their way in a couple of weeks.

Musk responded by explicitly threatening any Democrat or institution seeking to scrutinize him, his portfolio of companies, or his time at DOGE. Here’s what he said:

It’s a remarkable statement, and it speaks to a fundamental view held by Musk and his allies that the votes of ordinary people simply should not count. He and a small circle make the key decisions in our society.

Musk tweets so much that it’s hard to keep track of his views, but he is also explicit about that point too:X avatar for @HQNewsNow Headquarters@HQNewsNowElon Musk calls to imprison journalist Kara Swisher after she said Democrats should investigate him if they win back Congress. “Sounds like Swisher really wants to go to prison.”Image7:22 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 295K Views580 Replies · 2.11K Reposts · 7.87K Likes

Musk’s political threats are not really the story. The story is that he actually has the leverage to make them real, through a network of political influence and, more importantly, control over key social infrastructure. As with Ellison’s ability to harm California, Musk can actually threaten the Pentagon, foreign countries, and the U.S. government itself. And he does.

The story is that, depending on the outcome of the midterms, which we’ll know a lot more about in 11 days, we’re entering a new phase of a battle between democratic systems and oligarchical ones that will test the limits of Musk’s extraordinary power and the temerity of Democrats to actually do something about it.Twitter advertisers say they're worried about Elon Musk's tweets and actions | VoxSubscribedThe Fool on the Hill

Let’s start by reckoning with Musk’s power, which spans all sorts of infrastructure, campaign finance, and media. As to his control over critical infrastructure, the most salient revelation, and the catalyst for renewed political controversy, is Musk’s apparent role in throttling Ukraine’s access to military-grade satellite service through Starlink, a satellite-based internet network operated by Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX. Ukraine took significant damage and was unable to orchestrate its offensive strategy against Russia as a result of the cut-off.

How does this system organize the fate of wars? Starlink is adjacent to Starshield, a SpaceX service that provides secure communications for governments. It’s a critical piece of national security infrastructure. And that goes beyond providing internet access to war-torn battlefields.

By some accounts, Starlink operates roughly 75% of all active maneuverable satellites. It provides internet service designed to connect homes, businesses, vehicles, ships, aircraft, and more, including in remote locations that are poorly served by existing broadband or fiber-optic cables.

And it’s increasingly important commercially. Just yesterday, United CEO Scott Kirby cited the airline’s partnership with Starlink for boosting its market share. (To believe this, you have to believe there’s actually enough competition between airlines for Starlink to make a difference, and I have my doubts, but it’s clearly a useful service.)

SpaceX has private shareholders, but it is a government sanctioned firm whose growth over the past two decades is fundamentally owed to public funds, some $48 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, as well as access to key public space infrastructure. SpaceX started receiving DARPA money in 2003, a year after SpaceX was formed, and has been a go-to private contractor for every administration since. In other words, Musk’s control over essential infrastructure, and his ability to wield it privately despite procurement terms superficially nodding to safeguards, is a bipartisan creation of the federal government.

There is some debate over the extent to which Musk wields that power unilaterally or in collaboration with government officials — it’s far closer to a public-private partnership than a purely private entity — and a 2023 expose by Ronan Farrow reveals how that collaboration looks more like dependence across swaths of the federal government:

Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of [Farrow’s] inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told [Farrow]. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.”

Not unlike other historical and contemporary barons of distribution networks, from Cornelius Vanderbilt to Jay Gould to Andrew Mellon to Jeff Bezos, Musk’s control over infrastructure provides him with leverage over public institutions. His quasi-unilateral intervention in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is one example. And the way that power works is by threatening to pull the deployment of that infrastructure, or discriminate between who can access it, which has commercial and geopolitical implications. It’s the power of a capital strike, not unlike Meta’s renewed threat, just yesterday, to cut off service to the State of New Mexico in response to a jury verdict finding them liable for over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. Or take (Amazon) your (Google) pick (Uber/Lyft), really, because capital strikes are as American as unbridled monopoly power.

Musk’s threat is also to use his wealth, so much of which is traceable to benefits conferred by the government, to distort our democratic elections. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates that SpaceX is the source of over 75% of Musk’s overall net worth, which hovers around $1 trillion. And Musk’s election spending is a business investment for which he expects a return. As of mid-October, nearly 50 megadonors had spent close to $2.4 billion on the midterm elections, and Musk’s $369 million in campaign contributions dwarfs everyone else. At least $176.8 million has gone solely to support Texas AG Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate and to oppose Democrat candidate James Talarico.X avatar for @jamestalarico James Talarico@jamestalaricoThere is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.X avatar for @elonmusk Elon Musk @elonmuskThere is something deeply wrong with Talarico12:13 AM · Oct 22, 2026 · 49K Views385 Replies · 1.04K Reposts · 6.38K Likes

Musk is far from the first, or only, oligarch to wield other instruments of persuasion, including the media. His purchase of Twitter/X evokes Henry Ford’s 1919 purchase of the Dearborn Independent, then the second most widely distributed newspaper behind the New York Times, in the wake of his Senate campaign loss. And just as Henry Ford used his newspaper to grind various political axes, with a heavy dose of overt antisemitism, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has amplified partisan conservative voices and driven social wedge issues to divert attention from a more unifying politics.

Add to Musk’s efforts to control the public commons his lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging that the watchdog group interfered with Twitter/X contracts and economic advantage when it published a report showing advertisements appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Understandably, many advertisers pulled their spending from Musk’s platform. Here, Musk’s effort to censor his opponents is also a threat to bury any other opponent in litigation costs. And it’s yet another data point in Musk’s leverage over the federal government, reflected in the Trump administration’s transparent weaponization of antitrust. The FTC’s own, subsequent investigation into Media Matters is hard to see as anything but the abuse of public resources at Musk’s behest.Ladies and Gentlemen, the Democrats!

But of course, Musk and the billionaires are one part of the equation. The other is voters, who are choosing to move away from DOGE and the Trump era by voting for the ostensible opposition party. And what are some of those Democrats likely to do? That’s less clear.

One response is to campaign on the blatant corruption eroding our democracy, as Talarico is doing. Multiple studies have observed that ad saturation driven by massive campaign spending can have marginal returns on voter persuasion and eventually lead to voter suppression. And on some level, voters react to the source of funds. A recent Data for Progress poll showed that 75% of likely voters were less likely to vote for candidates who receive support from the AI industry. Musk is polarizing, at best, and has a net-negative favorability rating even in Texas.

A different response, one we saw with the Skydance merger, is to cower and fold before the superrich. For example, even though support for AI - another area of Musk investment - has become a third rail in politics, some Democrats are backing away from talking about it at all:

Senior Democrats and candidates are worried that if they go too hard in criticizing AI, industry-affiliated super PACs could drop millions more dollars against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and strategists. They are especially worried about a slate of competitive races, including Reps. Don Davis in North Carolina, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Henry Cuellar in Texas and a handful of South Texas and Pennsylvania races, getting hit with even more spending on topics like AI.

I have experience in politics and in running large legislative campaigns, so here I’ll offer advice. Be direct and aggressive against men like Musk. Politicians don’t need to chase every polarizing issue, but the inability to put forward an honest and moral position on a defining economic and social question kneecaps the ability to harness broader political support.

And we can see that because Republicans increasingly want Musk’s money, but don’t want him near their campaigns. Musk’s donations are funneled through political action committees like the Senate Leadership Committee, America First, and Lone Star Liberty, none of which bear his name. And while Republicans have been far less critical overall of Musk’s political interloping, several spoke out against his DOGE cuts, and Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio has joined calls for an oversight hearing on Musk’s weaponization of Starlink in Ukraine. Republicans are constrained by Musk’s giving to form a more coherent political message. Democrats shouldn’t be.The Government Gave, and the Government Can Take Away

Here’s my prediction. I don’t think Dems will back down from their calls for oversight hearings regarding Musk’s conduct. And I suspect some Republicans will join, particularly if Dems overperform in the midterms. The fact about people like Elon Musk is that their power is also their weakness. Campaign consultants can hardly beg for a more perfect foil than someone whose most identifiable consumer product, the Cybertruck, is a politically charged purchase and a visual manifestation of ego.

But it would be naive, if not damaging, to think that oversight hearings are adequate on their own. Oversight hearings easily drift into theatrical content farms, and viral social media clips, on their own, risk reinforcing a growing perception that too many Democrats are more adept at pretending to care than doing anything meaningful to generate durable outcomes.

More importantly, the question isn’t whether there should be oversight, but the point of that oversight. It’s critical to neutralize Musk’s ability to threaten nation-states and our own government, and if that means building the case for breaking apart his empire or imposing new rules, that must be baked into the hearings from the beginning. A free society cannot be bullied by threats of capital strikes, particularly as to essential infrastructure, and the ability to channel capital must be done through democratic means.

What would real oversight of oligarchs look like? Well, it would mean seeking intel about corrupt slush funds for the White House ballroom or Trump’s presidential library, about the purchase of equity stakes in companies like Anduril just before receiving nearly $1.8 billion in government contracts, about leading a $300 million investment in Polymarket while it receives conspicuously favorable regulatory treatment, or about $2.6 billion in stock trades immediately prior to the Iran war. It would also mean simultaneously governing, by moving legislation to close the McDonnell “official acts” loophole, to ban profiting off of public service, and to ban Congressional stock trading. When the next President takes office, Congress should abandon the filibuster to do these things. The path to durable governance is through tearing down parliamentary barriers to governing.

Moreover, oversight hearings cannot stop at the low hanging fruit. Democrats must create a drumbeat for oversight of corporate bad actors. It’s a target-rich market: JetBlue and Instacart on surveillance pricing, Live Nation inducing a corrupt settlement with the Justice Department amid their losing antitrust trial, Skydance on its relationship to sovereign wealth funds, Jeff Bezos and Amazon on their ongoing monopolization of e-commerce, HPE-Juniper on the circumstances of their corrupt merger settlement, the Big Three PBMs, the Big Four Meatpackers, KKR and Black Bear on private equity crippling youth sports, Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic on the efforts to hide the private financial risk of the AI bubble in a systemically vulnerable network of private credit, insurance, pension funds and banks. And on and on.

And Elon Musk. The richest welfare recipient in the world. As to Musk, the most obvious thing to do is not a matter of partisan convenience, but of strategic necessity: nationalize SpaceX. It’s something Matt has written about for BIG previously. SpaceX should be treated like a public utility. It’s a private company in form, but hardly so in terms of the government funding that has been central to its growth.

Will Democrats actually accomplish real oversight? I don’t know. But I can say that squandering power breeds resentment, and fear of reprisal is an abdication of the duty to govern.

Fundamentally, Musk’s threat, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” is a cautionary admonition against violence, taken from scripture, Matthew 26:52. Perhaps the best response draws from another scripture, Job 1:21, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.”

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Just How Much Are Young Voters Backing Democrats Now? See the Shift, Claire Cain Miller, Oct. 22, 2026. In the new Times/Siena poll, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way — a jump from just two years ago.

In the last presidential election, Democrats’ support among young voters was their lowest in two decades. Two years later, polls show that 18-to-29-year-old voters are returning to the party in large numbers.

In the most recent New York Times/Siena University poll of likely midterm voters, published Wednesday, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way. That’s 15 points higher than in our last poll before the 2024 election, and comparable to the 2008 election, when a youth wave helped Barack Obama to victory.

Young voters have moved toward Democrats. Nationwide, young voters now favor the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district by 44 percentage points, compared with a 10-point margin two years ago.

And just 16 percent approve of President Trump’s job performance, at least 11 points lower than any other age group.

New York Times, James Talarico Made His Name Fighting Republicans. He Made Laws With Them, Too, Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 22, 2026. He described himself as a progressive fighter. Now, he is seeking Republican votes.

James Talarico’s record in the Texas Legislature has been a tale of two Talaricos.

There’s the Talarico who flipped a competitive state house district around Austin and arrived in the Capitol in 2019 as a 29-year-old, a Democrat preaching bipartisan cooperation. There, he accomplished things by working with Republicans, including 39 bills that became law with his name on them.

Then there’s the Talarico who was a vocal progressive fighter, especially after Republicans redrew his district lines, pushing him to run in a liberal Austin area. Voters there cheered as he fought unsuccessfully against religion in public schools and in favor of transgender rights.

The first Talarico earned accolades even from some of his Republican colleagues in the Legislature they dominate. The second, which helped catapult him into the national spotlight, is being used against him in his run for U.S. Senate.

Mr. Talarico has tried to balance his two political identities throughout his four terms in the Texas House, according to a New York Times review of his record and interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators. Even as he worked against partisan bills pushed by the Legislature’s conservative majority, the review found his ability to work with Republicans to pass laws stayed largely consistent.

In his Senate campaign this year, Mr. Talarico has emphasized the bipartisan side of his record. Seeking to prevail in a state that President Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024, he has toned down his criticism of Republicans and distanced himself from some past remarks, saying they “missed the mark” or were “cringe-y.”

His campaign literature no longer refers to him as a progressive.

“I worked with both Republicans and Democrats who wanted to get things done for Texans,” Mr. Talarico said in a statement. His campaign provided written answers but did not make him available for an interview.

In interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators, Mr. Talarico was described as a driven and disciplined lawmaker who used his oratory skills to amplify the message of his party.

This week on “The Daily,” The Times’s podcast, Mr. Talarico said Republicans in the Legislature forced him into a position when he “had to fight back against that extremism.” He said his viewpoint on partisan politics has changed.

“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” he said. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.”

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With 12 Days To Go Trump And The Rs Are In Retreat, Their Battlefield Is Eroding, And The Election Is Breaking Towards The Democrats, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 22, 2026. To make the big blue wave that is emerging bigger we need to keep driving the early vote. For as Anderson Clayton told us a few weeks ago: "Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October."

In wave elections things usually break against the incumbent party at the end. We are clearly seeing that now. In poll after poll this past week the headlines read some version of “Trump hits new low” in the poll. Despite his ferocious campaigning, their enormous spending advantage, his serial bribes of the electorate, the power of the right-wing noise machine, and his control over and censoring of legacy and social media Trump has been unable to stem his decline. The coverage this past week has been brutal for our arrogant and vainglorious leader:

In recent days we’ve seen remarkable visualizations that capture just how much the country has turned on Trump and Trumpism. This one is from Reuters/Ipsos:

Not only has the electorate turned against Trump and the Rs, but they are turning towards us. In recent days we’ve seen gaudy generic ballot leads for Democrats:

Here’s the latest generic ballot tracker from FiftyPlusOne. We were up 6 on Labor Day. We are up 9 today:

+9 Dem is an 11 point swing from 2024, which is why we are competitive in so many Trump +10 and more states and districts now.

Which brings me to what is perhaps the most remarkable data we have about this election:  the polling in the battleground Senate states. If you look at the polling across the broader battleground -- AK, GA, IA, ME, MI, MN, NC, OH, TX -- there is only one Republican who has consistently led in polling for either Senate and governor in any of these states. It’s Greg Abbott, in Texas, and even he has only led in half of recent polls.

Republicans do not have polling in any of these states, some deeply Republican, showing their candidates consistently leading -- despite all their spending, the power of incumbency, etc. While we do have polling in all these states showing our candidates for Senate and governor consistently leading. There is a legitimate possibility that we win both the governor’s race and the Senate race in all these states. This is not something anyone believed possible a year ago, and it is still leaves me stunned. For we are going deep, deep into red states and red places, places we’ve struggled in for decades, in ways that could fundamentally alter our politics and our maps in the coming years.

What we are seeing in Texas may be the most consequential development in the election but as we discussed with Jane Kleeb this week we are also seeing a revival of a prairie populist Democratic Party in the heartland - Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio -- that has enormous implications for the future of both parties: 

I will be putting out a more thorough analysis of the early vote over the next few days but as I discussed last night we are seeing one very significant trend emerge:  Hispanics are voting in very large numbers across the country. Here’s fresh data from TargetEarly. It shows how much bigger the Hispanic vote is today compared to four years ago on this day. That Hispanics roared and helped vote the racists out of office would be quite a story line from this election:

We also discussed something I will be commentating on a lot in the coming weeks -- our remarkable and inspiring candidates, the emergence of character and integrity as a powerful antidote to Trumpism, our embrace of “raucous pluralism,” and how the Democratic Party is evolving, changing, expanding, getting better -- as so many wanted, and demanded.Subscribed

Finally, we spent time talking about how in the world could have Trump allowed himself to fall so far without making a major course correction along the way. This is something we’ve discussed here frequently over the past year as Trumpworld was seeing all the same data we’ve been seeing - our heightened performance in special elections, our huge wins last November, our elevated primary performances in states throughout the country this year, national and state polling, consumer confidence surveys, soaring inflation, slower job creation, ugly health care stats - and yet he just kept going, he kept doubling down on policies that were neither making things better for people nor popular.

I’ve come to believe that it was his arrogance, his vainglory, his belief in a coming thousand year nerd Reich, his corrupt stock pile of money, his contempt for Democrats/democracy/the American people, his underestimating of the Iranians, the fluffing he gets from Natalie each day, his age and addled state - all of this contributed to him believing that we could never beat ME. I’m Trump. They are little people. I always win, survive. There are never consequences for my misdeeds. I am mighty and powerful and they are suckers and losers. And yet here we are. With a reckoning coming. With him now impotent, weak, repudiated, failed, and the American people angry, deeply angry at the corruption, of the “more for me and less for all of you” government, of the searing abandonment and betrayal, of monuments, and golf courses, and flying palaces, and the gluttonous stuffing of his pockets, of selling out to Putin……

The American people have had it. And we still have elections here despite all his efforts to make them go away. And the American people are not just angry at them. They have put their faith back in us to make things better and put things right. And the first thing they want us to do now is win this election in October by driving the early vote through the roof; then we need to ensure there is a peaceful transfer of power in Washington and throughout the country in January; and then we have to get on fight like we’ve never fought for anything before to make things better and put things right for the American people, for our democracy, and for our kids and our grandkids.

That’s what we talked about last night. Get to the video when you can. Share it with others. Hit like so more will see it and read this post. And yes my friends, it is that time, time to go….Win The Election In October, And Be Prepared Not Scared For All The Fuckery To Come.

There are three things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:

• Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations.
• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too. Our next training is Saturday at 2pm.
• Stand with Dr. Amy Acton by donating to our Winning Ohio Fund today  

New York Times, He’d Be the First Openly Gay Man in the Senate. He Rarely Brings It Up, Jess Bidgood, Oct. 22, 2026. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, would make history if he won. On the campaign trail, he doesn’t dwell on it.

It was a Friday night in an ornate New Hampshire opera house, and Representative Chris Pappas, the Democratic candidate for Senate here, had nearly finished his finely tuned stump speech.

He had slammed Washington corruption, promised to fight for affordable health care and lamented high prices, hewing to the message that Democrats across the country believe will win them back control of the Senate.

Mr. Pappas didn’t mention the man in plaid, standing amid the voters on the creaking wooden floor, who may nevertheless represent the most remarkable aspect of his candidacy: his husband.

Mr. Pappas, 46, is running a closer-than-expected campaign against former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican, a race that both parties view as critical. If he wins, he will be the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate — but this is not something he’s made central to his campaign.

“I’m not thinking much about history right now,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview. “I’m really thinking every day about the struggles of New Hampshire.”

His low-key approach to breaking a barrier mirrors that of some other Democratic Senate candidates this year, as a party burned by losses in cycles past backs away from identity politics. Former Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska talks little about the fact that she would be the first — or tied for the first — Native American female senator. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s Muslim faith has become the target of political attacks. But on the trail, he talks more about how he would be the first Democratic doctor elected to the Senate in decades than the fact that he would be the first Muslim in the chamber.

Mr. Pappas’s understated approach to his potential pathbreaking reflects his generation as well as the way that his state, with its libertarian leanings, has become more accepting of gay rights over the course of his decades-long political career. Mr. Sununu has left the matter alone.

But it also comes at a fraught national moment, as some gay rights activists warn of the potential for backsliding. Just last week, Vice President JD Vance made fun of James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, by suggesting falsely that he was gay.

“We are seeing some incredibly cynical attacks on the L.G.B.T.Q. community today that have been mainstreamed in our politics, and people in the community are scared for where this country is headed,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview.

Still, he said, his constituents have been broadly accepting.

“Our state motto is ‘Live Free or Die,’ ” he said. “I think people, regardless of their politics, really just want their neighbors to be able to be themselves.”ImageChris Pappas and Vann Bentley walk next to a white picket fence and white clapboard house flying an American flag.Mr. Pappas and Mr. Bentley leave a campaign event in Warner, N.H., in August.Credit...Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press ImagesFighting an ‘anti-gay bill’ — in 2004

If there is one thing New Hampshire voters know about Chris Pappas, it’s probably not the fact that he’s gay. It’s the chicken tenders.

He grew up in Manchester, where he was a fixture at the Puritan Backroom, the longstanding Pappas family restaurant where his grandfather is said to have invented the chicken tender. It has been a regular campaign stop for candidates for Congress and the White House for years. (Mr. Pappas is a co-owner of the business today.)

Mr. Pappas, who attended one of the state’s largest public high schools, wasn’t sure he would ever be embraced by his community as a gay man. There was no gay-straight alliance there, nor a single out student, as far as he knew.

“I’m living a reality today that I didn’t think was possible when I was growing up just a few decades ago,” he said.

But he came out at Harvard, and wove his identity into a political career that began when he came home and ran for state representative at the age of 22. “It’s not like I put a bullet point on my palm card, but I was very open about who I was,” Mr. Pappas said. Kathy Sullivan, the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said Mr. Pappas’s sexual orientation has rarely become much of an issue in his campaigns.

“I can’t tell you there was a moment when I went, ‘Oh, Chris Pappas is a gay man,’” she said. “It’s just not a big deal.”

“People who knew, knew,” Mr. Pappas said. “And then I think as the battles kind of raged on issues around equality, I found my voice and was regularly speaking out on those issues.”

Politico, Kevin McCarthy predicts GOP will lose House majority, Mia McCarthy, Oct. 22, 2026. “What are the three things Republicans will do if they win the majority?” the former speaker asked. “I can’t tell you what that is.”

Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy predicted Republicans will lose the House in two weeks, citing historical midterm trends while also criticizing the sitting GOP leadership for how they’ve managed the chamber.

“In the last 100 years, all off-year elections, whoever is the party in power has the White House, has lost seats, and it’s only a few seats for the majority,” McCarthy said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Thursday.

Democrats, he added, will “get a majority” in the House: “I’m not quite sure how big it is, but they will probably win the majority.”

The former speaker, who ushered in the current GOP House majority in 2022 but only led the conference for less than a year before being booted from the speakership, went on to fault his own party for giving the election away.

“It’s not that the Democrats are going to win this election,” he said. “Republicans are going to lose it.”

He pointed to the skimpy House legislative calendar as a factor. Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies have routinely canceled scheduled session days amid member revolts that have undermined his grip on the razor-thin majority.

“You’re only given 24 months in a majority to manage it. They were in the fewest amount of days. They let the Democrats dictate,” McCarthy said. “You have to give a reason why to win. What are the three things Republicans will do if they win the majority? I can’t tell you what that is.”

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Democrats Lead In Ohio, Texas, And Iowa As Midterms Start To Look Like A MAGA Extinction Event, Jason Easley,right, Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races. 

Republican operatives and strategists have been warning their party that the political environment for the GOP has been getting worse on the ground with each passing week for months.

Being the sole party in charge of the federal government meant that Republicans had a massive fundraising advantage over Democrats, but even though the economy is bad and voters have been enraged for the last decade, Republicans made a strategic blunder.

Trump’s party sat on its money. Republicans didn’t spend early. The GOP didn’t try to make the case early and often that their policies had the country on the right track. Instead, they followed Trump’s lead and waited for his promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make the economy boom.

By the time Republicans realized that Trump was making things worse, the hole was too deep. The candidates they recruited were overwhelmingly low quality, and momentum was rolling against them.

Poor strategy, a terrible economy, and a reviled president have created the perfect environment for Democrats to have a historic midterm election.

Red states where Republicans never expected Senate seats and governorships to be in play are now in jeopardy.

We are 11 days away from Election Day, and the red states of Texas, Ohio, and Iowa show how big things could get for Democrats.Three Different States Where Republicans Face The Same Problems

The non-partisan Cook Political Report had a Republican and a Democratic pollster conduct polls in Iowa, Texas, and Ohio.

Here is what they found:

A trio of new polls conducted as part of The Cook Political Report’s Battleground Project found Democrat Josh Turek ahead of Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson 46% to 44% in Iowa; former Sen. Sherrod Brown leading Republican Sen. Jon Husted 49% to 43% in Ohio; and former state Rep. James Talarico besting Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 49% to 44% in Texas.

In Iowa, Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand leads Republican Zach Lahn by 11 points (54% to 43%). In Ohio, Democrat Amy Acton is ahead of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy by five points (49% to 44%). In Texas, incumbent GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is leading Democrat Gina Hinojosa by just two points (48% to 46%).

Two findings make these polls different from other polls.

The Cook Battleground Project polls found that the Republican message that Democrats will raise taxes isn’t working:

Republicans have spent millions on advertising warning voters that Democratic candidates would raise their taxes if elected. But, in all three states, the polls found that voters were more worried that Republicans would “cut taxes for billionaires while enacting policies that will drive up costs for everyone” than they were that Democrats would “raise taxes on working families, making life even more expensive for working people.”

In other words, Republicans may be more trusted on handling taxes, but voters don’t see tax policy alone as a sufficient tool for tackling affordability.

Voters are smart. They understand that affordability is not a tax issue, but Republicans have had two years and only made America less affordable, so voters aren’t buying what they're selling.

The media often falsely equates the unpopularity of the Democratic Party with Trump’s unpopularity, but the Cook Battleground Project is the first to test this theory.

Cook found the same thing people on the ground have been saying for years. Individual Democrats are popular, even if the national Democratic brand is not: “Voters in these three states perceive the Democratic candidates more favorably than they view the national Democratic brand. Instead, it is Trump’s unpopularity that is dragging down the Republicans on the ballot.”

Trump is an anchor that drags down Republican candidates. Voters look at Republican candidates and see Trump, whereas they judge Democrats individually.

Republicans are paying the price for bending the knee to Trump and allowing his image to be the entire party.

When all the pieces are put together, it means that Trump rallies are hurting Republican candidates. He is a midterm Grim Reaper who is ruining elections wherever he visits.

The midterm election is shaping up to be more than a loss for Republicans. It looks like a firm rejection of Trump, the party built in his image, and the Republican brand.

More On U.S. Economy -- And Election Interference

New York Times, Opinion: In Six Decades of Public Life, I Never Thought I Would Write This Piece, Robert E. Rubin, right, (a senior counselor to Centerview Partners and was the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999), Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). Many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections.

The economy has been voters’ top issue in four of the six midterm elections this century — and 2026 appears all but certain to make it five of seven.

Beyond the cost of living, the war in Iran and tariffs, America faces a series of daunting longer-term economic challenges, from mounting federal debt to the effects of artificial intelligence.

Yet many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. Nov. 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.

There is a chance — some would argue a likelihood — that the midterms will proceed smoothly and honestly, with the winners seated in a straightforward manner.

There is also the possibility that the election will be, like so much else over the past two years, chaotic at best and lawless at worst. From amplifying false claims of fraud and slashing defenses against foreign meddling in our elections to attempting to bully states into using an error-prone database to purge voter registrations, the Trump administration has already thrown up obstacles to fair and free midterm elections.

There are widespread fears Mr. Trump and his allies could go further, including by sending armed federal agents to polling locations, seizing ballot boxes and exploiting a procedural loophole involving the clerk of the House that could enable them to refuse to seat duly elected Democratic members when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.

If the Trump administration launches an effort to manipulate the outcome of the midterms, the economic impact could be felt immediately, and it could last long after Mr. Trump’s presidency ends.

With the exception of the booming A.I. sector, corporate investment is already weak. The National Federation of Independent Business’s measurement of small-business uncertainty is 32 percent above its historical average. This seems like a bad time to inject substantially more instability into the mix.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The short-term risks from election interference look even more concerning when we consider the possibility that a fight over the outcomes will not necessarily remain contained to the courtroom. Mr. Trump has explicitly refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act in regard to the 2026 elections. Starting in late 2025, a surge of immigration enforcement agents into Minneapolis cost the city, its businesses and its residents an estimated $700 million. Sustained post-election chaos coupled with aggressive federal interference could create similar disruptions on a nationwide scale.

Any effort to undermine the election will eventually resolve itself, whether through political compromise, contentious rulings from courts, the use of force or all three. But the economic impact will outlast any immediate political crisis. The rule of law, undergirded by a tradition of free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, supports business decisions and attracts foreign companies to invest. It underlies the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It bolsters investors’ confidence in the full faith and credit of the United States and lowers interest rates on our debt. The integrity of our elections, in other words, has been one of the keys to American prosperity.

The United States has not yet seen its economy suffer from a lack of confidence in its legal system. Other countries have. “We can live with high inflation,” one Turkish executive told The Financial Times last year, “but our biggest disincentive to invest is the lack of the rule of law.” A 2024 State Department report similarly identified rule-of-law issues — including lack of respect for property rights, repression of criticism and arbitrary investigations and arrests — as major impediments to the business climate in China.

The United States does not have to become Turkey or China to feel the economic impacts of a diminished rule of law. The economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote of the “animal spirits” that encourage people to engage in market activity. Americans’ animal spirits have long been bolstered by the knowledge that their country is the best place on earth to start or invest in a business. A contested or overturned election could call that into question.

When I talk to leaders in business and politics, even many of those who acknowledge the election threat seem to consider such a possibility remote. They do not tend to take Mr. Trump’s attacks on voting seriously. That’s another way of saying that the markets are not pricing in what I consider a meaningful risk.

If Mr. Trump accomplishes in 2026 what he was unable to with respect to the 2020 election, or even if he causes widespread chaos by coming closer to his objective, it could create serious disruptions in the bond and equity markets. The yield on 10-year Treasuries recently reached 5.36 percent — higher than it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — in part because of concerns about the country’s policy trajectory. Election chaos could increase investors’ worry about the ability of our political system to deal with our fiscal problems, driving yields even higher. This would result in higher debt service costs for the government and higher mortgage rates and credit card bills for consumers, exacerbating our already considerable challenges.

I’ve lived my entire life as a citizen of a constitutional republic that provides rights and protections, and I’d like to continue doing so. I imagine most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, feel the same way.

Over the next few weeks, leaders in business and in all sectors of our society should work with state and local elected officials to help protect the political process that lies at the heart of our constitutional system. They can do this by making clear, nonpartisan declarations of support for election integrity, by supporting nonpartisan organizations that protect our elections and by using behind-the-scenes influence to discourage those who might be considering any steps to disrupt or overturn the midterms.

In more than six decades spent in and around economic policymaking, I never imagined having to write a piece such as this. If we act now, we can still protect our government, our people and our economy — and we can preserve the benefits that accrue to all of us, no matter whom we vote for, when American elections are fair and free.

More On Ohio Candidate's Despicable Child Rape Ad

Vice President JD Vance (Image by Sarah D. Rogers for The Bulwark).

The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: JD Vance Is a Sociopath, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 22, 2026. Oh, I’m sorry. Is my rhetoric imperfect?

America’s vice president is an Elizabeth Holmes–level sociopath. Today I want to take you through four statements from JD Vance that illustrate what a terrible human being he is.

Statement #1: In 2024, JD Vance advanced a blood libel about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. He was open about not caring whether or not his blood libel was true. On September 10, 2024, he told CNN:

Whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true—whatever the case may be4—Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. . . .

And I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. . . .

If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it.

Five days later, on September 15, 2024, another CNN interviewer pressed him on his fabrication. Again, Vance was unapologetic about his lying:

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Statement #2: In an interview that aired on October 17, 2026, Vance was asked about his scapegoating of immigrants. He replied:

I would say, and to the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me.

This week, Vivek Ramaswamy released the most disgusting ad in the modern history of campaigns, featuring the toothless, addled, flat-out evil estranged mother of Amy Acton alleging that Acton is a serial liar.

Here I want to pause for a moment, because “evil” is a serious word.

When Acton was a child, her parents divorced. Her mother, Donna, was given custody of Acton and her brother. Donna remarried in 1975; her new husband, Cledith Arthur, had previously been indicted for sexually abusing his own eldest daughter. Once he married Donna, Cledith then abused her children. Physically and sexually. In 1978, Cledith was arrested and indicted on charges of raping Amy. She was 10 when the abuse began and 12 when Cledith was arrested.

Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody. Cledith Arthur, to avoid going on trial, fled Ohio. And Donna went with him, staying on the run from the law for the rest of Cledith’s life. Amy Acton never saw her mother again.

Imagine a mother who would marry a man knowing that he had sexually abused his daughter. Imagine a mother who would then offer up her own children to that man. Imagine a mother who, when the police showed up, would side with that man over her children. Imagine a mother who would run away—abandoning her children—because she chose a pedophile rapist over her own flesh and blood.

And now imagine that woman slithering out from her hole to defame her daughter in the service of helping a cretin like Vivek Ramaswamy.

I’m sorry, but “evil” is the only word. There’s a special place in hell for Donna Arthur.

In addition to that, Donna Arthur’s statements in the ad about Acton are, themselves, all lies, disproven by contemporaneous court records. This is calumny upon calumny.

Statement #3: Yesterday Vance went to Ohio to campaign for Ramaswamy. By itself, that’s a choice. At the rally, Vance defended Ramaswamy’s Donna Arthur ad. Here’s what he said: “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”¹

So Vance couldn’t work up the balls to disown the evil. He embraced it, even. But he did disown other Ohio Republicans who recoiled at Ramaswamy’s dishonesty:

I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.

He’s disgusted?

Disgusted?

Not by the pedophilia, the abuse, the mother who proffered her own children as sacrifices to her lover? No, JD wasn’t “disgusted” by any of that. He was “disgusted” by Republicans who wanted no part in Vivek Ramaswamy’s lies.

I guess that’s another example of JD’s “imperfect” rhetoric. What do you want? He’s just a politician. He doesn’t claim to be a saint.

Oh—wait a minute . . .

Statement #4: On August 31 Vance appeared on the Bryce Crawford podcast where he was asked to rate his odds of getting into heaven:

Crawford: On a scale of 1 to 10 — 10 being absolutely certain, 1 being not certain at all — how confident are you that you’d go to Heaven?

Vance: It’s high, but it’s not 10, right? I mean, it’s a 7 or it’s an 8. . . . If you’d asked me that question a year ago, it probably was like a 5 or a 6.²

Vance isn’t just bizarrely, heretically sure that he’s bound toward heaven—he thinks his chances have increased since he started bearing false witness on the regular.

This is sociopathy, plain and simple. Either Vance believes everything he’s saying, or he has no beliefs at all, and is a creature of pure, malicious nihilism.

I’m not sure which would be worse.

There is a Deep State—a real Deep State within the Trump administration and the broader Trump world. It is made up of JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Don Jr., and Peter Thiel, all of whom are aligned on the post-Trump direction of the Republican party.

Tucker went out on Trump first. Vance has followed, though only on deep background. Don Jr. came out of the closet a couple of days ago. And now comes the news that Thiel has joined them.

Put your Rubio fanfic away—this is the axis that will own the Republican party if/when Trump decides to leave power.

New York Times, Election Dispatches:Trump Defends Ramaswamy’s Attack Ad as Ohio’s Republican Governor Joins Backlash, Bayliss Wagner and Campbell Robertson, Oct. 22, 2026. President Trump on Thursday lashed out at critics of an attack ad that has roiled the Ohio governor’s race, and urged the Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, to continue airing it. Mr. Trump weighed in on social media hours after Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a fellow Republican, called on Mr. Ramaswamy to stop running the ad, which featured the estranged mother of the Democratic opponent.

Mr. DeWine called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and said it was “wrong” for Mr. Ramaswamy to run it. The rare public rebuke of his party’s nominee to succeed him put Mr. DeWine in conflict with not only Mr. Trump but also Vice President JD Vance, another Ohio Republican, who told Republicans on Wednesday to stop “whining” about the ad.Campbell Robertson and Bayliss Wagner, A Republican rift over Ramaswamy’s attack ad widens, with Ohio’s governor and President Trump on opposite sides.ImageGov. Mike DeWine in a dark suit against a black background.Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio during a National Governors Association meeting in Washington this year.Credit...Allison Robbert/Associated Press

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio on Thursday joined a growing chorus of Ohio Republicans condemning an advertisement being aired by Vivek Ramaswamy, his party’s nominee to succeed him, that uses the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton.

But President Trump followed Mr. DeWine’s denunciation hours later with a social media post that insulted both Dr. Acton and Mr. DeWine and called the ad “hitting pay dirt.”

With that post, the battle lines in a brewing Republican civil war over the advertisement were becoming clearer: Ohio vs. the White House.

Mr. Trump unreservedly championed the ad, describing it as “very powerful” and saying that everyone should “listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate.” Insisting that he had never heard of Dr. Acton before, Mr. Trump added: “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would.”

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The corporate cash behind Vivek Ramaswamy’s "despicable" TV ad, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 22, 2026. At 12 years old, Amy Acton was the victim of sexual abuse. After her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping Acton, her estranged mother, Donna Arthur, took her stepfather’s side and left the state with him as he fled justice.

Now, Acton is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Ohio and her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, is turning her history of abuse into a political attack ad. In the ad, Arthur accuses Acton of lying about her past. Arthur also came out against Acton in 2020, when Acton was leading Ohio’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as director of the state’s Department of Health, saying that she did not grow up in poverty and she was not raped by her stepfather. Court and police records cast doubt on Arthur’s claims.

The ad has been widely condemned by Democrats and Republicans as “morally wrong” and “revolting.” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, responded to the ad on Tuesday, saying, “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point.”

A Popular Information analysis of campaign finance records reveals that the ad was funded, in part, with contributions from the PACs and executives of major American corporations, including Bank of America, Deloitte, DraftKings, Kroger, and Nationwide.

The ad began circulating on social media on Monday night when it was included in a political survey. On Tuesday evening, Ramaswamy, left, told reporters that the ad came from his campaign but had not yet been shown on TV. Despite bipartisan backlash, Ramaswamy’s campaign decided to dig in later on Tuesday night, spending $4 million to air the ad across Ohio.

In the ad, Arthur did not specifically mention the rape charges against her husband, but repeatedly called her daughter a liar. “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur said.

Arthur’s account, however, is not credible.

Court records indicate that Acton’s stepfather was found living in a tent when Acton was a child, and Acton’s campaign provided documents to CBS indicating that the family lived in a tent for a year.

Arthur has previously claimed that Acton lied about being raped by her stepfather. In a 2020 interview with an anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue, Arthur said, “I haven’t seen my daughter since she was 12 years old and that was when my daughter lied and said my second husband raped her.”

Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with raping Acton in 1978. He pleaded not guilty but was later indicted by a grand jury. Arthur supported her husband after his arrest. She went with him when he fled Ohio for Pennsylvania to avoid prosecution, abandoning her children. Cledith Arthur never returned to Ohio, despite warrants for his arrest. He died in 2004.

In the same 2020 interview, Arthur said that a rape accusation by Cledith Arthur’s daughter from a previous marriage against him was also false. Arthur said, “She had accused him of rape, but that was wrong too.” Court and newspaper records show that Cledith Arthur was charged with incest in 1974 for allegedly raping his eldest daughter, according to HuffPost.

After moving to Pennsylvania with her husband, Arthur was found guilty of theft by deception in 1995 and 1996 and animal neglect in 2021. When Arthur attempted to appeal the animal neglect case, a judge found her “not credible.”

The ad was condemned by a host of prominent Republican officials and political commentators. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump, said it was “the grossest ad I can think of… anyone behind it should be ashamed.” Lydia Mihalik, the director of the Ohio Department of Development for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R), said, “There are lines we shouldn’t cross, and this is one of them… I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to believe that exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong.” Republican strategist Leslie Shedd described the ad as “despicable” and “morally wrong and reprehensible.”

The ad was financed by Ramaswamy’s campaign, which has raised money from numerous major corporations — both through corporate PACs and from top executives.

Popular Information contacted these companies and asked if they believed the ad featuring Acton’s mother was acceptable. DraftKings declined to comment and the other companies did not respond.

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False Flags via The Bulwark, Political Commentary: MAGA Media Learns to Love Vile Vivek Ramaswamy Ad, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 22,  2026. For these supposed moral authorities, the only question is whether it works.

In the Ohio governor's race, Vivek Ramaswamy dropped an ad in which the estranged mother of Amy Acton denounced her daughter as a liar. Some of Ramaswamy’s usual defenders were repelled by the ad. But some powerful right-wing media figures have made a point of sticking with him. We’ll get into it below.

Conservative podcasting mogul Ben Shapiro can sometimes seem like the last decent person left in right-wing media. When he isn’t writing movies for James Franco, Shapiro has been a rare voice standing up to the MAGA movement’s slide into absolute madness: outright racism, antisemitism, and Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy theories.

But when it comes to Vivek Ramaswamy’s new ad attacking Democrat Amy Acton in the Ohio governor’s race—an ad that stars Acton’s estranged mother, who remained married to the man who was charged with raping her daughter—Shapiro has a surprising stance: He’s cool with it!

According to Shapiro, the ad is just another round of rough-and-tumble politics. On his show Wednesday, Shapiro dismissed criticism of the ad as liberal “pearl-clutching.”

“It turns out that in politics lots of bad things happen!” Shapiro said.

Instead of denouncing the ad, Shapiro said it was no worse than members of the Kennedy family criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or relatives of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) opposing his re-election. Besides, Shapiro asked, do you remember when Democrats said JD Vance had sex with a couch?

Of course, there’s one big difference between those spats and the new Ramaswamy ad: Acton’s mother was married to a man charged with raping Acton when she was 12 years old. After he was indicted, Acton’s mother fled the state with him to avoid the case. Acton has not seen her mother for forty-eight years.

Shapiro’s defense of the ad echoes an approach that has defined other MAGA media-driven frenzies this cycle, including the botched hysteria around James Talarico supposedly checking himself into a mental hospital in Ohio: throw accusations against the wall without bothering to care about the accuracy of them, and then demand that the Democrat come up with some sort of defense of them. In this case, court documents make clear that Acton was correct in her descriptions of the horrors she faced.

But Shapiro doesn’t seem to worry about the factuality here. And though he may be the most prominent defender in pro-Trump media of Ramaswamy’s bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, he isn’t alone. While the ad provoked shock on the right after it initially leaked, some notable figures have made clear they’re fine with it. Along with Donald Trump and JD Vance, some big names in conservative media are saying Ramaswamy’s $4 million ad campaign starring Acton’s mother is acceptable if it means keeping the Ohio governor’s mansion.

Glenn Beck—who, like Shapiro, styles himself a sort of conscience of the right—is on board. On his own show Wednesday, Beck initially praised Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, for “looking like a grandmother.”

Then Beck laid out a sort of point system where he could evaluate the competing claims made by Acton and her mother. On one hand, Acton’s stepfather was indicted by a grand jury for raping her, with even Arthur admitting he fled the state to avoid being prosecuted.

“We do know that he fled the state after being charged with the rape of a 12-year-old girl, Amy—and that doesn’t look good!” Beck conceded, giving Acton one “point.”

Then again, Acton’s mother claims she was once involved in setting up a sexual assault counseling program at a hospital. That, Beck felt, was worth a point on its own, resulting in a tie.

“Point each!” Beck said. “That means: Dismiss it.”

Several conservative commentators have speculated that Arthur may herself have been a victim of her abusive husband, meaning she’s essentially blameless.

“It sounds like Mom may have been part of this abuse,” Beck said, making clear that he meant Arthur suffered, too.

So did Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.

“From what I’ve heard about family situations like this, if the stepfather is doing the abuse, it might not just be of the kids, it could also be of the spouse, the wife,” Kelly said.

What’s the reason for this attempt to paint Arthur as somehow morally equivalent to her daughter? Both Beck and Kelly argued that the sexual abuse stuff should be ignored, with the focus instead on Arthur’s claims in the ad that her daughter is a habitual liar. But even setting aside that sordid history—no easy feat!—Arthur is hardly a reliable person whose claims should be taken at face value.

In 2021, for example, Arthur was cited for allegedly keeping four kittens, all less than a week old, in a hot car where the temperature measured 120 degrees. When her conviction was vacated in 2023 because she didn’t have access to counsel at her trial, a judge in that appeal nevertheless found Arthur—who claimed that the car wasn’t hot, and that she was being “stalked”—to be “not credible” as a witness.

NOT EVERYONE IN CONSERVATIVE MEDIA has been so quick to forgive Ramaswamy, right. Podcaster Erick Erickson has criticized the ad. And National Review was one of the first outlets to publish the details of the criminal case against Acton’s stepfather, an issue that the conservative pundits supporting Ramaswamy have sidestepped by mostly misstating the details of the case. (Shapiro, for example, wrongly claimed on his show that Acton’s stepfather was not charged by a grand jury.)

Sadly, the most reliably anti-Ramaswamy contingent has been the racist “groypers” who surround white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who already hates Ramaswamy for being Indian.

“What kind of person would run an ad like that?” Fuentes asked on his show, interspersing criticisms of the ad with a larger attack on immigration from India.

Attention-hungry former Florida gubernatorial candidate and Fuentes ally James Fishback put out a video saying he was no longer “proud” to be a Republican because of the ad.

But those voices on the right are relatively small, compared to far more popular voices like Beck and Shapiro. Unsurprisingly, the first major conservative pundit to back Ramaswamy’s ad was Megyn Kelly, who has been on a sort of anti-woman rampage lately, describing the victim in the alleged rape case at Cornell University as a “beefy” loser.

On her show Wednesday, Kelly compared Ramaswamy’s ad to George H.W. Bush’s racist “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 presidential race. But while many other people have made that comparison after the Ramaswamy ad leaked, Kelly’s take was unusual—because she saw the similarity as a good thing.

“Guess what happened?” Kelly said of the Willie Horton ad. “It worked! It moved the needle!” 

The Daily with Sarah Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Sick Ad Against Amy Acton is Already Backfiring, Sarah Jones, right,  Oct. 22, 2026. Amy Action called Vivek Ramaswamy’s sick ad exploitive. It’s also backfiring according to a top election forecaster.

The Ohio governor’s race has been taken to the swamp by Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy siding with the wife of an indicted rapist of his opponent, Democratic nominee and former state health department director Dr. Amy Acton.

But going this low doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the Republican.

A top election forecaster is describing the race as favorable to Democrats after previously calling the race a tossup, and explained the ad is already backfiring.

Larry Sabato, the editor-in-chief and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, reported that Sabato’s Crystal Ball is shifting four gubernatorial races to the left, including a significant change in Ohio, where the race moved from a toss-up to “lean Democrat.”

“I think we thought Amy Acton was ahead before this,” Sabato said on CNN. “This is a disaster. This ad is a disaster, and it's hard to believe that there are Republicans out there defending it, you know. You had Republican former governor of Kansas Bill Graves on just a few minutes ago, and he was powerful in his explanation of why not only this isn't going to work, but it is already backfiring.”

Sabato had the race as “lean Democrat” before the despicable ad, in which Ramaswamy sides with an indicted rapist of a child in an effort to attack his opponent, while bizarrely claiming that she won’t discuss the issues facing voters.

“Amid the controversy over Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, a top election forecaster is now describing the race as favorable to Democrats after previously predicting it to be a “tossup.” For months, the battle to lead Ohio has been one of the more contentious contests on the national radar,” CNN reported Thursday morning.Acton Calls Ramaswamy’s Ad ‘Exploitive’

Acton called Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s $4 million ad against her, in which he aligned himself with the woman defending the man indicted for raping her when she was a child, “hideous” and “exploitive.”

To be clear, when someone aligns themselves with the person calling an alleged child rape victim a liar, they are aligning with the indicted rapist. This is literally the system that protects predators, as we see with the Epstein files. It starts with calling child victims of rape liars.

The ad, which began circulating on Monday online, features the estranged biological mother of Dr. Acton, a woman who had custody of her children taken away from her and sided with her husband, who was indicted for raping her 10- to 12-year-old daughter. He only escaped prosecution because he fled from the law and eventually died.

Acton has not spoken with her mother since she was 12 years old, after Arthur stood by her stepfather after he was arrested, charged and indicted for raping Acton. Arthur remained married to him until he died.

Arthur lost custody of both of her children after their stepfather was indicted for raping Acton, the AP reported.

WBAL.TV reported via the AP:

According to police and court documents obtained by The Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter, then 12, in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported his alleged conduct to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978.

Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty. He was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. He has since died.

Ramaswamy centered a woman so abusive to her children that they were taken away from her because she chose the indicted rapist over her own daughter. Appropriately, this is the “reliable narrator” for his campaign.

“My name is Donna Arthur, and I’m Amy Acton’s mother," Arthur says in the ad, which was first aired without the tags identifying who paid for it, according to the AP. "I love my daughter" but accused her of lying about her childhood, saying, "Amy has a serious problem; she is a liar."

Vice President JD Vance couldn’t bring himself anywhere near to condemning the ad, instead he told Republicans who expressed concern to stop whining. Naturally, the President himself wouldn’t stand up for a child whose alleged rapist was indicted.

This kind of depravity has become the norm for the party of Epstein, but even so, this ad reached new lows.Amy Acton Connects Her Childhood to What So Many Feel Right Now

Amy Acton responded by connecting the people who helped her and her brother to seeing the humanity in one another and the need to heal after this long decade of misery.

Speaking to a small group of voters, Acton said, “I remember as a kid people looking the other way, system's not working. But I also remember more the people who did look the other way. I talk about a couple who would pull my brother and I up on our front porch and feed us breakfast because they knew we were hungry, and that sticks between more, quite frankly.”

“And I think that's what we're living in right now: A time where we're we're seeing things and we're being asked to not see with our own eyes what we see.”

“But kindness is a fierce commitment to seeing humanity in one another, and everyone has longing for that. Everyone's exhausted.”

“This has been a long decade, and so just know that. I hope that's hope, that your fellow man is feeling it too. We've folks voting Trump three times showing up…

They're showing up, and we gotta heal this thing that's been broken.”

Ramaswamy is desperate to win the race, but the bad news for the DOGE bro is Ohioans aren’t worried about Amy Acton’s childhood more than they are the price of gas, an unjustified war in the Middle East, a president siding with Putin as he attacks the west in his hybrid information war, the cost of living skyrocketing thanks to Trump’s tariffs and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill undermining the affordability of healthcare even further.

Ohio hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in 20 years, but Vivek Ramaswamy’s repugnant MAGA personality might change that. And if that doesn’t do it, the chance to hear Dr. Acton’s call to seeing the humanity in our fellow humans might.

This nation desperately needs leaders who understand suffering and want to help, rather than people who see the suffering as easy prey.

U.S. Foreign Relatons, Global Strategies

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump vs. The Law of Non-Contradiction, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Yesterday, Russia released a wrongfully detained American: Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired schoolteacher who was imprisoned in 2022 after being accused of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine.

It is good when other countries release wrongfully detained Americans. Welcome home, Mr. Hubbard. But these exchanges also involve thorny diplomatic problems. Typically, America is forced to give something up to secure the release of a political prisoner, incentivizing more countries to wrongfully detain more Americans in the future.

Donald Trump has always had a difficult time wrapping his mind around tradeoffs like this. (See, for instance, his whole tariffs thing.) But we’ve rarely seen them utterly short-circuit his brain quite like yesterday—when he repeatedly insisted both that he alone could have secured Hubbard’s release without giving anything in return and that it was important for him to waive new sanctions on Russia, because if he hadn’t he could never have secured Hubbard’s release.

It started on Truth Social. In his post announcing the news, Trump bragged that Putin had given Hubbard back gratis: “The United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return—an unprecedented situation for Russia.”

You see, just another day at the office for President Donnie Deals.

Then, in a follow-up post twelve full minutes later, Trump said exactly the opposite. “Numerous people, who requested that sanctions be immediately imposed on Russia, have called to apologize to President Trump in that they didn’t know that he was negotiating the release of Stephen Hubbard, a truly big and important deal for the U.S.,” the president wrote. “If sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt.”

This is staggering stuff. Typically, deals to get back detained Americans have come in the form of prisoner swaps. In 2024, for instance, a complicated swap involving Russia, Belarus, the U.S., Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Norway resulted in the release of 26 people.

But as incentives go, prisoner swapping pales in comparison to the concession Trump admitted to giving to secure Hubbard’s release. If we rightly worry about oppressive countries snapping up Americans in order to secure the release of their own people, how much more should we worry about those countries detaining Americans in order to get billions of dollars of sanctions relief?

But the most dizzying part of the story isn’t how much Trump was willing to give Russia. It was how he genuinely seemed unable to grasp that he’d given Russia anything at all. Trump spent yesterday making it excruciatingly clear that he simply didn’t see the contradiction between his own two posts—the first claiming he’d given nothing up, the second itemizing exactly what he gave up.

Later, at a White House meeting, Trump made the same claim again: “We gave nothing in exchange, which is very rare. We never give anything in exchange.” And then, shortly after: “Let’s say we did what a lot of stupid people wanted me to do. A lot of really stupid people. . . . I was in the midst of getting Stephen out of Russia, and if we did what these foolish people wanted me to do [allowing sanctions to go into effect], he wouldn’t be coming out right now.”

Later still, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on this very contradiction, you could practically hear the gears grinding futilely between Trump’s ears.

“You said you didn’t give Russia anything in exchange for his release,” Collins said.

“If I would have done that,” Trump replied, “you would not have Mr. Hubbard coming back.”

“So you did give him something in exchange for the release,” Collins said.

“You don’t know anything. You’re fake news CNN,” Trump replied. “Right now you have a man that’s beautifully flying from Russia . . . that I got out, because I had a very good and very fast negotiation with President Putin. If you would have put those sanctions on, or whatever you want to call them, you could forget about him. You’d never see him again.”

“But you’re saying you lifted the sanctions in exchange for his release, right, Mr. President?” Collins asked.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN,” Trump replied.

Has a guy like Putin ever had it so easy?

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Oct. 22, 2026. Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections, according to U.S. officials and other people briefed on the deliberations.

As planning for a short but intensive operation progresses, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have stepped up exercises, flying planes over Iraq to practice strike maneuvers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss new strikes, U.S. officials said.

The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. Some officials say one more big round of attacks could push Iran’s economy over the brink and force the country to make diplomatic concessions after nearly eight months of conflict.

Still, there are reasons to be skeptical that a renewed war would be any more successful than the first phase of intense U.S.-Israeli strikes between February and April. Those rounds of fighting drove up energy prices and inflation around the world, eroded security in the Middle East and severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.

It is also far from certain Mr. Trump will approve fresh strikes. Repeatedly this year he has vetoed plans for a return to major combat operations, including this month when the U.S. and Israeli militaries were nearly ready to attack.

All of the officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss military planning.

Iranian officials have promised to retaliate this time by expanding their targets beyond commercial ships and energy infrastructure in the region to data centers and underwater internet cables.

They say the fighting will neither be quick nor limited.

While the United States is assembling a massive arsenal that will be fully in place by early November, diplomatic efforts have continued, as U.S. negotiators use the potential return to war as leverage with Iran to make progress on their demands on its nuclear program and control over the Strait of Hormuz.

So far, however, Iran’s negotiators have been unwilling to make concessions on the nuclear program, insisting on deferring that issue until later in the talks.

Some U.S. planners are convinced that an intensive three-day campaign could cause enough economic damage to change the Iranian position.

New York Times, Strike on Saudi Airport Kills 2 as U.S. Tells Some Diplomats to Leave, Ismaeel Naar, Oct. 22, 2026. For weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis have been attacking the kingdom’s aviation and energy sectors.

At least two people were killed in a strike on a major airport in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday evening, as Washington ordered some U.S. diplomatic staff to leave the kingdom following weeks of deadly attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.

The Saudi authorities said in a statement on Thursday morning that a Saudi national and an Indian resident died in the strike on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, a city in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province that is home to the state oil giant Saudi Aramco. Eight other people were wounded, the statement said, adding that airport was operating normally on Thursday.

In a separate incident, two people were killed and two others were wounded on Wednesday when a drone was intercepted over Aramco’s Shaybah oil field, also in the Eastern Province. Falling drone fragments sparked a fire in a contractor’s vehicle, killing a Filipino and a Nepali, the Saudi Energy Ministry said.

The Saudi authorities did not say who they believed had launched the strike on the airport or the drone intercepted over the oil field. There were no immediate claims of responsibility.

The Houthis have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure for weeks, killing at least 22 civilians and roiling energy markets.

The price of oil jumped about 3 percent on Thursday, with the global benchmark topping $112 a barrel, the highest level since mid-May.

Saudi Arabia announced a bombing campaign against the Houthis this month in support of the internationally recognized government of Yemen, which has been at war with the Houthis since 2014. That was when the Houthis, a rebel group from the country’s north, seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa — which they still hold.

A fragile truce in Yemen unraveled earlier this year, and the country has since tipped back into a civil war that the United Nations says has displaced some 260,000 people since August.

As the fighting has spilled onto Saudi soil, the United States ordered all “non-emergency government employees and their family members” to leave Saudi Arabia, a State Department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, said in social media post on Wednesday night that cited the Houthis’ attacks, mounting civilian casualties and travel disruptions.

Washington had pulled many diplomatic staff out of the Middle East earlier this year after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, the Houthis’ main patron. But it started sending some back in late August.

Then in September, the Houthis seized areas of strategic territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast in a lightning offensive, gaining greater control over a crucial choke point for global trade. In recent weeks, forces affiliated with the Yemeni government and backed by Saudi warplanes have mounted a counteroffensive to retake the territory.

The Red Sea has become an increasingly important route for Saudi oil exports since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway in the Persian Gulf, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February. The Houthis’ attacks on Saudi oil facilities and tankers traversing the Red Sea have heaped further pressure on energy markets.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

New York Times, Opinion: Impeachment. It’s Not Just for Presidents, David French, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America.

Imagine that it’s January 2027 and Democrats hold both chambers of Congress. They’ve been elected in a wave of public outrage over inflation, the war in Iran, and — crucially — public corruption. In fact, a Fox News poll taken shortly before the election showed that “corruption in government” was the top concern of voters, even greater than inflation.

How should the Democratic majority respond?

Last week Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, shared her thoughts about this, and it made parts of the right very, very angry.

During a discussion at the University of Chicago, Slotkin argued that a Democratic-controlled Congress should impose accountability on the Trump administration, but also that it can’t become the “whole personality” of the Congress.

And so, she proposed, Congress should “pick signature cases and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.” She acknowledged the two failed impeachments of President Trump, but said, “The people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who did his bidding.”

Here’s the part that made the right truly mad: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”

The Chicago Thinker, a self-described conservative and libertarian student-run publication from the University of Chicago, clipped the latter portion of her comments and ignited a firestorm.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that Slotkin was “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign that goes after all and sundry, including what she calls ‘people who enabled’ Mr. Trump.”

A group called the Center to Advance Security in America even went so far as to file an ethics complaint against Senator Slotkin, claiming that she may have been trying to intimidate young Americans from pursuing careers in public service.

Others just lied. Greg Price, a MAGA influencer with a large following on X, said that Slotkin “just said that he [sic] wants to prosecute everyone who works for President Trump.”

Different others threatened her. Mike Davis, a prominent Republican lawyer and former clerk of Justice Neil Gorsuch, posted on X, “Try it, @ElissaSlotkin. Learn about the Second Amendment, sweetheart.”

Jesse Kelly, a talk radio host who also has an immense following on X, wrote, “Elissa Slotkin should be arrested for what she said. These are the kinds of things we have to do to communists in order to stop this from escalating.”

“Crush this before it gets worse,” he said.

The hysteria was so out of proportion to Slotkin’s comments, that it’s worth pondering whether this was Trumpists’ own exercise in “deterrence.” They’re trying to deter accountability for MAGA’s immense corruption.

In reality, however, Slotkin was raising the right question and — by focusing on the “signature” cases — in the right way. How should a Democratic Congress respond to the extraordinary corruption of the Trump White House? And what can it do if President Trump is essentially immune to prosecution and impeaching the president has already failed, twice?

Her top-line answer is sound — pick the most egregious cases and pursue his enablers. But the default method should be impeachment rather than prosecution. Done correctly, impeachment can be more unifying and more effective than a campaign of criminal prosecution.

In fact, a campaign of criminal prosecution may well be impossible. Prepare for Trump to issue a host of pre-emptive pardons, protecting everyone from his family to his cabinet to his most senior advisers from criminal liability for any federal crimes committed in office or near one.

In other words, Trump may use the most misguided provision of the Constitution — the pardon power — to wreck the rule of law. In response, Democrats and Republicans should revive the impeachment power, the most underused portion of the Constitution, to save both the rule of law and the structure of our government.

First, let’s talk a bit about the law. Any efforts to prosecute Trump or his enablers criminally will run up against three roadblocks. Two are obvious, one is less so.

Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives the president the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” This power is one of the last vestiges of royalty given to the American president, and its reach is limited only by his or her integrity.

Trump now understands this reality fully, and no one should doubt his willingness to exercise his power to the fullest.

As Joe Biden demonstrated (in one of the worst moves of his presidency) the power to pardon can even be pre-emptive, granting pardons for cases that might be brought. It extends to people inside and outside the government, and it can grant total immunity from legal accountability for even the most heinous of federal crimes.

The second barrier to prosecution is unique to the presidency: Trump v. United States — the most misguided Supreme Court decision of the new century. As I’ve argued before, an otherwise originalist court reached a decidedly un-originalist decision to grant former presidents sweeping immunity for actions undertaken in office. The immunity isn’t absolute, but it’s broad enough to make any post-term prosecution of a president extraordinarily difficult.

The final barrier is both legal and practical. Proving a public corruption case is hard, and it’s getting harder. For example, in a 2016 case, McDonnell v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a former Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell. He and his wife received roughly $175,000 in loans and gifts from a businessman named Jonnie R. Williams Sr.

The court found that the government had not proven that McDonnell had committed any “official acts” in exchange for a financial benefit. McDonnell had set up meetings between Williams and Virginia public officials, had hosted events benefiting Williams’s company at the governor’s mansion, and had contacted other Virginia officials on Williams’s behalf.

Those were not official acts, the court reasoned, because “to qualify as an ‘official act,’ the public official must make a decision or take an action on that ‘question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy,’ or agree to do so.”

A later case, called Snyder v. United States, reversed the conviction of James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Ind. He received a gift of $13,000 from a truck dealer after Snyder spent more than $1 million at the dealership to purchase garbage trucks for the city.

The Supreme Court found that Snyder had received a “gratuity,” not a bribe, and the relevant federal statute criminalized bribery, and did not criminalize granting a gratuity after a favorable decision had been made.

Taken together, these decisions opened up an immense gray zone for financial influence, leaving bribery prosecutions viable in only the most brazen of cases.

I bring up these cases not because they foreclose any prosecution of Trump officials, but rather because they show that simply proving that money changed hands under suspicious or plainly immoral circumstances is not the same thing as proving a crime.

What this means in practice is that public corruption cases should be brought, but they must be brought carefully and selectively, when the law is clear and the evidence is overwhelming.

There could be plenty of those to go around — but only if Trump stays his hand on pardons. And he almost certainly won’t.

But impeachment is different. It’s a political remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors” that involve violations of the public trust, not just violations of the law. And it has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

The impeachment power is also broad. It extends to the president, vice president and all “civil officers” of the United States. While the term “civil officer” isn’t defined by the Constitution, it almost certainly extends to cabinet heads, ambassadors, other senior executive branch officials and federal judges.

In fact, a number of federal judges have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office in American history.

While we know that it is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Republicans will cross the aisle to vote to impeach and convict Trump, would they have the same loyalty to, say, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently deposed ambassador to Greece who The Wall Street Journal reported had solicited a substantial from gift from a Republican donor before her Senate confirmation?

Does that loyalty extend to Richard Grenell, the special missions envoy who’s worn a number of hats during both Trump administrations and who’s embroiled in his own pay-to-play scandal after Alina Habba Mildon, the president’s former lawyer who went on to work at the Department of Justice, accused him of siphoning off millions of dollars intended for a donation to the Kennedy Center, which he ran at the time? (Grenell denies any wrongdoing.)

Does that loyalty extend to Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who’d already committed an impeachable offense when he disclosed military plans on unclassified Signal group chats and hasn’t slowed down since?

As I was writing this edition of the newsletter, news broke that Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire from Venezuela, retained Mildon last year for a four-year period with a compensation package worth more than $50 million. He received a pardon from Trump shortly afterward. (Habba, too, denies any wrongdoing.)

Herrera had been charged with felony bribery, but negotiated a plea deal for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But even that was too much for him to bear.

More Global News

New York Times, Looted Goods From French Stores Flood Resale Sites After Riots, Jenny Gross, Oct. 22, 2026. Officials in France are pressing online platforms like eBay and Vinted to remove items that were stolen during public disturbances over the weekend.

The online listings started appearing just hours after the looting in France. For sale were a variety of items — handbags, skin care products, lip glosses — suspected of being stolen by people who had smashed windows and emptied stores in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities over the weekend.

Protests in France, which started over conditions in schools and broadened into demonstrations against the rising cost of living, descended into unrest on Saturday and Sunday. Several government buildings were damaged and more than 3,000 shops were looted, leading to the arrest of more than 2,500 people, officials said.

In Paris, many of the shops across Les Halles were looted and vandalized, while the Place de la Bastille and Place de la Concorde became center points for standoffs between the police and protesters. Stores that were broken into included Louis Vuitton, Céline, Hermès and the North Face, as well as video game shops, pharmacies and electronics stores. A preliminary estimate showed the damage would cost several hundred million euros.

Resale sites like Vinted said this week that they were cracking down on items suspected to have been looted. Vinted said it was working with the French authorities to detect malicious behavior.

“Since this weekend, our teams have taken immediate action to identify and remove listings linked to the looting, and we have stepped up monitoring of suspicious listings,” Vinted said in a statement. “When our rules are breached, we act against the accounts involved, up to permanent bans.”ImageThe interior of a store that has been looted with containers and small objects strewed on the floor.

President Emmanuel Macron of France warned on Sunday that “those who looted will have to pay back, and those who sought to bring down the republic will be held accountable.”

But many more people participated in the looting than the police will be able to arrest, and it will be virtually impossible for resale sites to take down all stolen items because of the scale of the theft, said Charlotte de Montpellier, an economist at ING Bank.

“I don’t expect that those companies will be able to track everything,” she said. The test for the broader French economy, she added, will be how long the protests last, and whether the unrest continues. “More could come, and that will of course have a significant impact on the final bill,” she said.

France was calm on Wednesday, but Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, said a significant security operation was planned ahead of more protests expected on Saturday.

Serge Papin, the trade minister, and Anne Le Hénanff, the digital affairs minister, met on Monday with resale platforms to discuss strengthening their cooperation with the French authorities to identify and report stolen goods. Alliance Française des Places de Marché, which represents platforms like eBay, Vinted and Etsy, said in a statement after the meeting that its members had agreed to increase monitoring to detect goods that might have been obtained through looting and inform consumers of the penalties associated with buying stolen goods.

The damage to companies goes beyond replacing looted products. On Tuesday, Carrefour, the largest food retailer in France, lowered its full-year financial targets because of indirect costs of the riots: increased spending on security and logistics, fewer customers, precautionary closures and reduced hours because of curfews.

Future U.S. Politics 

The Contrarian, Opinion: MAGA Hubris Fuels the Blue Wave, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Like many authoritarian cults, the MAGA crowd does not believe their reign will ever end or that their opponents will ever gather their wits to respond to assaults on their rights, liberties, and physical safety.

The fascists act with impunity because they cannot imagine the political pendulum will ever swing back; they cannot conceive that their abuse will ever trigger a backlash of sufficient strength to overpower their repressive rule.

But some savvier Republicans (including White House staffers who are already lawyering up) are getting a wake-up call. In the run-up to the midterms, it seems to be slowly dawning on some of them that their abusive conduct has lit a fire under the Resistance, and that a reckoning is coming.

We see the backlash in voter turnout and enthusiasm in precisely the places where MAGA tried to strip millions of voting power. Trump’s voting suppressors never anticipated the counter-redistricting effort Democrats mounted in places like California. Moreover, they seemed unprepared to see a dramatic swing in both red statewide races (where gerrymandering is irrelevant) and in the districts they thought would be safe after they carried out Donald Trump’s orders to deprive non-white voters of their representatives of choice.

The Callais decision further inflamed the pro-democracy coalition. Southern Senate seats that never would have been competitive are now in play; re-redistricted congressional seats are at risk. Nationally, Hispanics have swung back hard for Democrats.

Early voting has been surging coast to coast. In Georgia, for example, over 1 million ballots have already been cast, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The early numbers offer more encouraging signs for Democrats than Republicans, particularly in metro Atlanta and other left-leaning parts of the state.” A similar surge in early voting is underway in Florida. Nearly 100,000 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting in South Carolina.

Organizing around early voting has been productive. No Kings Coalition organizers report:

According to a new analysis by TargetSmart, early voting surged by 51% in ZIP codes that hosted a No Kings event compared to the same relative Saturday in the 2022 midterm elections (October 22, 2022). Across the 13 states analyzed — Georgia (46 Events), Indiana (46 Events), Maine (32 Events), Minnesota (88 Events), North Carolina (71 Events), Nebraska (15 Events), New Mexico (29 Events), Nevada (22 Events), Ohio (79 Events), South Dakota (8 Events), Tennessee (24 Events), Virginia (85 Events), and Wyoming (14 Events) — overall early voting was up 32%, meaning communities with a No Kings event outperformed the general statewide increase by 19 percentage points. ….

The data also highlights a surge in historically underrepresented voters: in ZIP codes with a No Kings event, early voting among voters of color increased by 90% compared to 2022, versus a 29% increase among white voters.

The more desperately the Republicans try to cling to power, the more the Resistance builds. The Justice Department’s pathetic efforts to harass states and take over the voting process not only failed spectacularly in court (e.g., in the Missouri and U.S. Post Office cases, in over 2 dozen cases in which the feds tried to grab state voter rolls, or in the botched raid to grab Fulton County ballot materials) and petered out in a series of spasmodic, widely ridiculed efforts to hunt down noncitizen voters. It also seems to have played into the hands of early vote organizers who exhort voters not to allow the regime to rob them of their precious right to vote.Subscribed

The baseless DOJ lawsuit suing California for refusing to eject a random list of 20,000 voters from the rolls triggered a furious response from a coalition of groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which intervened in the suit and vowed that voters would not be intimidated. As California Attorney General Rob Bonta declared in a Sunday interview, “Here you have the federal government, with bluster and intimidation and bullying, trying to scare them into disenfranchising voters, and it’s wrong….They’re desperate.” He continued, “It’s embarrassing for them. They’re in the death throes of this election cycle, staring down a blue wave where they’re going to get thrashed, and they are planning for what they do after they get thrashed.”

In a similar vein, Big Tech’s ham-handed interference with mass organizing has itself fueled a backlash. Meta’s interruption of the No Kings Coalition Instagram feed for over 4 hours — reminiscent of efforts for which Meta was sued in Brazil — triggered a demand for information from Meta, calls from Congress to investigate, and a seething response from the independent Meta Oversight Board, which called out “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts.”

As the Oversight Board explained: “From the removal of political activist accounts during protests in the U.S. ahead of the midterm elections to technical restrictions that hit the accounts of a presidential candidate in Brazil leading to allegations of electoral interference, it’s clear that Meta must do more to ensure that its enforcement practices during elections are transparent and consistent and that political speech is protected rather than stifled.” Its co-chairs continued, “We have repeatedly warned that during elections and periods of heightened political tension, Meta’s content moderation failures often manifest themselves in two ways: overenforcement that suppresses political speech and underenforcement that undermines electoral integrity.”

The ferocious response from a variety of civil society groups and elected leaders nicely tees up a full-throttle effort to investigate and begin real regulatory reform of Big Tech, which has — with Trump cheerleading — made itself the target of voters’ ire on everything from AI to data centers to election interference and child endangerment.Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in October 2026, rallying nobody.

Finally, the anti-MAGA backlash is getting a further boost from growing disgust over Trump’s overt corruption — about which VP JD Vance ludicrously claims ignorance and Republicans refuse to address. From the outrage engendered by taxpayer-funded self-promotional ads to the outcry over Kimberly Guilfoyle’s penny ante graft to the massive self-aggrandizing building projects and crypto-scams, Trump has fed the very narrative that helped dislodge Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Even Fox News polling reflects the degree to which these issues have broken through. Six in ten people said they “were extremely concerned” about corruption, with almost 90 percent saying they were either extremely or very concerned about government corruption.

In sum, the arrogance of autocrats can prove their undoing. In trying to block out independent media, they have ensconced themselves in an echo chamber, missing signs that their message is badly misfiring and that their actions are boomeranging. Be it on voting, Big Tech abuse, or corruption, the Trump regime’s overreach has inured to the benefit of Democrats and their allied pro-democracy forces, evidenced in the substantial enthusiasm advantage for Democrats, the spiking early voting numbers, and the expanding electoral maps. If the blue wave manifests itself, a good deal of the credit will go to MAGA hubris.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Gramsci’s Foreshadowing, William Kristol, right, Oct. 22, 2026. There’s a remark by the early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, that’s been much quoted in recent years:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

I’ve long thought Gramsci’s formulation to be an apt comment on the present moment. And I was reminded of it this morning as I read about Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, and Donald Trump and Steven Witkoff. For, if I can update Gramsci, it seems to me that today…

Trumpism is dying, and a new liberalism struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.

It’s worth noting that the famous line ascribed to Gramsci isn’t a literal translation of the 1930 entry in his Prison Notebooks: In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati. The late Professor Joseph Buttigieg—yes, the father of Pete!—editor of the comprehensive English-language edition of the Prison Notebooks, translated Gramsci’s comment more literally: In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena occur.

In fact, “morbid phenomena” may describe our Trumpists more accurately than “monsters.” After all, monsters are in a way impressive. They can have a certain grandeur. But Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, Donald Trump and Steven Witkoff? They’re not grand or impressive. They’re merely the “morbid phenomena” of our day, the visible detritus of a failing and flailing movement that’s, sadly, dominated our politics for the last decade—and that, of course, remains powerful today.

Jim Swift wrote yesterday about the disgusting attack by Ramaswamy, on his opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton—an ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother accusing her daughter of being a “liar” who “lies about her past.”

In fact, the mother’s husband, Acton’s stepfather, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing his stepdaughter when she was 12 years old. Her mother lost custody of both Amy and her brother, who also was abused. The stepfather posted bond, fled, and lived as a fugitive until his death in 2004. Acton’s mother left town with him.

In a statement, Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said that, “Our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” And he also explains that “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it. She continued to receive that abuse” because at 11 and 12 years old, she tried to protect her younger brother.

But Ramaswamy has doubled down on his smear. His campaign is putting $4 million behind the spot.

Yesterday, in Cincinnati to campaign for the Republican ticket, Vice President JD Vance at first seemed indifferent to the truth of this ad that calls a survivor of childhood sexual abuse a liar. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance said.

But later in the day, at a rally with Ramaswamy, he actually praised his fellow Republican for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.” What’s more, Vance said that he was “a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad.

So there it is, the morbid phenomenon of late Trumpism on full display: Smearing a survivor of child sexual abuse; running an ad featuring a primary enabler of the abuse; and complaining that some decent people in his party are offended by this.

But the Trumpists don’t just like enablers of child sexual abuse. They also love brutal and aggressive dictators.

Send today’s Morning Shots to a friend or family member.

Andrew wrote Monday morning about Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and his support for Russia and Vladimir Putin. And indeed, later that very day, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”

Even Neville Chamberlain didn’t claim that Nazi Germany had been fine on Czechoslovakia. And Trump’s befuddled appeasement of Putin has continued full bore this week, as Andrew details below.

Yesterday, U.S. special envoy Steven Witkoff joined the chorus, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” after he released a 74-year-old American who had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia for four years: “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”

Sucking up to a murderous aggressor and brutal dictator is another one of the morbid phenomena of Trumpism.

It’s all repulsive. And dangerous.

But let me close by returning, across the aisle as it were, to Antonio Gramsci. I don’t endorse Gramsci’s politics, or much of his analysis, insofar as I understand it—though my sense is that some of it is quite brilliant. But I think Gramsci understood this: You can’t just wait for the morbid phenomenon bedeviling the world to collapse on its own.

Yes, fascism has weaknesses. And yes, fascism in its various manifestations needs to be understood and argued against. But above all, fascism has to be confronted. And then defeated. That was true in the last century. It’s true today. 

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Your X Feed Is Not Going to Predict the Midterms... The LAUREN EGAN / Opposition guide to surviving election season without doomscrolling.
• Elon Musk Could Face a Mountain of Subpoenas in 2027... This week’s Next Level starts as a Secret Podcast before SAM and TIM crash the stage, live in Atlanta! The gang discusses what a Democratic House could mean for Musk and a mountain of subpoenas in 2027.
• The Real Lessons of the French Riots... France’s major problem isn’t immigration, explains MONA CHAREN.
• Vivek Is a Despicable Creep... On The Bulwark Daily, MARK HERTLING joins TIM live from Atlanta to discuss the Musk-administration blame game over Ukraine’s military communications and the leadership vacuum at the Pentagon. Plus, MIKE MURPHY weighs in on Ramaswamy’s vile attack on Amy Acton and senses kryptonite in the water around Trump as farmers revolt over tariffs and diesel prices.
• ICE Is Surging in California Right Ahead of the Election... Organizers work to resist intimidation and calm the nerves of Latinos preparing to go to the polls, reports ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO in Huddled Masses.

QUICK HITS

BACK TO IRAN: The thing about endless wars is they tend to keep dragging on. Although Trump has been trying hard to redirect the public’s attention from Iran to Ukraine—at least until the midterms are over—the New York Times reports that the U.S. and Israel are developing plans for possible new strikes:

The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. Some officials say one more big round of attacks could push Iran’s economy over the brink and force the country to make diplomatic concessions after nearly eight months of conflict.

Still, there are reasons to be skeptical that a renewed war would be any more successful than the first phase of intense U.S.-Israeli strikes between February and April. Those rounds of fighting drove up energy prices and inflation around the world, eroded security in the Middle East and severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.

Trump spent most of this year nursing the delusion that total Iranian capitulation was always just one more spectacular bombardment away. He seemed to have inched away from that mindset in recent months. But apparently hope springs eternal. Read the whole thing.

MEASURING THE WAVE: Speaking of the Times, its latest gold-standard poll with Siena College paints a grim picture for Trump with less than two weeks to go until Election Day. Not since Harry Truman in 1946 has a president been so unpopular entering the midterms. Only 34 percent of voters approve of his performance, and likely voters prefer Democratic House candidates to Republican ones on the generic ballot by a whopping 11 percentage points.

There are, however, a few silver linings for the GOP. The Democratic party writ large remains, incredibly, even less popular than Trump himself, with only 28 percent of voters saying they are “satisfied” with it. (Thirty-six percent said as much about the Republican party.) And the generic Senate ballot in the 35 states with upper-chamber contests this cycle was much closer: Only a five-point lead for Democratic candidates. It’s a reminder that the last thing Democrats can be is complacent. Even if they clean up in November, they’ve still got a lot of work to do.  

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Democrats Lead In Ohio, Texas, And Iowa As Midterms Start To Look Like A MAGA Extinction Event, Jason Easley,right, Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races. 

Republican operatives and strategists have been warning their party that the political environment for the GOP has been getting worse on the ground with each passing week for months.

Being the sole party in charge of the federal government meant that Republicans had a massive fundraising advantage over Democrats, but even though the economy is bad and voters have been enraged for the last decade, Republicans made a strategic blunder.

Trump’s party sat on its money. Republicans didn’t spend early. The GOP didn’t try to make the case early and often that their policies had the country on the right track. Instead, they followed Trump’s lead and waited for his promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make the economy boom.

By the time Republicans realized that Trump was making things worse, the hole was too deep. The candidates they recruited were overwhelmingly low quality, and momentum was rolling against them.

Poor strategy, a terrible economy, and a reviled president have created the perfect environment for Democrats to have a historic midterm election.

Red states where Republicans never expected Senate seats and governorships to be in play are now in jeopardy.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

President Trump, who has actively suppressed his transcripts from his schooling and falsely implied repeatedly that he graduated college with high honors, insulted CNN's Caitlin Collins and another female reporter at the White House on Oct. 22, 2026.Hope for America, Commentary:Trump's newest ABSURD attack on Kaitlan Collins was stunning, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 22, 2026. Just after 4:00 this afternoon, Donald Trump walked out of the Oval Office and spent barely seven minutes with reporters before turning questions about Russia sanctions into another ugly attack on women.

He called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and a “low IQ person.” Minutes later, ABC’s Karen Travers asked about the same subject, and he demanded to know whether she was a “stupid person.”

Then he headed to South Carolina for a rally that was supposed to promote Darline Graham, only to spend almost an hour and a half talking about himself. Protesters interrupted him at least a dozen times in the first 20 minutes. When a supporter punched one of them, he praised it: “That was great, man. Wow. Man, I loved that.” Just the night before, he had explained that saying “Please don’t hurt them” was a way to keep the press from getting him. Now he was openly celebrating the violence again.

As I watched, my youngest daughter walked into my room, and I immediately paused the television. She is old enough to understand what is happening, and she needs to recognize the warning signs of a would-be dictator. But I also wanted to preserve what little childhood she has left without the narration of a madman filling the background. I kept thinking about how impossible it would have been to imagine Barack Obama calling a female reporter a dummy for asking a question. There used to be a minimum standard of human decency attached to the presidency. Now we are watching a man praise violence, insult anyone who questions him, muse about renaming oceans, confuse the Nobel Peace Prize with the Pulitzer Prize, and insist that he is in a very good mood. Something is very wrong, and I keep thinking about what another two years of this will do to our country and to the young people learning what power looks like.

Taking back Congress will not make Donald Trump stop. It can slow him down, force hearings and subpoenas, create public records, and buy time for legal challenges and the institutions still functioning. We also have to prepare for the period after election night. He is already saying Republicans cannot lose unless the other side cheats, laying the groundwork for another attack on results he does not like. We could see pressure to keep winners from being seated and renewed attacks on anyone reporting that the election was fair. We are voting for the elections that follow this one, too, and for the next president to actually take office. More Americans are willing to confront him even when surrounded by hostile supporters. Their courage and coordination make the growing resistance visible. We can meet this moment by turning that determination into votes against him and the enablers who keep his cruelty and chaos in power.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 21, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Everything feels out of whack in the United States. First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.

And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. “I looked at his a‑‑, and then I looked at his legs, and my—I said, ‘His a‑‑ is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, ‘This guy’s a monster.’”

Today he snarled at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.”

In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.

Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”

Meanwhile, Trump claims he had nothing to do with the slowing of Starlink over Ukraine, telling a reporter: “I wasn’t involved.” When asked if Elon Musk ordered it, Trump responded: “I don’t know who did it, but I was not involved.”

Congress members, including Republicans, have vowed to hold whoever was responsible for the cuts accountable. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said on Monday that those limiting Starshield “will be fully investigated and will be held fully accountable.” He said Congress would investigate and mete out “immediate harsh and punitive budget cuts to any responsible agency or agency head.”

Musk is not taking that threat calmly. In response to a report by Calen Razor in Politico that Democrats intend to investigate Musk’s role in cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink communications networks, leaving Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk posted on social media: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”

His was a shocking threat against members of Congress, but the move of Europeans and Canadians to develop their own satellite communications systems given the dangers of relying on Starlink seems to be worrying Musk. If Congress also moves the United States away from his contracts, he could be in real trouble. As Douglas P. McCormick noted in Fortune last June, Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is not real. Almost all of his net worth is unrealized equity in companies he runs. His wealth is simply the market’s estimate of the worth of his promises to deliver in the future, and those promises depend on government contracts.

Americans are beginning to see the costs of Trumpism more generally.

As Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter this morning, twelve million Americans have lost healthcare coverage under Trump, and those who still have it have seen the cost of their premiums rise sharply. The situation will get worse in the future, since when they wrote their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans put the worst of their cuts off until after the midterms.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fell by more than 5 million people, or nearly 13%, between July 2025, when the Republicans enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and June 2026. Nearly half of those no longer receiving benefits are children. Starting this month, more of the costs of SNAP will fall to states. The amount of their payment will be based on their error rates, causing them to err on the side of denying benefits and cut costs, leading even more to lose benefits in the future. Some states may have to withdraw from SNAP altogether.

In The Atlantic today, David Frum wrote that the bill for Trumpism is coming due. Although Trump promised in his first term to eliminate the national debt and in his second to balance the budget, maybe even financing a $2,000 check for every American taxpayer, the budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 clocked in at about $2 trillion, about $160 billion more than it was during former president Biden’s last year as president. Next year’s deficit will likely be even greater.

How we got to this point, Frum reminds us, is that the Republicans’ 2025 extension of their 2017 tax cuts will reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. Their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. That leaves a growing deficit that climbs to more than $4 trillion as the cost of servicing the debt grows.

Economist Justin Wolfers explained: “Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don’t, and borrow the difference from people who aren’t old enough to vote.”

Those numbers, Frum notes, don’t include the cost of Trump’s war on Iran. The administration acknowledges that fuel and munitions for that war have cost about $45 billion, but the real costs run far higher with the destruction, for example, of U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Department of Defense has asked for an additional $200 billion for the war, and Trump has asked for $1.5 trillion to fund the military in 2027, which Frum notes is up 44% from before the war on Iran.

In order to stay in power, Republicans are peddling what Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel recently called “fear porn.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters quoted Watters’s explanation: to engage non-MAGA voters, he said: “You have to say, these people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes, and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous, you know what we’re all about. And that’s really a choice.”

In September, Watters warned that “the Democrat party and its communist base are running against America” and “want to shatter the pillars of Western civilization.” He continued his dark fantasy: “They want to abolish the Senate, police, ICE, and of course the border. Some of them are even calling for reparations and rent control. Others have a little bit of a problem with whites, and a majority of Democrats don’t prefer capitalism. It’s like we’re fighting the Cold War here in our own country.”

Host Sean Hannity told viewers: “We can vote to build on the successes of President Trump, his first two years in office, or you can shred your Constitution, allow our country to be taken hostage by this new radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement and their far-left extremist candidates.” He called Democrats “completely insane.”

A company formed last month in Wyoming has been circulating in Texas phony leaflets and text messages pretending to be from a trans rights group. Addressed to the “student” of the household, the flyers claim to be a resource guide for transgender and LGBTQ+ youth. The flyers are deliberately inflammatory, purporting to give a roadmap to children for how to separate from their parents and replace them with other adults or organizations.

Right-wing groups are sharing the mailers and linking them to Democrats. A Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives called them “disgusting and evil” on social media and posted further: “The radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children and unravel the basic framework of our society.”

In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “the most vile political ad in Ohio history.” It features the biological mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, saying Acton is a liar for saying she lived in a tent as a child. In the ad, the woman tells Ohioans not to “let her become your governor.”

Acton, 60, has not seen her biological mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from the woman’s home after a grand jury indicted the woman’s second husband for raping Acton. The woman helped her husband escape custody and avoid trial until he died. Charles Hilu of the National Review reported that court records confirm Acton’s history, and noted that the impoverished family did, in fact, spend a winter living in a tent.

Acton’s brother replied to the ad, saying both of them had been abused, but she had received the worst of it as she  tried to protect him. “Shame on Vivek,” he said.

While Vice President J.D. Vance defended Ramaswamy’s ad, others were appalled at his attempt to use her childhood trauma against her.

The Columbus Dispatch endorsed Amy Acton and called the ad “revolting.” MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, donated $500,000 to Acton, saying: “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight.”

New Jersey’s Republican former governor Chris Christie told Karen Tumulty and Dan Merica of the Washington Post: “The question for all Republicans is whether this type of attitude is what we want leading our party going forward. For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center. Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure.”

Today Ariana Baio of the Guardian reported that Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, has voted for Democrat James Talarico rather than Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to be the next U.S. senator from Texas. Bush explained: “I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles. But character matters more than party affiliation. Our democracy depends on leaders who respect our institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability, and seek to unite rather than divide.” 

Defiance.org, They threw us out while filming Trump’s corruption. We’re releasing the film anyway, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 22, 2026. I spent the fall quietly filming a documentary about what Donald Trump has turned Washington into. One week before the election, you’re going to see all of it.The government ejected our film crew from the Washington Monument. It tells you everything about why we made this documentary.

A federal government with nothing to hide doesn’t just “toss out” a film crew from one of the most famous public places in the nation’s capital. Especially not when the filmmakers start pointing out the ways in which the president has betrayed the American people. That would seem suspicious, no?

Let me back up for a second. Next week — one week before the midterm elections — we’re releasing a documentary about Donald Trump and his enablers’ abuses of power. It’s called CORRUPTIONLAND. We’ve been working on it for a while. And in September, our film crew went up the Washington Monument to get something no other vantage point in America offers: a full 360-degree view of “the swamp” and what Trump has done to it since returning to office.

That’s when he ran into a roadblock. Last night on Jen Psaki’s show on MS NOW, I told part of the story.

But here’s what happened in full.

We arrived on an ordinary weekday and got tickets like everyone. To be clear, the Washington Monument permits cameras. Tourists and social-media influencers film up there every single day. So we brought in our handheld cameras, got waved through by the first set of guards, and cleared the physical security screening zone. Nobody raised an eyebrow. In fact, they specifically inspected our equipment and gave us the go-ahead.

Then we got to the top of the monument and started rolling. I spoke about how the corruption in Trump’s Washington was so blatant that you could see it everywhere, pointing through the little windows to the specific locations where the president has defaced the nation’s capital or engaged in corruption — from the torn-up reflecting pool to the Kennedy Center to the ground where he’s building a soaring arch in his own honor, dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial.

That’s when two National Park Service (NPS) staff approached and asked us to stop filming.

I calmly asked why. They said we weren’t permitted. I explained that what we were doing didn’t require a permit, and that we’d checked the NPS website in advance to be sure. They stepped away to confer, discussing the subject matter of our documentary. We resumed filming.

Then I walked around to another side and pointed out the mess that’s been made at the public golf course that Trump is ripping up and how Congress never gave him the authorization, to say nothing of the White House ballroom monstrosity that you could see from the other set of windows.

All the while, I could tell in my peripheral vision that the NPS staff were still huddling, nervously. Of course they were nervous. In Trump’s Washington, every federal agency has been politicized and every federal employee has been made to fear the president’s retribution. They’ve watched tens of thousands of their colleagues get fired or forced out merely on the suspicion that they are disloyal.

One of the NPS staff walked back over with the verdict.

“You need to leave.”

We tried to point out the absurdity, especially because other tourists had just emerged from the elevator, too, and were filming! With cameras not much different than our own. When it became clear the Park Service wouldn’t budget, we decided not to make a scene. After only a few minutes at the top of the Washington Monument, we were directed to depart the premises. In fact, they escorted us to the elevator, took us to the bottom, and made sure we walked out of the facility.

That’s the extent of the fear in Washington, D.C. today. Civil servants eject a documentary crew from a monument that belongs to the public, built to honor a man who gave up power voluntarily. Why? Evidently because the subject being discussed was a president who craves power — and uses it to instill fear in our government and across the nation.

By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched the Park Service get politicized under Trump. Earlier this year, NPS went after D.C. protesters who we’ve collaborated with to oppose the president’s corruption. In fact, the agency threatened to take down their signs and revoke their permits because they displayed posters about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. NPS said the posters were “obscene” and that another one posed a “threat,” until a federal judge intervened and ruled this summer that the signs were “well within the heartland of protected First Amendment speech” and permanently ordered the agency to stand down.

I’ll say this. The Trump administration can keep trying to bully and intimidate us all they want. But what they cannot do is stop this film from coming out.

There’s a very good reason it exists. This summer, I called my colleague Xander at DEFIANCE.org and said: we’re seeing three Watergate-level scandals a day, and then we forget them. People forget Trump fired the people who investigated him and are supposed to monitor public corruption… they forget about his kids investing in companies that then win Pentagon contracts… they forget about his arrests of journalists and prosecution of foes. There’s so much of it that none of it sticks.

But what Xander said did stick with me. He said all these stories are really one story. We’re being robbed, by a man who captured the federal government, in a million different ways at once.

So we decided to make that one story. And we did it without a studio or a news network or a billionaire backer — a film finished in a record sprint. As I write this, I’m still waiting on the final edit, partly because every single week there’s been new corruption related to what we filmed. Just this week, the president stood at a rally and told Marine families poisoned at Camp Lejeune that if his party wins, they’ll get their settlement money, and “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”

He’s making our case faster than we can film it.

The result is CORRUPTIONLAND, a 35-minute documentary that gets to the core of the rot in Trump’s Washington. And along with it, we’ll be releasing a map that tallies up the dollar value of that corruption. I’m gonna tell you right now, even I was blown away by the preliminary number, and I thought I’d seen it all.

We’re releasing this one week before the election for the obvious reason: Congress is one of the last guardrails to stop corruption, and voters need to wake up. Thankfully, many are. Corruption is the number one voting issue this election cycle, for the first time since polling began, and it’s animating people to get to the polls. Hopefully, YOU can use this film to stir even more people to action.

So, save these dates:

Monday, October 26, 8pm ET — THE VIRTUAL PREMIERE. This is for all DEFIANCE.org Members who helped make the documentary possible. Your link arrives in this inbox before Monday. The event will include special guests, people from the film, then the documentary itself, the night before anyone else sees it.

If you’re not a DEFIANCE.org Member, you can join today and be in the room with us Monday night.

P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.DEFIANCE DAILY

In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tonight at 5 pm ET!TRACK THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN READING ROOM & BOOKMOBILE

The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room is in Detroit for one more day. If you’re in the area, make an effort to get there. You won’t be disappointed. RSVP at trumpepsteinreadingroom.com/detroit/.

If you missed yesterday’s event with U.S. Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed, Sen. Chris Murphy, and Rep. Maxwell Frost, check it out here:

Politico, DOJ indicts Virginia Democrat who led redistricting push on drug trafficking, money laundering charges, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Oct. 22, 2026. State Sen. L. Louise Lucas publicly bashed the White House while helping engineer Virginia’s ill-fated push earlier this year to draw a 10-1 map ahead of the November midterms.

The Department of Justice indicted L. Louise Lucas, a long-serving Virginia state Democratic lawmaker who publicly clashed with the White House amid its redistricting push, on five counts related to drug trafficking and money laundering that were unsealed Thursday.

Lucas, a powerful state senator who chairs the appropriations committee, helped engineer Virginia Democrats’ ill-fated push to gerrymander the House map ahead of the November midterms. While voters approved of the redrawn districts in a referendum in April, the state Supreme Court overturned the map in May, ruling that Democrats broke state law when they violated the proper procedure while rushing to get the measure in front of voters.

She was indicted, alongside family members and other associates, related to a cannabis business she helped start.

The indictment accused Lucas and her associates of steering proceeds from illicit cannabis sales to expand their business, directing marijuana licenses to partners and using her political influence to benefit her network. FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters in a Norfolk, Virginia, press conference Thursday that Lucas had “accumulated nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains.”

The FBI raided Lucas’s office in May, which she cast as retribution for her efforts in Virginia’s redistricting process. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I grew up under Jim Crow,” she said in a statement distributed by her lawyer Thursday. “I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them. I spent my life fighting back, and I’m not stopping now.”

In the press conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche fiercely pushed back against accusations that the case was motivated by President Donald Trump’s personal animus toward Lucas. Investigators began looking into the lawmaker “long before” Trump reentered the White House, he said.

“Don’t trust me,” Blanche said. “Read the indictment.”

Buying and selling cannabis for recreational use remains illegal in Virginia but will become legal next summer. Lucas will appear in federal court this afternoon.

The longtime Virginia senator is the latest White House foe to find herself under DOJ’s scrutiny. Last week, federal agents searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), part of an ongoing investigation into her immigration status.

Last year, Trump implored then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey — all bitter rivals — writing “we can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” And he’s pushed to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook from her place on the central bank, accusing her of committing mortgage fraud.

In a statement Thursday, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger said that Lucas “and her family deserve the opportunity to present their defense and speak to the allegations presented.”

But she railed against the DOJ’s decision to charge Lucas less than a month before the midterm elections in November.

Lucas herself is not on the ballot.

“The timing of this indictment undermines the U.S. Department of Justice’s previously longstanding policy of not taking legal actions — to include indictments or significant investigative steps — close to an election and sadly, this timing further erodes the trust the American people deserve to have in the Department of Justice,” Spanberger said.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s BBC Lawsuit Nightmare Gets Worse As Judge Orders President To Testify, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Trump tried to shake down the BBC with a defamation lawsuit, but the broadcaster has fought back at every turn, and now Trump must testify by December 11.

Donald Trump did this all to himself. Trump got angry when the BBC used footage of his 1/6 speech in a documentary and accused the British broadcaster of defaming him and harming his business.

In what has become a predictable pattern that Trump has used to shakedown other media companies, the president sued for $10 billion and claimed that his reputation and business had been damaged.

The president even got the lawsuit heard in Florida, but almost immediately the wheels began to come off. The BBC did something that CBS and ABC did not do.

The BBC refused to pay. The BBC also fought back.

The British broadcaster tried to subpoena Trump’s adult kids who were with him on 1/6. They were also granted access to Trump’s business records by the judge, only for the president to amend his lawsuit to remove the claim that his business had been harmed; thus, he did not have to turn over his business records.

The BBC has also tried to get the phone records for every phone that Trump used on 1/6 beyond the White House switchboard. The 1/6 Committee was limited to only White House phone records, which were incomplete.

What Trump expected to be another step in his media-bullying cash grab turned into a legal rock fight, and now a judge has ordered Trump to sit for a deposition by December 11.Trump Has Been Trying To Get Out Of Testifying

Trump has been trying to get out of testifying for months, which is odd behavior for someone who brought the lawsuit and claimed that he was defamed.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that the judge threatened Trump wth sanctions unless he testified:

“The court has admonished plaintiff for his lack of participation to no avail,” US Magistrate Judge Enjolique A. Lett said in a brief order in Miami. “Going forward, the court expects strict compliance with its order, the failure of which will lead to sanctions.”

Lett made the comment in response to a BBC motion to compel Trump to answer their questions in a deposition — which he has tried to postpone, including a session scheduled for Friday, “due to other matters of national importance.” The judge scheduled a hearing by Oct. 22 on the issue, according to the order.

The BBC wants former special counsel Jack Smith to testify. Trump is trying to block Smith’s testimony.

However, before the question of Smith’s testimony can be settled, the judge ordered Trump to be deposed by December 11.

The AP reported:

The order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett came as lawyers for the British broadcaster complained that Trump had delayed his appearance. Charles Tobin, the attorney for the BBC, said that with two months left in the discovery period, “we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff.”

…

Lett said Trump must sit for a deposition by Dec. 11, or face sanctions up to dismissal of his lawsuit -– unless the discovery period was extended past Dec. 18.

The lawsuit would never have happened if Trump hadn't filed it. There was no defamation. The BBC did not edit the footage they used or do anything defamatory. The lawsuit was part of Trump’s effort to rewrite history and erase his role in inciting the 1/6 attack.

Trump is drunk with delusion about his own power, but Trump has no power or authority over the BBC. The other media outlets paid up because they either needed the administration’s approval or feared retaliation.

The BBC has none of those concerns. Trump has no authority and can do nothing to the BBC, so the broadcaster can follow the First Amendment playbook can fight the president.

Trump is going to lose this lawsuit, and his deposition could be devastating if it ever becomes public.

The BBC is showing the world how to defeat Donald Trump.

New York Times, Why a Pillar of Christian Journalism is in Turmoil, Ruth Graham, Oct. 22, 2026. Former employees of Christianity Today say new leadership has been pushing back on independent journalism. About half of its staff members have left or been laid off over 14 months.

Last year, leaders of the evangelical publication Christianity Today summoned the entire staff to a hotel ballroom in the Chicago suburbs for a meeting about their future.

The publication’s chief operating officer, Nicole Massie Martin, opened her presentation with a Bible verse from the Old Testament about rejoicing even in dark times, “though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food.” Then Thomas Addington, the interim president, delivered a blunt message: Christianity Today’s reputation as a staid voice of intellectual centrist evangelicalism — embodied by its proximity to Wheaton College in Illinois — had to change.

Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears.

Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.

In interviews, a number of employees who have departed since the meeting in 2025 said that the changes at Christianity Today seemed to be about more than stabilizing its finances. Its new leaders, they believe, are abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals

Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven “by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.”

Multiple journalists said that Ms. Martin and Mr. Addington have made attempts to discourage certain articles and lines of reporting based on feedback from their own social and professional circles. One reporter, who was granted anonymity because of concerns over the terms of his severance agreement, said he was instructed this year to slow down an investigation into a faith-based organization that had financial connections to Christianity Today.

“Every journalistic organization has debates about what content to prioritize,” Mr. Addington said. “C.T. is no different.” At the meeting in 2025, he said, he was using Wheaton and TikTok as “metaphors for where C.T. has been and where the media environment is taking us.” The outlet remains committed to independent journalism, he said.

Last week, the new editor in chief, Erik Petrik, took down an article that discussed evidence that the popular evangelical writer Elisabeth Elliot, who died in 2015, was bisexual. Edited and fact-checked over the course of weeks, the article disappeared within 12 hours of publication, after receiving backlash from conservatives online.

New York Times, From Kenya to Japan, Rush to Fix Security Flaw Takes Sites Briefly Offline, Lynsey Chutel, Amelia Nierenberg and Brian O. Otieno, Oct. 22, 2026. Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language

Japan’s prime minister. A hospital in Germany. Taxpayers in France. An I.T. firm in Kenya.

People’s online routines were disrupted around the globe on Wednesday and Thursday as governments and companies rushed to protect their websites, after security researchers found major flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.

Many took their websites down as an emergency precaution while they fixed the flaw, which was identified using artificial intelligence. A fix was quickly available, and software developers and tech departments from Helsinki to New York scrambled to apply it, meaning that in many cases the outages lasted less than a day.

But the flaw and the temporary shutdowns it provoked showed how far-reaching potential cyberattacks could be — and how deeply the internet has embedded itself into our lives.

Oct. 21

Top Headlines

Russian President Vladimir Putin With Poodle Trump (Hartmann Report Graphic)

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The Greatest Betrayal in American History Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes, Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump is empowering Putin, abandoning Ukraine, and preparing to bargain with dictators over the future of the world. The Republicans who could stop him are doing nothing...

Trump-Putin Collude To Release Kidnapped American As 'Humanitarian' Propaganda Stunt

A photo provided by the Moscow City Court showing Stephen James Hubbard in court in 2024 (Distributed by Associated Press).

• New York Times, Calling Putin a ‘Humanitarian,’ Witkoff Thanks Him for Releasing an American, David E. Sanger, Kim Barker and Ivan Nechepurenko, Oct. 21, 2026. The move buys good will with President Trump while costing the President Vladimir V. Putin — who is wanted for war crimes — little.
• New York Times, Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released by Russia?  Kim Barker and Lynsey Chutel, Oct. 21, 2026. Mr. Hubbard, a 74-year-old teacher, was held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

News Roundups 

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.

• Meidas Touch Network, Wednesday Afternoon Updates: Witkoff Salutes Putin, New Mexico Files Epstein Lawsuit, Vance Goes Full Pedo Protector, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Here are today’s headlines: The Wall Street Journal reports Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine and discussed it with Trump, despite both of their denials; Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff thanks Putin for diesel and calls him a humanitarian; Zelenskyy says he’d agree to peace deal freezing the current lines; Vance says nobody hates corruption more than Trump, the most corrupt individual ever in politics, while The New York Times exposes a $50 million job for Alina Habba before a billionaire’s pardon; Vance smears a protester asking for action on the Epstein files and rages about the Vivek Ramaswamy ad…scolding Republicans who got upset with the ad.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Administration Praises Putin as “Humanitarian,” Republicans Demand Musk Investigation, Trump Seeks to Evict the Press, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Donald Trump’s special envoy sat across from Vladimir Putin, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for the deportation of Ukrainian children, and told him, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” He said it in the same week a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller in the Kharkiv region. Then he thanked Putin for the diesel deal and talked about bringing more Russian fertilizer into the U.S. We should all be glad Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired teacher from Michigan, is finally coming home. But Trump himself tied his release to blocking the sanctions Congress passed.

There’s more. The New York Times reports that a billionaire’s family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a deal worth more than $50 million, and weeks after she started, Trump pardoned him. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the briefing room into a swimming pool. Elon Musk now admits he “got carried away” with DOGE, as Republicans demand he testify under oath about throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network. And in North Carolina, Trump told veterans and military families exposed to Camp Lejeune’s poisoned water that “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: It Was Always Likely That Things Would Get Worse For Trump And The Rs As We Got Closer To Election Day. And They Have, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 21, 2026.  In my posts over the last few days we’ve discussed how the late polling in the 2026 election was showing Trump dropping further and hitting new lows for the cycle. These polls also showed the generic ballot opening up and getting better for us. As we’ve discussed here it was always the likely scenario in a wave year that at the end voters would break to us and away from them. There is now a lot of data to suggest that is what is happening.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How Low Can Vivek Go? Jim Swift and Andrew Egger, Oct. 21, 2026. The Ohio Republican crawls below the gutter. Trump and his cronies keep using slurs like they’re going out of style—which, to be fair, they are. .
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ramaswamy’s October Surprise Blows Up in His Face, Jim Swift, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s October surprise was supposed to make voters question Democrat Amy Acton’s character. Instead, yesterday, a leak of his attack ad featuring her estranged mother blew up in his face.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Manufacturing Trans Panic, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio isn’t the only red state where Republicans seem to be resorting to desperate tricks to salvage a race. In Texas, Ken Paxton and his supporters have been trying to turn transgender issues into a centerpiece of his race against Democrat James Talarico. Now they’re trying to whip up a new, artificial trans panic to make the sale.
• New York Times, Trump Approval Hits New Low Two Weeks Before Midterms, Poll Finds, Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik, Oct. 21, 2026. Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional district, a New York Times/Siena poll found.

Elon Musk Scandals, Global Power Grabs

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute to the crowd at a conservative political rally in the United States -- a salute that Musk described as innocent.

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 20, 2026 [Order Came From Musk!!!?!!], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 21, 2026. A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.
• New York Times, SpaceX and Tesla Explore Merger to Create a De Facto Elon Inc., Ryan Mac and Jack Ewing, Oct. 21, 2026. A deal would consolidate Elon Musk’s holdings in rockets, cars and artificial intelligence into a company worth well over $3 trillion.

More On Trump Foreign Policy Scandals

• Wayne Madsen Report, Analysis: Pressure growing for Canada to expel U.S. ambassador Pete Hoekstra, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump’s former ambassador to the Netherlands, creates hatred for the U.S. everywhere.

More On Billionairre, High Tech Tyrants

• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: ‘No Kings’ Means You, Too, Mark Zuckerberg, Frank Figliuzz, right, retired former FBI Assistant Director, Oct. 21, 2026. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account during Saturday’s rallies across the nation. We deserve answers.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). The justice said during a discussion that recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign finance have deepened America’s divides.

More On Trump Family Scandals, Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.

Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia. Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia. 

Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal, Tyler Pager, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job. 

More On GOP Attack Ad On Ohio Child Rape Victim

• New York Times, Vance Defends Ramaswamy’s Ad as Backlash Threatens Ohio Campaign, Campbell Robertson and Bayliss Wagner, Oct. 21, 2026. The vice president backed an advertisement featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother, who has been estranged from Dr. Acton since her stepfather was charged with child rape.
• Lance's Substack, Opinion: J.D. Vance Rams His Salami In Ramaswamy,  Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 21, 2026. So, now J.D. Vance is officially on the record as: Defending Nazis marching in Ohio to incite violence against Haitian immigrants for eating their pets; Defending actual Nazis praising Hitler on Young Republican chat group platforms; Now defending Ramaswamy's attack ad against his opponent, a former child rape victim who he accused of lying.

Special Reports: Venezuelan Earthquake Tragedy Reexamined

• New York Times, How Venezuela’s Public Housing Towers Were Built to Fail, Julie Turkewitz, Helmuth Rosales, James Glanz, Malika Khurana and Isayen Herrera, Oct. 20, 2026. These 10 public housing towers collapsed within seconds of back-to-back earthquakes in June. The Venezuelan government suggested the intensity of the quakes was to blame.
• New York Times, Death Toll From Venezuela Quakes Likely Far Exceeds Official Count, James Glanz, Julie Turkewitz and Helmuth Rosales, Oct. 21, 2026. A Times analysis and U.S. Geological Survey data indicate that the official 6,509 death toll is probably a severe undercount.

More Global News

• New York Times, A Battle for Control of India’s Biggest Business Empire, Alex Travelli, Oct. 21, 2026. A boardroom fight, an attempted veto and government intervention have plunged the Tata Group, one of India’s most revered institutions, into a fight over its future.

Top Stories

Russian President Vladimir Putin With Poodle Trump (Hartmann Report Graphic)

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The Greatest Betrayal in American History Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes, Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump is empowering Putin, abandoning Ukraine, and preparing to bargain with dictators over the future of the world. The Republicans who could stop him are doing nothing...

What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?

Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?

Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate.

That came just three days after he spit on the grave of Lindsey Graham by signing an executive order waiving every operative section of the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that both houses of Congress had passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

Gone are the 500 percent tariffs on Russian goods, the secondary sanctions on Putin’s oil customers, and the requirement that the sanctions stay in place until Russia made peace on terms Ukraine accepted. All destroyed on a Friday night while Congress was out of town. And now he’s publicly, shamelessly defending it and essentially daring Republicans in Congress to do anything about it.

This all came a week after one of Trump’s roughly every-two-weeks-since-he-was-sworn-in phone calls with Putin, presumably to get his instructions on how to destroy American democracy, gut our government, and hand Europe over to the revived USSR that Putin fantasizes about.

Putin apparently ordered Trump to end diesel sanctions and thus send him billions of dollars to build more drones and glide bombs to kill more Ukrainian children, and Trump said, “Sir, yes sir!”

The Wall Street Journal noted that the same call was where Putin suggested the meeting with Trump and Xi and that a former Russian intelligence officer described it to the paper as a “new Yalta,” three strongmen dividing the planet into spheres of influence.

While Democrats and average Americans are furious, a tiny handful of Republicans have timidly objected.

Graham’s sister Darline, who now holds his Senate seat, says she doesn’t trust Putin and wouldn’t have waived a thing in the law. Ted Cruz called it a “mistake,” as if Trump had made a math error. Don Bacon said Trump is prolonging the war, although the reality is that he may have just handed Putin a victory this winter. Putin and the Russian media certainly think so.

The Australian billionaire Murdochs, through their papers the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, have objected: the Journal’s editorial board said that Trump had “stuck a shiv” in the back of Graham’s legacy, and the Post warned that a Yalta 2 summit could trigger a full-on Republican revolt that could even end in impeachment.

Which raises the most important question in America today: If Murdoch’s papers can speak the truth to the GOP out loud, can call for action, why can’t a single Republican leader in Congress find a similar ounce of spine?

Tom Nichols, a lifelong Republican and a professor emeritus at the Naval War College, wrote in The Atlantic this weekend that Trump has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation. The Lincoln Project, founded and run by Republicans, is saying the same thing. This should have nothing whatsoever to do with partisan politics.

We’re literally watching the plot of The Manchurian Candidate play out on the evening news, except that in Richard Condon’s story the asset gets stopped before the convention, and in ours he’s sitting in the Oval Office and systematically dismantling our country while handing Ukraine (and probably, soon, the Baltic states) to his master, Putin.

My father’s Republican Party believed that America was good and the USSR was a threat to both peace and democracy. Even the GOP in Reagan’s day, for all its sins, saw the Soviets and other autocrats worldwide for what they were.

The party of Mike Johnson and John Thune, however, appear to have decided that the fate and future of American and European democracy is simply negotiable, and that it’s just fine that Putin is now running our foreign policy.

Look at what the man they’re protecting right now, today, has already done to make America more like Russia.

Federal ICE/HSI agents raiding the home of a sitting member of Congress, an echo of Putin’s early years, three weeks before an election. Threatening election officials with imprisonment if they don’t do his bidding. He has masked, armed thugs terrorizing people and killing American citizens, just like Putin’s secret police.

Like Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam he hangs 40-foot banners with his face from federal buildings in DC (with our tax dollars) and is slapping his grotesque name on anything he can reach. And let’s not forget the threats against broadcasters’ licenses, the defiance of federal court orders, and the open contempt for the Hatch Act: is Trump freelancing as a wannabe dictator, or is Putin coaching him with those regular phone calls?

Putin illegally invaded Ukraine, in violation of international law and common decency. He has no legitimacy, and he was deeply in trouble as Ukraine had been taking down his ability to refine and sell oil. Trump has given him both legitimacy and an economic lifeline, and America got absolutely nothing out of it.

Nothing.

Except that we’ll now get to watch the rape and destruction of the physically largest democratic nation in Europe. Perhaps that gives Hegseth an erection and represents a “great new business opportunity” for Witkoff and Jared, but it should make every American blindingly furious.

This is how Trump’s master, Putin, runs his wars. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has documented torture by Russian forces that they call widespread and systematic.

Rape, they confirmed, was used as a weapon of torture in nearly every Russian detention center in occupied Ukraine that they examined. Both men, women, and children of both genders have been raped by Russian soldiers in occupied villages while their families were forced to listen from the next room: this is part of Putin’s instructions to his men. It’s official Russian policy.

The Ukrainians are terrified, as are many Americans who live and work in that country. Watch this interview with Phil Ittner, a seasoned, hardened professional war correspondent for decades who’s seen the worst of the worst around the world as he breaks down describing what’s happening in Kiev right now.

Ukraine has verified the names of more than 19,500 children kidnapped and shipped into Russia; Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab puts the real number closer to 35,000 in a country, Russia, where child pornography is not a crime.

The International Criminal Court — which Trump is trying to punish with sanctions right now — issued an arrest warrant for Putin’s abduction and exploitation of these Ukrainian children, but apparently that’s just fine with Trump and the Republicans in the House and Senate.

That’s the guy Donald Trump defers to, sucks up to, and wants to join in Shenzhen to redraw the map of the world.

That’s the monster JD Vance was holding up for admiration when he told a Turning Point crowd in April that cutting off weapons to Ukraine was one of the proudest moments of his vice presidency. It gives a whole new meaning to the word “vice.”

Meanwhile, writing the checks to finance Trump and his lickspittle Republicans is the richest man on Earth.

Elon Musk has put $366 million into this midterm cycle, $276 million of it in the last three months alone, all since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires buying judges and politicians. This is beyond gilded age corruption; it’s something entirely new in the American experience.

This is the same Elon Musk the Wall Street Journal reported has been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022. He once refused to turn on Starlink to prevent Ukraine from hitting Russia’s fleet. Who it now appears personally slowed down Starshield to prevent Ukraine from stopping Russia’s torment of Kiev.

Is this what the five Republicans on the Supreme Court intended when they handed down Citizens United? Justice John Paul Stevens — who’d served in the Navy during World War II — warned in his Citizens United dissent that the decision would’ve given Tokyo Rose’s propaganda broadcasts “free speech” protection; now it’s been extended to Putin and his online trolls.

Stevens’ clerks thought the 2010 reference to 1944 was dated. He was just early.

So, where the hell are the Republicans? The House isn’t scheduled to return until after the election, and the Senate is on vacation, too. Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune could call both bodies back into session tomorrow to impeach this deranged traitor to American values and history, but neither has lifted a finger.

Are they terrified? Or are they in on it with Putin and Trump?

Democrats are essentially powerless; they can give speeches and file bills that Republicans ignore, and write strongly worded letters, but that’s about it. Senator Richard Blumenthal — who co-wrote the Graham Act with Lindsey — was right when he said Trump’s waivers for Russia to sell its oil have nothing to do with national security and “everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.” But he has no power to stop any of this.

The only people in Washington with the constitutional power to stop this, right now, before the Shenzhen summit and before the next trainload of Ukrainian kids hits the Russian hinterlands and movie studios, are the Republicans who can impeach Trump in the House and convict and remove him from office in the Senate. Now.

Refusing to do so is today’s GOP spitting on the graves of every American who died at Belleau Wood, Omaha Beach, and the Chosin Reservoir so this country would never, ever bend her knee to a dictator.

They can keep calling themselves “Republicans” if they like, but they’ve forfeited the right to call themselves “patriots” or, arguably, even “Americans.”

My dad’s party — and the Republican statesmen of his day like Goldwater and Dirksen — would’ve been on a plane back to Washington the Friday night Trump killed those sanctions, and had an impeachment resolution on the floor by Monday morning.

Even Reagan, who stood in Berlin and told Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” wouldn’t have recognized a Republican Speaker or Senate leader who let his president hand Moscow a billion-dollar diesel contract paid for with the blood of millions of Ukrainian civilians.

Call Republican legislators — and Johnson and Thune — at 202-224-3121 and demand they explain why they’re not taking this guy out of office the way genuinely patriotic Republicans did with Nixon back in the day.

Ask them if they’re standing with Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of America, or with Trump’s dear friends Putin, and Xi?

Then ask the same thing of your Republican state legislators, county commissioners, and city council members. If they stay in that party, they’re implicitly endorsing this historic betrayal of our nation.

Trump-Putin Collude To Release Kidnapped American As 'Humanitarian' Propaganda Stunt

A photo provided by the Moscow City Court showing Stephen James Hubbard in court in 2024 (Distributed by Associated Press).

New York Times, Calling Putin a ‘Humanitarian,’ Witkoff Thanks Him for Releasing an American, David E. Sanger, Kim Barker and Ivan Nechepurenko, Oct. 21, 2026. The move buys good will with President Trump while costing the President Vladimir V. Putin — who is wanted for war crimes — little.

Praising President Vladimir V. Putin as a “humanitarian,” the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday thanked the Russian leader in St. Petersburg for releasing an American held for years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

The release came after President Trump made a direct appeal to Mr. Putin to let the 74-year-old teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, return to the United States. Russia had accused Mr. Hubbard, who was held for over four years, of being a Ukrainian mercenary.

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Mr. Witkoff told Mr. Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”

Mr. Putin, who started a war of aggression against Ukraine that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, is wanted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court. Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly expressed sympathies for strongmen and parroted Kremlin talking points, has long made clear his disdain for the I.C.C.

His envoy’s embrace of Mr. Putin on Wednesday capped a tumultuous 12 days in which Mr. Trump has repeatedly sided with Russia and sidelined Ukraine.

The American president has announced that the United States will buy Russian diesel fuel and suspend the imposition of new sanctions. Mr. Trump also called on Ukraine to replace President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Putin’s nemesis.

Ukraine said the United States had intermittently cut off intelligence sharing; limited its access to Starshield, the military version of the satellite internet service Starlink; and suspended delivery of its already limited supply of Patriot interceptors, the only defense Ukraine has against Russian ballistic missiles.

Mr. Witkoff, over repeated visits to Moscow, has raised eyebrows in Kyiv for his what critics call his at times fawning behavior toward Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump himself faced similar criticism for welcoming Mr. Putin to Alaska with a red carpet in the summer of 2025, ending years of diplomatic isolation for the Russian leader over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration says it is trying to build a relationship with the Russian leader as it pursues negotiations to end the war.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that he had asked Mr. Putin last week to release Mr. Hubbard, who was “on his way back home and will soon be with his family.”

“The United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return — an unprecedented situation for Russia,” the American president wrote on Truth Social. “There was no ‘swap’ necessary for this release.”

Turning over Mr. Hubbard, who was tortured, sometimes starved and placed in the general prison population in a country where he did not speak the language, came at little cost to Mr. Putin. But the move buys him good will with Mr. Trump, who is arguing that he alone has the relationship with Mr. Putin needed to get him to end the war.

Mr. Witkoff’s remarks came at the start of talks in St. Petersburg, where the U.S. envoy had come to discuss new variants of a proposed plan to end the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

He told Mr. Putin he had “brought some papers” with “some ideas about the different elements of some sort of peace deal,” saying that the Russian leader could “read that at your leisure later.”

Mr. Trump had telegraphed that he had sought Mr. Hubbard’s release, talking to reporters about it on Tuesday, when the former teacher was still in captivity. But Mr. Trump didn’t mention that Mr. Hubbard was being held because Mr. Putin’s government had sought to take American prisoners for leverage.

As Mr. Putin and Mr. Witkoff were meeting, though, Russia’s security services announced the arrest of a German citizen on charges similar to Mr. Hubbard’s.

In recent days, as Mr. Hubbard was moved out of a penal colony and prepared for release, it became clear that his value to Mr. Putin had changed. He was now more valuable to the Russian leader as a symbol of the renewed relationship with the U.S. president than as a pawn in negotiations.

Mr. Hubbard’s health is fragile. The Trump administration has pushed for his release since learning of his case, making it a priority, lawyers for Mr. Hubbard said. He will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment.

Mr. Hubbard was essentially abducted by Russian soldiers from eastern Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded and accused of fighting for Ukraine. Russian sentencing documents said he was given the call signs, or nicknames, of “Samurai” and “Ninja,” and that he manned a checkpoint on a bridge over a river.

This was highly unlikely.

Mr. Hubbard, a Michigan native, was living in the city of Izium, near Kharkiv, after a peripatetic life, teaching English for years in Japan and moving for a time to Cyprus, where one of his sons lived, before settling down with a Ukrainian woman. After that relationship ended, Mr. Hubbard opted to stay in Ukraine.

He had just turned 70 when the Russians invaded. His son in Japan told him to keep his head down, but Mr. Hubbard did not seem to understand that the war had started, text messages between the two men showed. Those messages also showed no evidence that Mr. Hubbard had joined the Ukrainian military. He told his son that all was well. He gave daily updates, like when he went to church. He had a hard time buying food, but said once that he bought caviar “for nutrition.”

The Russians said they arrested him inside the home of an acquaintance in April 2022.

A still from video released by the Moscow City Court Press Service showing Stephen Hubbard at a hearing in the Russian capital in 2024.Credit...Moscow City Court Press Service

New York Times, Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released by Russia?  Kim Barker and Lynsey Chutel, Oct. 21, 2026. Mr. Hubbard, above, shown during his frame-up in a Russian court, is a 74-year-old teacher, who was held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

Russia on Wednesday released a 74-year-old American teacher after holding him as a prisoner for more than four years. He had been convicted of working for Ukraine as a mercenary, charges that the United States said were fabricated.

The teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, was the only American in Russia considered “wrongfully detained” by the State Department and the only one to have been captured in Ukraine during the war and taken to Russia. His release came after President Trump, who has been easing American sanctions on Moscow, appealed directly to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Here’s how Mr. Hubbard became an unlikely pawn in an international conflict.How did he end up in Ukraine?

Mr. Hubbard grew up in Big Rapids, a small Michigan city, with his mother and sister. As a young man, he enlisted in the Air Force and then the National Guard but did not stay long in either. His first marriage, at 20, fell apart, and his second marriage took him to Japan in the mid-1980s. There, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. He became sympathetic toward Russia.

After his second marriage ended, Mr. Hubbard moved to Cyprus, where a son from his first marriage lived and where he fell in love with a Ukrainian woman. The couple moved to Izium, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, where Mr. Hubbard taught English online.

Mr. Hubbard was a solitary man, family members said. He avoided email and social media, and he was suspicious of potential government surveillance. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Hubbard sent family members updates about his daily activities, which included searching for food and going to church. In text messages with a son of his who lives in Japan, he gave no indication that he had joined the Ukrainian military.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.How was he captured?

Russian forces captured Mr. Hubbard, then 70, just weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.

The circumstances of his arrest are murky, but the Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had been arrested at the home of an acquaintance and that he had been manning a military checkpoint. The Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had joined a regional territorial unit to defend Ukraine and that he received training, weapons, ammunition and $1,000 a month.

In October 2024, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Hubbard to six years and 10 months in a penal colony on charges of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine. Russian state news agencies reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charges.Where was he held?

Mr. Hubbard was first held at a detention camp near the Russia-Ukraine border and later imprisoned in at least five different Russian detention centers. At times, his family had no idea where he was and the United States Embassy had no access to him. The New York Times pieced together accounts from fellow prisoners of war to trace where he had been held.

Unlike other Americans held in the Russian prison system, Mr. Hubbard, who spoke neither Ukrainian nor Russian, was kept in the general population, his lawyers said. Ukrainian prisoners of war who were held with Mr. Hubbard said that he had been repeatedly tortured because he was an American — beaten, forced to stand all day, given little food and poor medical care.New York Times,

In May 2025, Mr. Hubbard was allowed to call his son in Cyprus, Joseph Coleman. In an interview, Mr. Coleman said that he had spoken for about a minute with his father, who initially sounded like he was in good spirits.

“But then somewhere in the middle it turned and you could you could hear the frustration in his voice,” Mr. Coleman recalled. “You could hear maybe a slight lack of hope.”

Mr. Coleman, who is a Greek Orthodox priest, wrote a long letter to Mr. Putin in September, emphasizing his Orthodox faith and pleading for his father’s release.

“My father is not a man of violence,” Mr. Coleman wrote. “He is a teacher and a peace-loving man, and above all he is my father.”

Why was he released?

Mr. Putin announced his decision to release Mr. Hubbard during a meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday.

Russia released Mr. Hubbard unilaterally, rather than in a prisoner swap — suggesting that for Mr. Putin, the American prisoner’s value had changed from a pawn in negotiations to a symbol of his renewed relationship with Mr. Trump.

In the days before Mr. Hubbard’s release, relations between the White House and Ukraine had frayed, with Mr. Trump moving to buy Russian diesel, lifting sanctions on Moscow and pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries.

Mr. Hubbard, who is in fragile health, will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment. His sister planned to travel to Texas to meet him. Mr. Coleman and another of Mr. Hubbard’s sons, the one who lives in Japan, also flew to the United States to be with their father.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How Low Can Vivek Go? Jim Swift and Andrew Egger, Oct. 21, 2026. The Ohio Republican, right, crawls below the gutter.

Trump and his cronies keep using slurs like they’re going out of style—which, to be fair, they are. On Monday in Kansas, Trump denounced news reports that he said portrayed Sen. Roger Marshall as “a Shylock-type guy.”

And yesterday, after Trump tussled in the Oval Office with reporter Andrew Feinberg of the Independent—calling him a “sick person” and saying “I actually think there’s something wrong with you”—a White House communications account described Feinberg as a “Mongoloid Moron.”

Trump, as he ages, is losing his last fragments of self-control, and his comms staffers are rotting their brains more every day in the bigoted fever swamps of right-wing social media. The slurs will continue until morale improves. Happy Wednesday.

News Roundups

Meidas Touch Network, Wednesday Afternoon Updates: Witkoff Salutes Putin, New Mexico Files Epstein Lawsuit, Vance Goes Full Pedo Protector, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Here are today’s headlines:

• The Wall Street Journal reports Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine and discussed it with Trump, despite both of their denials
• Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff thanks Putin for diesel and calls him a humanitarian
• Zelenskyy says he’d agree to peace deal freezing the current lines
• Vance says nobody hates corruption more than Trump, the most corrupt individual ever in politics, while The New York Times exposes a $50 million job for Alina Habba before a billionaire’s pardon
• Vance smears a protester asking for action on the Epstein files and rages about the Vivek Ramaswamy ad…scolding Republicans who got upset with the ad
• New Mexico’s AG sues Epstein’s lawyer and accountant
• Trump’s lawyers say he’s too busy to be deposed and that he doesn’t want his encounter with BBC on video
• Three polls show Democrats up by double digits, including a D+11 final NYT/Siena poll, as Trump hits record lows
• Netanyahu orders regime change in Iran, two more are tankers hit, Brent back above $110
• Meidas+ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

There’s a whole lot of important updates in this one, so buckle up.

The Starlink Cover Story Falls Apart

The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Musk ordered a slowdown of the military-grade Starlink system Ukraine relies on, capping speeds in a way that left some offensive and interceptor drones virtually useless. Musk and Trump have both been furious at Ukraine for striking Russian diesel refineries. Two people told the Journal that Musk and Trump discussed the decision on a call after it went public, and one said they talked before the throttling. After Zelensky warned Ukrainians could die, SpaceX called the White House looking for a shared story.

Now look at how many stories they’re telling:

• Musk, Oct. 14 on X: Starshield limits are “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
• Rubio, in India: “Trump has nothing to do with the decisions that are made by Starlink and Starshield.”
• Trump: “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon.”
• Zelensky, on Fox & Friends, revealing: Starlink is still limited, but Rubio promised to “unblock this.”

So Rubio promised to fix something he says the government doesn’t control. Even Fox’s Peter Doocy admitted Musk “might have throttled it.” They’re all deflecting because the truth is impeachable.

Witkoff’s Love Letter to Putin

Steve Witkoff opened his meeting with Putin with “It’s so good to see you,” then said Trump is “grateful for your decision to remove export controls on Russian diesel.” Remember, the throttling was tied to anger over Ukraine hitting Russian diesel refineries. Trump seems totally OK with Ukraine bombing the Ukraine energy grid and civilians, though.

Putin claimed prices dropped 5 to 6%. Feeling that at the pump? Me neither. He said the first tanker would carry 40,000 tons once “the financial arrangements are in place,” meaning more sanctions relief. That’s roughly 300,000 barrels, a rounding error in a global market that burns many millions of barrels of diesel a day.

Then Witkoff told Putin, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” Putin returned the flattery and offered to mediate with Iran, citing Russia’s “trust-based relationship” with Tehran. The U.S. joined Netanyahu in a disastrous war, fuel prices surged, Trump cut a sanctions-relief deal with Putin, and now Putin wants to be the “peacemaker.”

Zelensky Would Accept a Freeze

Asked on Fox & Friends whether he’d accept a deal freezing current lines, with Ukraine keeping 75% or more of its territory, Zelensky said “Yes,” calling a freeze a real way to end the war.

Vance: Nobody Hates Corruption More Than Trump

In Cincinnati, Vance said, “There is no person who hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government more than Donald J. Trump,” and waved off critical stories as anonymous or “completely fraudulent.”

Well, now’s a good time to point you to this NYT bombshell published yesterday about former Trump lawyer Alina Habba…

Venezuelan billionaire banker Julio Herrera Velutini faced felony bribery charges, then pleaded to a misdemeanor in August 2025.

He hired Trump lawyer Christopher Kise, and his 27-year-old daughter gave $3.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Still no pardon.

The family then offered Alina Habba $10 million a year for four years plus bonuses to be general counsel of Concord Partners, a Florida company with no public profile set up in late October 2025. (A deal that would bring Habba $50 MILLION…)

Habba was a senior adviser to Pam Bondi at the time, with a DOJ office and a U.S. Marshals detail.

She started Jan. 1. Weeks later, Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon.

People familiar with the contract told the Times they believed Habba was hired to help with the pardon.

That’s A-OK with JD Vance. And that’s just the tip of the corruption iceberg.Vance Smears a Heckler, Defends Vivek

At a rally, a man behind Vance spiked his MAGA hat and yelled “You protected pedophiles!” before being hauled out. Vance’s response: the guy “has not washed his hair in about 3 months,” and “the people who haven’t washed their hair in 3 months are Democrats.” The guy was wearing a MAGA hat, by the way.

Asked about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s mother, Vance said he was “a little bit disgusted”…by Republicans “whining” about it. That’s right. Vance wasn’t disgusted by the ad featuring Amy Acton’s abusive mother, who stayed with her husband who was indicted for raping Acton starting at 9 years old. Instead, who was mad at the the people who objected to it. “

“Politics is a tough business... Stop whining about an advertisement.”

-- JD Vance, pedo protector

New Mexico Goes After Epstein’s Enablers

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a federal lawsuit against Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn, accusing them of helping finance and conceal Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, including abuse at his Zorro Ranch. The suit seeks to block potential bequests of $50 million and $25 million from Epstein’s estate, and says Indyke received more than $16 million from Epstein between 2011 and 2019 and Kahn more than $10 million. Both have denied knowingly facilitating Epstein’s crimes. Torrez says a criminal investigation continues: “Jeffrey Epstein did not operate alone, and his death does not end the pursuit of accountability.”Trump Doesn’t Want to Be Filmed with BBC

In a new filing in his lawsuit against the BBC (Southern District of Florida), Trump’s lawyers say he can’t be deposed on video and accuse the BBC of failing to confer on a new date. Trump had agreed to sit on Oct. 16, then backed out, citing Iran, the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, and the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.” He found time to campaign in Georgia and attend a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, though.

Trump Is Radioactive

Three polls out this morning show Democrats leading by double digits on the generic ballot: CNN/SSRS at D+10 among registered voters, Verasight at D+12 among likely voters, and the final New York Times/Siena poll at D+11 among likely voters asked about their actual congressional candidates, 52% to 41%. Democrats lead women 56% to 37% and are even running neck and neck with men, 47% to 46%. As the Times’ Nate Cohn pointed out, no party has won the national vote by that kind of margin since Democrats did it in 2008. CNN also found Democrats up 15 among independents, with nearly six in 10 voters calling Trump a factor in their vote, two to one against him.

Trump’s approval sits at a record low 32% in CNN’s poll and 34% in NYT/Siena. As Jake Sherman noted, Clinton and Obama were both at 46% when they lost the House in 1994 and 2010. In the Times’ history of midterm-year approval, only Truman in 1946 (33%) was lower. Voters now trust Democrats over Republicans on nearly everything the Times asked about: health care by 20, cost of living by 15, gas prices by 14, corruption and AI by 11 each, foreign wars by 10, the economy by 8, and even immigration by 4. And the party of the working class? It’s 53% to 40%, with Democrats leading. That includes 78% of Black voters, 67% of voters 18 to 29, 61% of Hispanic voters, and 58% of people who didn’t vote in 2024. This is what a wave looks like.

Per AdImpact, Trump appeared in 47% of GOP ad airings in May and just 1% in October, while 21% of Democratic airings mention him. In a hilarious misstep, Minnesota Republican Eric Pratt’s campaign site accidentally published its own AI prompt, which noted, “The President is not popular” and asked the AI writing his policy platform to not mention him. Oops. He removed it after screenshots of the page went viral.Image

And Rep. Eric Burlison complained on Fox Business about the “hellscape that we’re living in.” Republicans control every branch. The hellscape is them.

Israel, Iran, and Oil

Netanyahu says Israel still intends to overthrow Iran’s regime, citing Trump’s pledge to “finish the job” together. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in the Financial Times that Iran seeks peace but is “fully prepared to defend ourselves.” UKMTO reported two tankers struck overnight, the Soyia near Al Faw, Iraq, and the Al Dasma in the Strait of Hormuz, with all crews safe. Brent is at $110.03. And we have new information on Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu. An Israeli Channel 16 poll found 77% said it made no difference.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Administration Praises Putin as “Humanitarian,” Republicans Demand Musk Investigation, Trump Seeks to Evict the Press, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Donald Trump’s special envoy sat across from Vladimir Putin, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for the deportation of Ukrainian children, and told him, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” He said it in the same week a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller in the Kharkiv region. Then he thanked Putin for the diesel deal and talked about bringing more Russian fertilizer into the U.S. We should all be glad Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired teacher from Michigan, is finally coming home. But Trump himself tied his release to blocking the sanctions Congress passed.

There’s more. The New York Times reports that a billionaire’s family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a deal worth more than $50 million, and weeks after she started, Trump pardoned him. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the briefing room into a swimming pool. Elon Musk now admits he “got carried away” with DOGE, as Republicans demand he testify under oath about throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network. And in North Carolina, Trump told veterans and military families exposed to Camp Lejeune’s poisoned water that “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”

This is why I do this work. My family is in Ukraine, living under the same bombs this administration keeps downplaying. That’s why I’m finishing a deep dive on Trump’s ties to Russia going back 50 years, and it’s coming soon. And on election night, I’ll be live from 6 PM to midnight Eastern on all platforms, with big guests.

None of this is possible without you. There’s no billionaire, corporation, or politician behind this newsletter, and as you can see, the people in power would rather the press not be in the room at all. If you want independent journalism that keeps asking the questions they don’t want asked, please become a paid subscriber today, and share this with someone who needs to read it.Subscribed

Let’s get into it.

Witkoff Calls Putin a “Humanitarian” as Russia Frees American Prisoner and Kremlin Warns Ukraine to Make “Necessary Decisions”

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff praised Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” during their meeting in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin at the opening of the meeting. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.” It was Witkoff’s ninth meeting with Putin, held at an imperial palace outside St. Petersburg, and he again traveled without the career diplomats or intelligence officials who usually accompany such talks. According to accounts of the meeting, Witkoff thanked Putin on Trump’s behalf for the diesel deal and the two discussed expanding Russian fertilizer exports to the U.S. once the war ends. Russian state media reported that the first diesel shipment bound for the United States was dispatched on Wednesday.

Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired American teacher imprisoned for four years, and Trump tied it to his decision to block sanctions. Hubbard, a Michigan man, was convicted in Russia of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine, charges he denies, and sentenced in 2024 to nearly seven years. Putin told Witkoff that Hubbard was already at the airport, and Witkoff told Putin, “because of you, he’s going home to his family.” Trump said the U.S. “was not required to give anything in return” and that “no ‘swap’ [was] necessary.” But he also said people who had called for sanctions on Russia had apologized, and that “if sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt.” Critics note the release followed a pattern of Moscow using prisoner releases to build goodwill with Witkoff.

The Kremlin signaled no change in its demands and warned that Ukraine must make “necessary decisions” or face a “worse” situation. According to Russian state media, Kremlin officials said progress toward peace is “theoretically possible,” but only if Ukraine’s leaders make the decisions Moscow wants. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would study the proposals Witkoff brought but that talks would take a long time. Russian officials also told Witkoff that a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping was “possible,” potentially at next month’s APEC summit in China, a format that would exclude Ukraine. Putin also offered to help resolve the conflict with Iran. Witkoff said he hoped to resume three-way talks involving Ukraine, but the Kremlin showed no new willingness to engage.

Zelenskyy said he won’t accept any deal crafted without Ukraine and that Starshield access remains “limited.” “Don’t talk about us without us,” Zelenskyy told Fox News, insisting that any resolution must involve direct talks between himself, Trump, and Putin and be approved by Ukraine’s parliament. He also opened the door to freezing the war along the current battle lines. Zelenskyy thanked the U.S. for restoring intelligence warnings of Russian missile strikes, calling them “very, very important for our people, for children, adults, civilians.” But he said Ukraine’s access to Starshield, the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, remains limited, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio is working to restore it. Witkoff is expected to return to Oslo after his visit to Russia for more talks with European officials.

Ukraine and Norway are racing to build their own ballistic missile defense as U.S. Patriot supplies run dry. Zelenskyy announced Wednesday that Ukraine and Norway are accelerating work on FREYJA, a European program to develop new capabilities to intercept ballistic missiles, with the first tests targeted for the end of this year. He met with Norway’s defense minister and the CEO of Kongsberg, which makes the NASAMS air defense system Ukraine already uses to protect its cities. Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point has developed an interceptor missile under the program designed to counter Russia’s Iskander-class missiles at a lower cost than U.S.-made Patriots. The push comes after CNN reported last week that Ukraine had completely run out of Patriot interceptors, amid reports the Pentagon was holding up deliveries. Zelenskyy said new Norwegian military aid packages could arrive as early as November.

A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal.

The family of a Venezuelan billionaire seeking a Trump pardon gave Alina Habba, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers, a deal worth more than $50 million, The New York Times reports. Banker Julio Herrera Velutini faced felony charges in a scheme to bribe Puerto Rico’s governor to fire a regulator investigating his bank, but struck an unusually lenient deal in August 2025 to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor campaign finance violation. He still wanted that charge wiped away, so he hired Christopher Kise, a lawyer from Trump’s personal legal team, and his 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, gave $3.5 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC. As of last fall, the pardon still hadn’t come. Then the family hired Habba, offering her $10 million a year for four years plus bonuses, guaranteeing her more than $50 million in total. She signed the deal while still serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

Weeks after Habba started the job, Trump granted Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. Habba’s new role was general counsel at Concord Partners, a Florida company Isabela Herrera set up in October 2025 that has no public profile and whose business remains unclear even to some people in the Herrera family’s business empire. Habba began working there on January 1, while also serving as a senior adviser at the Justice Department overseeing U.S. attorneys, with an office at the department and a U.S. Marshals protective detail. Soon after, Trump pardoned Herrera, along with former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez and a former FBI agent charged in the same case, shortly before they were set to be sentenced. People familiar with Habba’s contract told the Times they believed she was brought on to help secure the pardon and were surprised by the size of the payout. Career prosecutors had pushed for harsher sentences in the case.

Habba, the Justice Department, and the White House all deny she had anything to do with the pardon. “Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” Habba said in a statement. The Justice Department said she didn’t speak to anyone about a pardon, and a White House official said she had nothing to do with it. Habba declined to describe her work for Concord, and the Herrera family didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Times describes a growing “pardon industry” in Trump’s second term, in which wealthy defendants pay well-connected lawyers, fixers, and lobbyists hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for access. House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a report this summer on what they called Trump’s “pay-to-play clemency industry.”

The revelation comes as Habba is locked in an escalating feud with fellow Trump ally Ric Grenell over millions of dollars that came from Congo. Shortly after the pardon, Habba began dating Turkish investor Turhan Mildon, whom she married last month in a New York ceremony attended by Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and White House counsel Will Scharf. Habba has accused Grenell of diverting a nearly $6 million donation her husband intended for the Kennedy Center, which Grenell was running at the time, out of a $17.6 million transfer to a Texas defense firm, TX-AT. But according to the Times, documents Habba’s side first gave the White House redacted the sender’s name, and the White House later learned the money actually came from a bank account tied to the Congolese government. Mildon is an adviser to Congo’s president and holds a Congolese diplomatic passport, and Grenell once consulted for TX-AT, though he denies any role in the transfer and calls the accusations absurd. Scharf, who attended the couple’s wedding, is now leading the White House investigation.

Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House and Replace Briefing Room With a Swimming Pool

Trump has repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the press briefing room back into a swimming pool, The New York Times reports. According to three people familiar with the discussions, Trump urged then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt several times to move journalists out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, telling her in August it would be her “last legacy.” The proposal never moved forward before Leavitt stepped down on August 27. Trump has told aides he wants to restore the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt installed in 1933 for polio therapy, which Richard Nixon later covered over to make room for the press. On September 27, Trump posted images on Truth Social showing the briefing room labeled “Fake News” next to a gilded swimming pool labeled “FDR Pool.” The White House communications director said “all options remain on the table,” and that reporters would most likely be moved across the street to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Advisers who once talked Trump out of the idea have been replaced by allies urging him to punish the press. Trump floated evicting reporters in his first term, but senior aides repeatedly dismissed the idea as impractical and counterproductive. The Times reports that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who often spends weekends with Trump at his golf clubs, has helped drive the swimming pool idea, even creating a foam board rendering of the briefing room as an in-ground pool. Senior officials say Pulte also brings foam boards highlighting potential targets for revenge prosecutions. Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s longtime lawyer, who pushed many of Trump’s lawsuits against news outlets, has also grown more influential. The Times notes that removing the press from the White House would be highly symbolic and difficult for future presidents to undo.

The push is part of a broader campaign against the press. In September, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House over coverage he called “fiction and lies,” and the administration revoked the credentials of more than 70 journalists. A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled last week that the ban violated the outlets’ First Amendment rights and ordered their passes restored, a ruling the administration is appealing. On October 9, the Justice Department sent letters demanding information from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News after the networks briefly halted pooled White House coverage in solidarity with CNN, in what people familiar with the effort described as an antitrust investigation. Earlier, FBI agents showed up at the homes of Times reporters with grand jury subpoenas after they reported on security concerns about Trump’s Qatar-donated Air Force One, subpoenas the Justice Department later withdrew after a judge’s rebuke. Trump has also sued ABC, CBS, and The Des Moines Register.

The report came as Trump lashed out at reporters again in the Oval Office, telling one, “You better be careful.” During the announcement of his new anti-fraud program, Trump threatened The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg after he asked why tipsters would get only a 1% commission, far less than federal whistleblower law typically provides. When Feinberg later began asking about Trump’s golf courses, Trump cut him off: “Quiet. Quiet! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” The White House’s official Rapid Response account then attacked Feinberg online using an ableist slur, and JD Vance called him an “imbecile journalist.” Trump has also turned on conservative outlets, attacking Fox News for “defending Dumocrats.” When a reporter asked him about France’s president blaming him for unrest there, Trump called it “fake news” and demanded to know who she worked for, then apologized once she said The Daily Wire, telling her, “The Daily Wire is good.”

Musk Says He “Got Carried Away” With DOGE as Republicans Demand Investigation Into His Ukraine Starlink Slowdown

Elon Musk admitted he “got carried away” during his time running DOGE. Speaking on the debut episode of biographer Walter Isaacson’s podcast, Musk said, “I think I had it going for too long,” and that he should have stayed “more in the background” and kept it to “a month or two.” Asked whether being close to the president was “seductive,” Musk said, “It was a little bit,” describing it as “kind of cool” to be in the Oval Office while “big momentous decisions are being made.” When Isaacson suggested he “seemed to get a bit too intoxicated by it” with “the chainsaws and all that,” Musk agreed: “Yeah, I think that’s true. I got carried away basically.” DOGE claimed $215 billion in savings, but firings, lost productivity, and rehiring reportedly cost taxpayers $135 billion in 2025 alone. Researchers writing in the medical journals Nature and The Lancet have projected that DOGE-driven cuts to foreign aid could lead to millions of deaths, including an estimated 163,500 children a year.

Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick says Musk may have broken the law by throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network and is demanding an investigation. The call comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk personally ordered the slowdown of Starshield, the military version of Starlink, and may have discussed it with Trump beforehand. “If Musk ordered Starlink to be slowed down in Ukraine, this could be a violation of the law,” Fitzpatrick said on CNN. “We have to conduct an investigation. We must summon witnesses... place them under oath, and get to the bottom of the matter.” He added that “this is a very, very serious issue” that “cannot be swept under the rug.” Ukrainian officials have said the restrictions made it harder to counter Russian jet-powered Shahed drones.

The Journal’s report blows up the administration’s earlier explanations. Before the report, Trump said he hadn’t limited Ukraine’s access and didn’t believe Musk was responsible either. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the administration had “nothing to do with that,” claiming no one ordered the slowdown and that it “sort of happened.” Musk himself had posted that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” But according to the Journal, Musk ordered the cap himself, and SpaceX later called the White House seeking a unified message suggesting the two had coordinated in advance. Zelenskyy says Starshield access remains “limited.”

A growing number of Republicans now want answers. Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, called for a congressional investigation, saying, “Lives are at risk and lives are lost over these things.” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota also backed a probe, though he suggested it “may very well have been some sort of a technical glitch.” A bipartisan group of nine senators, including Republicans Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, and Lisa Murkowski, has already asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether the Defense Department or its contractors contributed to the disruption. “Any restrictions on these capabilities, particularly without advance notification, raise serious questions about the Department of Defense’s contractual oversight,” the senators wrote.

Trump Ties Camp Lejeune Payouts to GOP Midterm Wins, Ramaswamy Doubles Down on Acton Ad, and a Bush Breaks With the GOP

Trump told North Carolina voters that victims of Camp Lejeune’s contaminated water will only get paid if Republicans keep Congress. Speaking at a rally in Greenville, Trump said, “If we win the House and the Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible.” Then he added: “If we don’t win, there’s no money.” People who lived or worked at the North Carolina Marine Corps base from the 1950s to the 1980s were potentially exposed to contaminated drinking water linked to serious illnesses. As of September, the Justice Department had offered to settle just 3,637 of the 408,500 claims filed by victims, according to Roll Call. Trump’s comments effectively made compensation for veterans and military families conditional on how people vote.

Trump rallied for his handpicked North Carolina Senate candidate even after national Republicans pulled their money from the race. Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chair who boosted Trump’s 2020 stolen-election claims, is trailing Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s former governor. Senate Republicans’ top super PAC canceled tens of millions of dollars in ads for Whatley earlier this month, and Trump-linked groups have put in just over $2 million. Cooper had $12.4 million on hand heading into October, compared with Whatley’s $916,000. “I’m the one who got him into this,” Trump said with a nervous laugh. “I hope it works out.” Early voting data shows Democrats outpacing Republicans in the state, and at least six protesters were escorted out of the rally.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted it produced the video featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother and said it will spend $4 million promoting it. In the video, Donna Arthur calls Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, “a liar” and suggests she has mental health issues. Arthur lost custody of her children after Acton’s stepfather was indicted in 1978 for raping Acton when she was 12, and Acton hasn’t seen her mother since that day in court. After initially refusing to say who made the ad, Ramaswamy’s campaign confirmed late Tuesday it was theirs and said Arthur was not paid. The ad drew bipartisan condemnation, with Ramaswamy’s former Republican primary rival Casey Putsch calling it “pretty damn low” and saying he’ll now vote for Acton. More than 676,000 Ohioans have already cast ballots in the race.

Neil Bush, son of one president and brother of another, broke with the Republican Party and voted for Democrat James Talarico in Texas. “I have been a Republican for most of my life,” Bush wrote on Facebook. “But character matters more than party affiliation.” He said he was “deeply troubled” by Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton, citing Paxton’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which Bush called “an affront to our democratic institutions.” Bush went further, writing that Trump “and those who have enabled him have done enormous damage to the Republican Party.” He praised Talarico for his “integrity, civility, humility, and a willingness to listen,” adding that Talarico’s faith is “a source of humility” rather than “a political weapon.”

Trump refused to commit to endorsing JD Vance for president in 2028, with Vance standing right behind him. At an Oval Office event Tuesday, a reporter noted that Vance had said in an interview he believed Trump would endorse him if he runs. Trump cut the question off, calling Vance “a very talented person” but saying, “I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.” Vance quickly agreed, saying, “No, sir, I said that too.” “It’s early, very early right now,” Trump added. “We have to get through the midterms, see how it goes.” Vance is currently the frontrunner in polling for the 2028 Republican nomination.

Other news:

Democratic attorneys general and secretaries of state are ramping up plans to counter any attempt by the Trump administration to interfere in the midterms. Twenty-four Democratic attorneys general have been coordinating with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and civic groups through weekly Zoom calls and in-person “tabletop” exercises in Milwaukee and Detroit to prepare for scenarios like ICE agents showing up near polling places or federal officials seizing ballots. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, who leads the effort, called the Justice Department and the administration “the biggest adversary to a smooth election.” The DOJ has sued 30 states for unredacted voter lists and has lost 26 of the cases courts have ruled on, and it has announced plans to deploy 1,000 poll monitors, compared with 289 in 2022. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his biggest worry is that the administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote.” The Brennan Center’s Larry Norden said the administration’s efforts have “consistently lost” for 18 months, but that “we must continue to be prepared.”

New York congressional candidate Brad Lander says he was detained by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank while harvesting olives with rabbis and volunteers. “We were simply harvesting olives in a grove,” Lander posted on X, sharing a photo of himself on a bus. “The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.” Lander, the former New York City comptroller, was in the West Bank with a coalition helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives amid a surge in settler violence. Last week, settlers injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine and targeted European diplomats in separate attacks, and a UN report found more than 900 Palestinians were injured in settler attacks in the first half of the year. Lander is the Democratic nominee in New York’s deep-blue 10th District after defeating Rep. Dan Goldman in a primary dominated by debate over Israel. The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron blasted foreign leaders, including Trump, for exploiting France’s riots with “unacceptable” and “stupid” claims. Trump has used the cost-of-living unrest in France to rally his supporters, claiming without evidence that Muslim migrants are responsible and urging Macron to “close your borders.” Macron said there has been “foreign manipulation of information” since the riots, including AI-generated images of scenes that never happened and false claims that France was “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists.” Asked if he was referring to Trump, Macron replied, “Among others.” He accused leaders “on the other side of the Atlantic” in the middle of election campaigns of “using our country for their own political campaigns.” Macron spoke in Qatar at the end of a Gulf tour where he secured additional diesel supplies to ease France’s energy crisis.

Thousands of California state workers went on strike Wednesday in a first-ever walkout by their union. SEIU Local 1000, which represents about 100,000 public employees including nurses and teachers, has been at an impasse with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration since its contract expired June 30. The union is pushing for a 20% raise over three years, higher state health care contributions, and flexible telework, after Newsom required state workers to be in the office four days a week. The union has accused the state of bargaining in bad faith, including by saying there was “no money” for additional pay. The state tried to block the strike, arguing it endangered public safety, but a labor board designated about 5,000 essential workers who will stay on the job. Newsom’s office has not commented on the work stoppage.

The United Nations says the world must cut carbon emissions by nearly a fifth in four years to avoid a disastrous overshoot of climate targets. The UN Environment Programme said the “window has closed” on limiting warming to 1.5C, but that cutting emissions 18% by 2030 and 45% by 2035 could keep the overshoot as small as possible. Under current policies, temperatures are on track to rise 2.8C above preindustrial levels, endangering life across much of the planet. “The herculean effort was not made,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “We procrastinated, and now we are saying this window has closed.” The report notes that the United States, the world’s second-biggest emitter, has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement under Trump, and that other countries’ pledges have weakened in response. Experts say renewable energy is growing faster than expected, but political leadership is “dragging its feet.”

An off-duty Con Edison worker was shot and killed on the George Washington Bridge in what police suspect was a road rage incident. The 46-year-old was driving on the bridge Tuesday night when a gunman fired a single shot through his car’s rear window, striking him in the shoulder, according to law enforcement sources. Video shows the victim nearly crashing into another driver on an entrance ramp shortly before the shooting. His car then struck a median, while the suspect drove away. The shooting shut down the bridge for hours, and all lanes reopened around 1 a.m. Police have not released a description of the gunman, who remains at large.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: It Was Always Likely That Things Would Get Worse For Trump And The Rs As We Got Closer To Election Day. And They Have, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 21, 2026.  In my posts over the last few days we’ve discussed how the late polling in the 2026 election was showing Trump dropping further and hitting new lows for the cycle. These polls also showed the generic ballot opening up and getting better for us. As we’ve discussed here it was always the likely scenario in a wave year that at the end voters would break to us and away from them. There is now a lot of data to suggest that is what is happening.

Two high-quality polls released this morning also found this encouraging dynamic manifesting in their data. First up - the venerable New York Times poll:Here’s the NYT summary of the poll:

President Trump’s approval rating hit a new low just a few weeks before the midterm elections, driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices, according to a new national poll from The New York Times and Siena University.

Just 36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Mr. Trump’s performance, while 59 percent said that they disapproved. That is his lowest approval rating recorded in any Times/Siena poll. More than two-thirds of independent voters said that they disapproved of the way he has handled his job as president.

Likely voters said that they preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts in the final Times/Siena national poll before the midterm elections, a slight improvement for Democrats since last month. The metric is widely seen as a strong indicator of political momentum.

The national political environment is bleak for Republicans. Americans broadly disapprove of economic conditions under the Trump administration, with three-quarters rating the economy as fair or poor. A majority of voters blame Mr. Trump for the decline: 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iran and nearly three-quarters disapprove of his handling of gas prices, which are above $4 a gallon.

A remarkably similar summary to what we read in the NBC, ABC/WaPo, and Reuters/Ipsos poll summaries over the past few days. Everybody is seeing the same thing, and interpreting it the same way.

The second poll released this morning comes from G.Elliot Morris/Strength In Numbers/Verasight. It also finds movement away from them, and towards us, just like in all these other polls:

Here’s the summary of the poll:

Generic ballot: Democrats lead 52–41 among registered voters (D+10 unrounded), and 54–42 among likely voters (D+12). These are both new highs for our poll, and higher even than the Democratic Party’s margin in generic ballot polls ahead of the 2018 and 2006 midterm elections.

Job approval: 34% approve / 62% disapprove (net −28 before rounding), essentially unchanged from September’s record low of −30. 50% strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, vs 16% who strongly approve.

Immigration: Trump’s net approval on immigration fell five points to −16, a new low. Border security (−6) and deportations (−18) are also at new lows, too. Eight of 13 issues are at series lows.

Party trust: Democrats lead on 10 of 13 issues and tie Republicans on deportations. They are now ahead on immigration (D+2), and the GOP’s edge on border security is down to seven points from 22 in May 2025. Democrats lead by 13 on voters’ own most important problem (47–35), tying May for their widest margin in our tracker.

The midterms as a referendum: 40% say their vote for Congress will mostly be a statement against Trump, vs 21% who say it will be a statement of support. When given a binary choice 58% want a Congress that acts as a check on the president, vs 25% who want one that helps him pass his agenda.

Top problem: 39% name prices and inflation the single most important problem facing the country, tying May for the highest share we have recorded. 63% put it in their top three.

Impeachment: 51% think there are grounds for Congress to impeach Trump, vs 39% who don’t. 50% would support the next House impeaching him in 2027, while 38% would oppose it.

A lot of wows and holy shits in this data.Subscribed

Here are the generic ballots we’ve seen this past week. +11 Dem means the likelihood of a big blue wave is far greater today:

We also must note now that the visualization of the data we’ve seen over the past week consistently looks like this:

And this:

The signs of Trump’s titanic failure and historic repudiation are all around us. The inflation numbers last week were horrific, with one measure, PPI, coming in more than double the forecasts. Job growth has slowed. Interest rates of all kinds have soared. His failed war in the Middle East is spreading and getting worse. Diesel is at an all time high. Fertilizer, gas and utility costs have surged. Health care costs are going up for all Americans, and care will be harder to get for everyone too from the barbaric cuts Trump and his allies made to our health care system. Global markets view him and his economic team as over their head buffoons. He is bending the knee to Putin. Consumer sentiment in the University of Michigan survey is the lowest in over 65 years:

We cannot forget for one moment that this huge rejection of Trump and Trumpism has come despite their enormous ad spend, his ferocious campaigning, the proven power of the right-wing eco-chamber, and their growing control over legacy and social media. Even with all these structural advantages we are competing deep into red states and red places we’ve struggled to win in for decades. Objectively it is astonishing where we are now; astonishing of how much of an opportunity we have now to take power away from them all across the country; astonishing how Trump has failed to heed the warnings and course correct over the past twelves months; astonishing at what an unbelievable f-uck up and failure he is, how impotent, weak, desperate and pathetic he has become.

But he we are now, my friends. With the election we all wanted to have emerging right in front of us. So we need to work doubly hard now, dig a little deeper to support our candidates and party committees, drive the early vote to make the big blue wave even bigger, and …….

Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight The Fuckery That Is Already Here

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Dr. Amy Acton, Democratic nominee and current front-runner in polls to become next governor of Ohio.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ramaswamy’s October Surprise Blows Up in His Face, Jim Swift, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s October surprise was supposed to make voters question Democrat Amy Acton’s character. Instead, yesterday, a leak of his attack ad featuring her estranged mother blew up in his face.

By Tuesday evening, after the ad had been roundly condemned—including by other Ohio Republicans—Ramaswamy’s response was to announce he would spend $4 million promoting the ad.

The video surfaced Monday night. DJ Byrnes, author of the Ohio politics newsletter The Rooster, published a recording featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. Byrnes said a voter saw it in a poll, recorded it, and sent it his way.

For hours, it was unclear who was behind the ad. V-PAC, the super PAC supporting Ramaswamy, right, said it wasn’t involved. Ramaswamy’s campaign initially defended the attack without answering directly if it was responsible.

In the minute-long video, Arthur calls Acton a liar, disputes her account of growing up homeless, and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”

What the ad doesn’t say is why Acton and Arthur are estranged. Acton says she last saw her mother when she was 12. Her stepfather had been charged with raping her. She and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody. Her mother and stepfather then skipped town while out on bond, according to a 2019 account in the Youngstown Vindicator.

National Review obtained court records corroborating key parts of Acton’s account, including the criminal proceedings against her stepfather. Her account of abuse and homelessness was also public in 2019, years before she ran for governor.

Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, has corroborated his sister’s account. He says he also suffered abuse in the household, and that their mother stayed married to the man who raped Acton until his death.

Even Ramaswamy’s copartisans were quick to denounce the ad. After learning of the circumstances behind Acton’s estrangement from Arthur, Dan Hauser, a strategist for Sen. Mike Lee, deleted his post sharing the video and apologized for sharing it. Lydia Mihalik, the director of Ohio’s Department of Development under Gov. Mike DeWine, condemned the ad.

Others questioned what, exactly, the campaign thought it would accomplish. Former Republican communications consultant Liz Mair said the ad made her sympathetic to Acton, while Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham wondered how anyone expected it not to backfire. Chris Christie reposted footage, shared by a Democratic strategist, of himself roasting Ramaswamy on the presidential debate stage. Nikki Haley weighed in, too: “Not laughing. Just seeing what we tried to tell everyone back then. He’s a bad guy.”

Acton’s campaign responded to the Arthur video Tuesday afternoon with an ad featuring Stearn. “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” he says, describing how his older sister—at “11 and 12 years old”—tried to protect him.

By Tuesday evening, the backlash had followed Ramaswamy into a town hall in Westerville. Shortly after he took the stage, a heckler confronted him about Acton’s mother. The man was escorted out.

Afterward, speaking to reporters, Ramaswamy finally admitted that his campaign had made the ad. He argued that voters should listen to people who know Acton “well,” including her mother, and said he had never met Arthur and that she wasn’t paid for the ad.

Ramaswamy also said he wished the campaign were about substantive issues, accused Acton of spreading lies about him and his family, and decried her decision not to debate him.

Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign told Axios that the ad performed well in testing with persuadable voters. The outlet reported that the resulting $4 million statewide push began streaming Tuesday night.

Campaign manager Jonathan Ewing called it a “campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton.”

This is not the first time Ramaswamy has had a problem involving a campaign ad and a child abuser. I reported just a week ago that Ramaswamy’s property-tax ad featured Vernon Edwards, a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty to two counts of gross sexual imposition involving his niece, who was younger than 13.

The campaign pleaded ignorance. “The man has been removed from the ad,” spokesman Evan Machan told me. It also deleted an earlier social-media video showing Ramaswamy shaking Edwards’s hand and complimenting his patriotic shirt. But the ad featuring Edwards ran during the Browns victory over the Ravens, after the campaign had promised to remove him from it.

Ramaswamy’s campaign’s callousness, mendacity, and shoddy staff work would be a liability in any race. But it seems especially likely to hurt him in an environment where Republicans already have a problem with a nagging child sexual abuse scandal.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Manufacturing Trans Panic, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio isn’t the only red state where Republicans seem to be resorting to desperate tricks to salvage a race. In Texas, Ken Paxton and his supporters have been trying to turn transgender issues into a centerpiece of his race against Democrat James Talarico. Now they’re trying to whip up a new, artificial trans panic to make the sale.

Last week, GOP voters across the state started receiving strange—and, to them, enraging—text messages. “New school year?” one read. “Here’s your complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” The text then linked to the “Back to School Toolkit” of the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), a state trans advocacy group.

These confusing “back-to-school” texts—which arrived long after the start of the school year and mysteriously seemed to land mostly in Republican inboxes—caused an immediate outcry, with conservative influencers going viral denouncing them across social media. But TENT denied sending the texts at all.

The texts, it turns out, were only the prelude. This week, a more extensive and expensive campaign unfolded along similar lines. This time, Texas voters—again, primarily Republicans—received mailers at home, purportedly from an organization called the “Texas Transgender Student Union”—an organization incorporated last month in Wyoming, with no physical or online presence save the mailers themselves. Again, the mailers linked repeatedly to resources on TENT’s website, as well as to the American Civil Liberties Union.

While the faux TENT text messages simply reminded voters that trans advocacy groups exist, the mailers went much further, containing reams of language seemingly designed to confirm conservatives’ worst fears about such groups’ intended aims.

TENT’s actual Back to School Toolkit focuses on legal resources for trans students in navigating Texas’s increasingly trans-hostile laws, reminding them what sorts of activities and activism state law does and doesn’t restrict. It also has educational resources for students and their parents who want to protect themselves from Texas conservatives’ increasingly militant view that a child presenting as trans is prima facie evidence of child abuse, and how families might deal with, for instance, having Child Protective Services called in against them.

But the mailer that circulated this week presented a very different worldview, one in line with the common Republican belief that the chief aim of these organizations is to lure trans children away from their families. It contains sections on “What to do if your parents don’t support you” and “What if I want to be emancipated?”

“Even if your family doesn’t accept you as you are,” the mailer reads, “groups like this are ready to become your found family.”

In a statement to The Bulwark, TENT strongly denied any association with either the earlier texts or the mailers. “TENT did not author, authorize, approve, or distribute these materials. Any and all materials are not affiliated with our organization and are impersonations.” The group declined to comment on the experience of being turned into an electoral scarecrow apparently by Republicans, citing their need as a nonprofit to refrain from commenting on partisan political activity. They also—understandably, but perhaps unwisely—largely scrubbed their website, meaning that their own resources can today only be accessed through internet archives.

This has only made it easier, even as it’s become clear that the mailers were impersonations, for conservative activists to argue that the mailers’ contents are broadly similar to TENT’s own advocacy materials. But, again, the opposite is true. You can still read an archived version of TENT’s “back to school toolkit” yourself. Far from being a roadmap and encouragement for trans Texas students to escape their families, the “family resources” section of TENT’s toolkit is entirely focused on helping “families navigate heightened state scrutiny, especially as state agencies have been weaponized against supportive parents and guardians of [trans] youth.”

All this is entirely in keeping with Texas Republicans’ unbelievable smear campaign against Talarico, which has darkly twisted his past enthusiastic advocacy for trans students.

The GOP messaging apparatus has repeatedly insinuated—and sometimes outright stated—that “Talafreako” has a pedophilic fetish for trans youth. In lurid GOP-funded ads, an AI model of Talarico in a dress sings about how he wants to change “the gender of all of your offspring,” or an AI Talarico in scrubs prepares to perform a sex-change surgery on a little girl. On the campaign trail, JD Vance returns again and again to the same line: “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.”

Republicans would like it if Trump were popular and successful, and they could just run on that. Since he isn’t, they’d like for their threadbare old warnings that Democrats are all communists in disguise would scare voters back to their side. But that doesn’t appear to be working either. For Texas Republicans, this is the Hail Mary play: Insist that Talarico and trans organizations are working hard to steal your children from your home and subject them to “transgender mutilization,” all in furtherance of their own dark sexual urges. It probably won’t work. But that doesn’t make it any less contemptible.

Brendan Hartnett contributed reporting.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• ‘Fjord’ Review… SONNY BUNCH on the limits of tolerance.
• Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Pick Up Where Obama Left Off… JONATHAN COHN sits down with Michigan Senate candidate ABDUL EL-SAYED to discuss his admiration for Barack Obama, the shortcomings of the Obama presidency, and the lessons he hopes to carry into the Senate.
• Dana Bash Sees a Political Earthquake Coming in Texas and Maine… How do democracies fall apart, and why do the people who could stop it so often look the other way? SARAH LONGWELL hosts DANA BASH on Bulwark Takes.

QUICK HITS

WILL VANCE GET THE ROSE?: Vice President JD Vance wants Republicans to see him as Donald Trump’s heir apparent, and lately he’s been discussing the possibility more. “I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028,” he told journalist Mark Halperin on Monday, adding that “I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”

Trump doesn’t seem so sure. Asked to weigh in on the vice president’s prediction yesterday—with Vance standing right behind him—the president begged off. “He’s a very talented person and he’s a very good person,” Trump said, “but we’ve literally—I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.”

“No sir,” Vance quickly replied. “I said that, too.”

“Who would believe that?” Trump went on. “I don’t talk about it with him, he doesn’t talk—it’s early, very early right now. We have to get through the midterms. We’ll see how it goes.”

TAKING THE OIL: Another can’t-miss report on Trumpian corruption this week from ProPublica. Yesterday, the publication obtained the 18-page strategic partnership agreement governing the United States’ new imperial access to Venezuela’s oil reserves:

The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.

One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries.

The Trump administration is taking a 35 [percent] stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement.

The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise. 

New York Times, Trump Approval Hits New Low Two Weeks Before Midterms, Poll Finds, Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik, Oct. 21, 2026. Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional district, a New York Times/Siena poll found.

President Trump’s approval rating hit a new low just a few weeks before the midterm elections, driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices, according to a new national poll from The New York Times and Siena University.

Just 36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Mr. Trump’s performance, while 59 percent said that they disapproved. That is his lowest approval rating recorded in any Times/Siena poll. More than two-thirds of independent voters said that they disapproved of the way he has handled his job as president.

Likely voters said that they preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts in the final Times/Siena national poll before the midterm elections, a slight improvement for Democrats since last month. The metric is widely seen as a strong indicator of political momentum.

The national political environment is bleak for Republicans. Americans broadly disapprove of economic conditions under the Trump administration, with three-quarters rating the economy as fair or poor. A majority of voters blame Mr. Trump for the decline: 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iran and nearly three-quarters disapprove of his handling of gas prices, which are above $4 a gallon.

But Democrats still face serious challenges, particularly as they seek to win control of the Senate. To do so they are trying to flip seats in Republican-leaning states including Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Ohio, which Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2024. Other polls show that Democrats and Republicans are locked in tight races in several key Senate contests.

[Follow all of the latest polls heading into November’s elections.]

Still, the deep economic frustration has even broken into the coalition that elected Mr. Trump to his second term. Over the past year, Democrats have improved their standing among men, young voters and Hispanic voters — winning back some voters in those groups who helped propel Mr. Trump to victory two years ago.

Paul Gettings, a Republican who lost his job running a logistics company in June, said that he supported Mr. Trump in 2024 but plans to back Democrats this year. He cited frustration with high gas prices, the war in Iran and what he sees as harsh immigration enforcement in Simi Valley, Calif., where he lives.

“I’m very disillusioned with the Republican Party and how they can continue to support Trump,” said Mr. Gettings, 62, who is unemployed. “He’s turned into a politician just like the rest of them and it’s a lot of empty promises.”

Among all registered voters, including those who are less likely to vote, Mr. Trump’s approval rating was even worse, with 34 percent approving of his job performance. Mr. Trump built his 2016 and 2024 wins partly on the strength of his support among white voters without a college degree, but the poll found that group is about evenly split in its approval of his job, with 48 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving.

[See all of the latest polls measuring President Trump’s approval rating.]

As views of Republicans have declined, public perceptions of Democrats have grown increasingly positive over the last two years on an array of measures. 

Elon Musk Scandals, Global Power Grabs

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute to the crowd at a conservative political rally in the United States -- a salute that Musk described as innocent.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 20, 2026 [Order Came From Musk!!!?!!], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 21, 2026. A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.

The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.

According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “[W]e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”

After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.

Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.

Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.

A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.

Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “[p]eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”

Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.

Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.

Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”

These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.

And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.

Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”

But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.

Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.

Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”

Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.

“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.

“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.

“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.

“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “[W]e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.” 

New York Times, SpaceX and Tesla Explore Merger to Create a De Facto Elon Inc., Ryan Mac and Jack Ewing, Oct. 21, 2026. A deal would consolidate Elon Musk’s holdings in rockets, cars and artificial intelligence into a company worth well over $3 trillion.

Elon Musk has taken a big step toward creating Elon Inc.

The world’s richest person said on Tuesday that SpaceX and Tesla were exploring a merger, which would consolidate his interests in rockets, electric cars and artificial intelligence into a multitrillion-dollar behemoth.

Mr. Musk is both the chief executive and the largest shareholder of both companies. During an earnings call for SpaceX, he said that the boards of the rocket maker and the electric car manufacturer had formed special committees of independent directors to consider a merger.

“Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” he said. But as a conflicted party, who could essentially decide the terms of the deal, he will not be in on the discussions, he added.

Mr. Musk’s statements were the clearest sign that he is exploring whether to create a technology giant that could be worth some $3.5 trillion given the companies’ current market values. Since SpaceX held its initial public offering in June, its executives have publicly flirted with the idea of combining Mr. Musk’s two crown jewels.

The idea of a merger has garnered support not only from Mr. Musk, but also from his legions of fans and investors, who see synergies in software development and hardware manufacturing between SpaceX, which encompasses rockets, A.I. models and the Starlink satellite internet service, and Tesla, which makes cars, self-driving technology and robots.

But a consolidation of Mr. Musk’s business empire has also raised concerns from some lawmakers and critics, who believe that the world’s richest person, whose net worth has recently hovered around $1 trillion, has already amassed too much power.

Mr. Musk, Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

SpaceX’s stock jumped 8 percent in premarket trading on Wednesday, while Tesla’s gained about 1 percent.

Tesla reports its latest quarterly earnings on Wednesday, after the close of trading in U.S. markets. Mr. Musk will probably face more questions about the possible merger on a call with analysts.

Beyond sharing a chief executive, Tesla and SpaceX have deep connections. Mr. Musk has moved money and workers between companies, and the carmaker has sold hundreds of millions of dollars in batteries and vehicles to the rocket maker, according to financial filings. Tesla invested in xAI, the A.I. company that merged with SpaceX this year, and Tesla and SpaceX plan to produce A.I. chips together at a joint factory called Terafab.

Micah Walter-Range, an analyst for VettaFi Space Index, a stock index that tracks commercial space companies, called a merger between SpaceX and Tesla “an intriguing concept.”

“It’s not hard to see why a vertically integrated company seems attractive,” he said. “Tesla robots linked by Starlink to xAI data centers for control and A.I. model training purposes would give SpaceX an end-to-end advantage that nobody else could replicate quickly.”

Last week, during a launch event for Tesla’s new Roadster, Mr. Musk looked on as a vehicle deployed thrusters under its chassis that lifted the car over a row of other Tesla vehicles, including a Semi truck. The car did a flip as it passed overhead.

Mr. Musk said SpaceX engineers had worked on the Tesla product. The demonstration showed “what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world best rocket company,” he noted.

More On Trump Foreign Policy Scandals

Wayne Madsen Report, Analysis: Pressure growing for Canada to expel U.S. ambassador Pete Hoekstra, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump’s former ambassador to the Netherlands, creates hatred for the U.S. everywhere.

In the wake of Albertans overwhelmingly rejecting an American-backed referendum on secession from Canada, attention in Canada is shifting to a popular demand to have the Canadian government declare persona non grata (PNG) Donald Trump’s ambassador in Ottawa, the irascible Pete Hoesktra. Critics of the U.S. ambassador cite his repeated outlandish interference in Canadian domestic politics. The PNG move comes amid Trump’s repeated demand that Canada become the 51st state along with his insulting suggesting that after concluding his Hitlerite “Canschluss,” Canada could keep its national anthem as a “state anthem.”

A petition calling for the expulsion of Hoesktra is gaining steam. As of October 21, 2026, the petition has attracted more than 275,000 signatures and has parliamentary sponsorship. The petition, initiated on July 21 by Calgary resident Leanne Walker, includes several valid points:

• Canadian sovereignty: Hoekstra has minimized Trump’s rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state.
• Election interference: Hoekstra described Canada’s 2025 federal election campaign as anti-American.
• Alberta separatism: Petitioners raise concerns about connections between Republican political operatives and Alberta separatist organizations, including the Centurion Project.
• U.S. State Department meetings: Alberta separatists reportedly met State Department officials three times between April 2025 and January 2026. Hoekstra has denied knowledge of those meetings, even though Hoekstra has a record of being a bald-faced liar.

Hoekstra admitted knowledge of an American political technology company called 10xVotes. However, he denied knolwedge of its involvement in the Alberta secession referendum vote.

• Diplomatic conduct: Petitioners argue Hoekstra’s political interventions are inconsistent with the Vienna Convention’s expectations for foreign diplomats.

There is also a second parliamentary petition demanding Hoekstra’s expulsion. Petition e-7124, sponsored by then=New Democratic Party Quebec MP Alexandre Boulerice, collected 27,103 signatures before closing June 25, 2026. It requested a formal review of Hoekstra's conduct and possible recall.

The popular petition does not compel Carney's government to expel Hoekstra, although a formally presented parliamentary petition requires a government response.

Hoekstra dismissed the petition campaign in an August interview, saying that he only answers to Donald Trump. The petition campaign is more than an isolated protest. It is a parliamentary petition campaign with hundreds of thousands of supporters. The PNG campaign is centered on Canadian sovereignty and allegations of American involvement with Alberta, and more recently, Quebec separatists (as indicated by the collage below).

As one of the Trump administration’s more rabid supporters, Hoekstra has not only been linked to the pro-U.S. statehood Alberta Prosperity Project, but to similar organizations in other provinces. These include the Saskatchewan Prosperity Project, led by Brad Williams, and the British Columbia Prosperity Project, organized by Peter Letourneux, and which advocates joining Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Yukon in a possible new country that would be amenable to U.S. statehood.

If expelled from Canada, Hoesktra would join several other infamous American ambassadors who have been formally declared persona non grata. These include Vincent de Roulet, declared persona non grata in 1973 by the Jamaican government of Prime Minister Michael Manley amid accusations of improper interference in Jamaican affairs (a personal anecdote: de Roulet did not ingratiate himself with Jamaicans when he complained that locals were only entering the U.S. embassy lobby to use the rest rooms); Philip Goldberg, expelled in 2008 by Bolivian President Evo Morales for supporting opposition forces and conspiring against his government; and Patrick Duddy, expelled in 2008 by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in solidarity with Bolivia and amid charges of U.S. interference in Venezuelan domestic politics (including support for the secession of oil-rich Zulia state); and Heather Hodges, expelled in 2011 by President Rafael Correa over a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable concerning Ecuadorian police corruption.

Hoekstra may justifiably follow in the ignoble footsteps of past U.S. ambassadors who were expelled over their misdeeds.

More On Billionairre, High Tech Tyrants

Lincoln Square Media Opinion: ‘No Kings’ Means You, Too, Mark Zuckerberg, Frank Figliuzz, right, retired former FBI Assistant Director, Oct. 21, 2026. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account during Saturday’s rallies across the nation. We deserve answers.

Millions of Americans took to the streets Saturday for No Kings Day, a pro-democracy mobilization against the concern that a single, unitary authority seeks to control our freedoms.

Just as the rallies reached their peak, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reached in and proved their point. The movement’s most vital communication channel suddenly vanished. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account, along with the pages of several key organizers and leaders. For hours, during the most critical window of the mobilization, the digital heartbeat of the protest went dark, leaving organizers locked out and fueling immediate fears of political censorship.

The fallout was swift, and the explanation from Silicon Valley was frustratingly familiar. Tech giants like Meta operate with the power of sovereign royalty, yet when their systems disrupt core constitutional activities, they retreat behind the shield of technical glitches. This incident exposes a dangerous vulnerability in our public square: the automated suppression of legitimate political speech during a highly volatile election year.

Meta’s initial response was a brief, hollow apology about algorithms. Company spokesperson Andy Stone stated on X (not even a Meta platform) that an automated trigger designed to catch accounts posting, sharing, or commenting at unusually high frequencies, had been pulled “in error.”

It took a full 24 hours for Meta to offer a more granular, detailed explanation. On Sunday, Stone clarified that engineering teams found the restriction was triggered not by outgoing posts, but by the account’s intense “reading” behavior, which network security systems mistakenly flagged as an automated Claude AI tool that might be scraping data. Humans blaming an automated system they created, for wrongly perceiving the presence of an AI tool created by humans, which ultimately suppressed the freedom of humans.

This delayed explanation was met with deep skepticism by the No Kings leadership. The group rejected the idea that a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure could simply mistake the highly publicized, verified accounts of a massive civil movement for a nefarious bot. Denouncing the disruption as an unacceptable failure of civic responsibility, No Kings leadership issued a strict ultimatum, demanding a fully transparent, comprehensive explanation by Wednesday night. They argue that the public deserves to know exactly what parameters triggered the ban, why human content moderators failed to intervene immediately, and what safeguards are being implemented to prevent a recurrence before Election Day.

The digital blackout of constitutionally-protected activity caught lawmakers’ attention. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) aggressively criticized the platform’s failure. In a public post, Murphy pointed out the absurdity of the situation, noting that Meta pulled down the preeminent organizing page on the single biggest day of these protests, providing zero real-time explanation while keeping users locked out for the entire afternoon. Murphy later suggested that if the incident wasn’t deliberate malevolence, it was a profound indictment of a company failing to prepare for predictable, major moments of political action.

Murphy is right. Meta’s failure could have been a moronic mistake, but that’s the point. Zuckerberg is left with only two avenues of explanation – either he’s blindly ceded leadership of Meta to mechanized systems, or he purposefully decided to suppress political activity. While the latter would be more troubling than the former, the two options are effectively the same – Meta acted like a king on No Kings Day.

Historically, Meta has been inconsistent in its treatment of political activity. In that inconsistency, often the result of trial-and-error attempts to get it right, it’s become the digital version of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. For years, the platform has bounced between being criticized for letting malicious political traffic spread completely unfettered, and being blasted for heavy-handed, automated over-enforcement that crushes legitimate speech. During global protest movements, Meta has allowed organizing tools to remain active during high-volume foreign and domestic civil rights rallies. Yet, it’s also been criticized for failing to curb coordinated nefarious looking behavior and hate speech connected to violence.

During U.S. election cycles, Meta seems to rely on automated defenses to intercept large foreign bot networks and malicious state-sponsored traffic. But Zuckerberg faced intense scrutiny for being slow to suspend accounts that drive dangerous political conspiracies. Even in the most forgiving view of Meta’s mistakes, its reliance on automation to address human behaviors appears to have undermined human oversight of that automation.

A fact-based analysis suggests that the No Kings Day blackout could genuinely have been the innocent result of rigid defense systems. Tech platforms deploy aggressive, high-volume behavioral triggers to stop automated scraping and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. When thousands of users interact with a page simultaneously, or when managers rapidly refresh administrative dashboards to respond to a fast-moving crisis, security architecture can misinterpret the surge as bot activity.

Claims of algorithmic innocence shouldn’t equate to absolution. Meta isn’t helpless. It possesses the technical capacity to override these automated safety nets for high-profile events. The company regularly implements heightened electronic monitoring during major events like the FIFA World Cup, national elections, or corporate rollouts to ensure high-traffic accounts do not face automated blocks. The fact that Meta failed to apply similar proactive overrides for a heavily-promoted, nationwide voting drive points to systemic negligence at best, or willful blindness at worst.

Zuckerberg’s way too cozy relationship with the Trump regime, coupled with the fact the fact that the No Kings movement directly opposes Trump, only serves to fuel public perceptions that what happened on Saturday might have been purposeful. That’s another mistake of Zuckerberg’s own doing.

When Silicon Valley ignores the people who use its products, it does so at its own peril. Increasingly Meta and its counterparts seem more intent on preserving themselves than serving the public. During this high-stakes election season, an unannounced four-hour digital media blackout as organizers and rally participants attempted to communicate, was an unacceptable suppression of constitutionally-protected freedoms. Like millions of Americans, I had No Kings Day on my calendar. Are we to believe that Zuckerberg did not?

Meta must become hyper-aware of the political calendar. Algorithmic security systems must be paired with human oversight capable of instantly reviewing and reversing automated errors targeting legitimate political organizers. If platforms insist on controlling the primary infrastructure of modern American political discourse, they must bear the responsibility of protecting those communications.

Until Meta provides the transparency and remedies organizers demanded by Wednesday night, suspicion will rightfully remain that the systems built to protect our information ecosystem are instead silencing the voices of democracy. “No Kings” means you too Mr. Zuckerberg.

Frank Figliuzzi, right, hosts The Frank Figliuzzi Show on Lincoln Square. He is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.

Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting

New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal, Tyler Pager, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.

Julio Herrera Velutini really wanted a pardon.

A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Mr. Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record.

So Mr. Herrera deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.ImageAlina Habba in the Oval Office last March. A former personal lawyer for President Trump, she went on to work in his Justice Department.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.

Ms. Habba denied any role in the pardon.

“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a statement.

Ms. Habba was a special government employee at the time, which allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.

She declined to discuss her work for Concord.

Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.

A White House official said that Ms. Habba had nothing to do with the pardon and that the administration follows a pardon review process that includes the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.

Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.

For Ms. Habba, the job from the Herrera family came at a pivotal point in her life and career.

She resigned in December 2025 as U.S. attorney in New Jersey after a panel of federal judges ruled that her appointment by Mr. Trump had been carried out unlawfully. Her second marriage was also falling apart.

The arrangement with the Herreras provided her with a new level of financial security. She also found new love. Shortly after the pardon was issued, Ms. Habba started dating Turhan Mildon, a Turkish investor.

They were married last month in a lavish ceremony in New York. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel.

The couple is now engaged in high-profile feud with Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump ally. Ms. Habba has accused Mr. Grenell of misallocating a donation from her husband to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Grenell was running at the time. Mr. Grenell has denied her accusations, calling them absurd.

Ms. Habba brought those accusations directly to Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Scharf to investigate them. The Times has previously reported that the investigation centers on a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company.

Mr. Herrera, who also has Italian citizenship, is a member of the Herrera family, a banking, real estate and fashion dynasty that dates back to the 14th century. The family owns estates and castles in Caracas, Venezuela; the Canary Islands; Spain; and Germany.

Mr. Herrera founded a bank based in Puerto Rico in 2008.

In August 2022, he was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera all pleaded not guilty to felony charges.

Mr. Kise, Mr. Herrera’s lawyer, helped negotiate a deal with the Justice Department under which Mr. Herrera pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Ms. Vázquez and the former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for harsher sentences.

All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.

In July, Banvelca, the Herreras’ family office since 1781, announced that Ms. Herrera, a member of the eighth generation and the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, was assuming leadership of the company. Neither the news release nor her bio on the company’s website makes any mention of Concord Partners, the vehicle employing Ms. Habba, who now goes by Mrs. Mildon.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

New York Times, Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). The justice said during a discussion that recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign finance have deepened America’s divides.

Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for a series of election-related decisions in recent years that she said have led to more polarization and a dysfunctional democracy.

Justice Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, delivered the sharp critique two weeks before hotly contested midterm elections and in front of an ideologically mixed crowd of law students and professors. In a wide-ranging discussion, she pointed to the court’s rulings that have loosened restrictions on campaign funding, cleared the way for partisan voting maps and undermined landmark voting rights protections.

“In all these areas, the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works” and has created “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”

The justice’s remarks came during a conversation at Catholic University’s law school with Prof. J. Joel Alicea, who was a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a conservative.

While Justice Kagan has issued strongly worded dissents in individual election-related cases, her remarks on Tuesday amounted to a global critique of how a series of choices by the court’s majority have affected democracy in the United States. Taken together, she said, the rulings have deepened political divisions and made the country’s electoral system work less well.

Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, for instance, when the court in 2019 closed the door on federal litigation challenging voting maps aimed at achieving political ends. As a result, she said, “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom” to draw voting maps that advantage either Democrats or Republicans in a way that “is very destructive of our democracy.”

Similarly, she said the court’s decisions to ease campaign finance rules have left loopholes that have allowed a massive infusion of political contributions into elections.

“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”

Justice Kagan spoke as the court’s new term has begun and ahead of midterm contests that will determine control of Congress, and could require the Supreme Court to intervene in post-election challenges. Election-related litigation has already been filed across the country, with both political parties anticipating the possibility of voter intimidation and the seizure of ballots.

In the coming months, the justices will also hear arguments in high-profile cases involving the legality of bans on semiautomatic rifles, religious rights and President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.

Even as the court has moved to the right with the addition of three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, Justice Kagan, a nominee of President Barack Obama, has at times found compromise with her colleagues selected by Republican presidents.

Before joining the bench in 2010, she was the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was known for building coalitions and recruiting conservative faculty members.

On Tuesday, Justice Kagan was the first justice who was nominated by a Democratic president and is a non-Catholic to take part in the annual event sponsored by the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. She is the fifth justice to participate.

She went over the allotted hour for the event and seemed eager to offer a polite takedown of originalism, the theory embraced by conservative justices that the Constitution should be interpreted based on its public meaning at the time it was adopted.

“They were writing the Constitution for the ages. They were writing the Constitution, knowing that there would be change in the world,” she said.

“The whole project” of originalism, she added, “is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”

More On Trump Family Scandals, Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.

This publication has delved into the espionage activities of a number of members of the Trump family, ranging from Donald Trump, Sr.’s longtime questionable links to Soviet and Russian intelligence during the Cold War and post-Cold War; Fred Trump. Sr.’s ties to Nazi German and Fascist Italian intelligence before and during World War II; and the paternal grandfather, Fred (Friedrich) Trump’s espionage at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel — location of the I.S. Navy’s transceiver radio unit — on behalf of the German Kaiser during World War I.

One Trump who has evaded suspicion is Donald Trump’s professorial uncle, Dr. John G. Trump. The president has often praised his uncle, a longtime professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using him as a benchmark of high intelligence and genetic superiority.

Trump often cites his uncle to claim "good genes" or "much better blood," a common feature of Nazi theories of racial superiority, stating during campaigns and public speeches that his uncle's academic pedigree proves his own natural intelligence. Trump has highlighted John Trump’s scientific background—including his work with high-voltage X-ray cancer treatments and radar development during World War II.

This month, Trump was presented with his uncle’s original 1983 National Medal of Science award. The occasion was the so-called Golden Age of American Innovation Summit held at the Trump-commandeered and renamed “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Trump has often inflated the curriculum vitae of his uncle. In July 2025, Trump told a story claiming that his uncle taught the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) at MIT. This was chronologically impossible, as John Trump died in 1985—a decade before Kaczynski was identified—and MIT records confirmed Kaczynski never attended the university. Trump has often misstated his uncle's academic credentials — claiming degrees in nuclear, chemical, and mathematics, when, in fact, his degrees were in electrical engineering and physics.

Trump has also briefly mentioned that his uncle was among the first to see Nikola Tesla’s highly-valued papers after the scientist’s death in 1943. On January 7, 1943: Tesla died at age 86 in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. At the time, Tesla’s innovative notebooks and papers were highly sought after by not only the U.S. government but by Nazi intelligence units operating in and around New York City. Fred Trump, Sr., who had been affiliated with both the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Queens and, later, the Nazi-led German American Bund, served as an important conduit between the Bund and German spies.

It is well known that Fred Trump was so ardently pro-German, he spoke only German in his house and with his German friends. Whether this camaraderie extended to his brother at MIT is sketchy but they did share one thing: their father, Fred Trump, also known as Friedrich, had been doing everything possible to regain the trust of Kaiser Wilhelm’s government after having been banished from Germany by a Bavarian royal decree issued in February 1905. The banishment was due to Friedrich’s failure to register his emigration to North America as a teenager in 1885 and his evasion of mandatory military service. Friedrich left Germany to strike it rich in the United States, which he did by starting hotels, restaurants, and whorehouses during the California and Yukon gold rushes. Friedrich and his wife, Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents, were never happy being Americans but longed for their German homeland. Friedrich’s dream of returning to Germany was never realized as he died from the Spanish flu on May 30, 1918, at the age of 49.

Although the focus on the Trump family has been on Fred, Sr, and his son Donald, relatively little attention has been paid to Friedrich’s other son, Dr. John Trump.

Upon Tesla’s death, federal authorities, acting through the Office of Alien Property Custodian, took control of Tesla's belongings, including technical papers, drawings, and equipment. This occurred despite Tesla having been a naturalized American citizen since 1891. It remains perplexing that the federal government asked Dr. Trump, the son of a pro-German hotel manager and bartender at the McAlpin Hotel, where war plans were devised among U.S. and visiting Allied officers, to examine Tesla's technical documents and determine whether they contained inventions or scientific information valuable to the American war effort.

Although Tesla’s papers were sought after by the intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, Dr. Trump concluded that the papers contained no immediately usable scientific or military breakthroughs. In particular, he found no practical evidence supporting Tesla's claims about a revolutionary particle-beam weapon, popularly called a death ray. But was this a feint by the MIT professor? Did he claim the papers were of no value, while passing on copies of them to his family’s valued German homeland either directly or via his brother, Fred? Considering the Trump family’s four generations of treasonous behavior, Dr. Trump should be considered as suspect as everyone else in the family.

In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a message from someone in Weehawken, NJ referring to a New York Times article about Tesla’s work on a “teleforce” death ray perfected by Tesla. The letter’s author urged Hoover to provide protection for Tesla lest he and his invention falling into the hands of “alien enemies.” The letter and article are found below.

There is also a problem with the chain-of-custody for Tesla’s papers. Dr. Trump's signed report, dated January 30, 1943, confirms that he examined the material on January 26–27 at the Manhattan Warehouse in New York, not in Tesla's hotel room. It also confirms that selected documents were retained by the Office of Alien Property Custodian. But how many may have been retained by Dr. Trump? Some papers were retained by government authorities, and subsequent FBI correspondence acknowledged uncertainty about the whereabouts of portions of Tesla's materials. A January 12, 1943 FBI memo reported that there was fear that “enemy agents” had confiscated some of Tesla’s trunks of documents after his death on January 7th and that the “War Department was interested in this matter.”

In a later letter, Hoover wrote that the FBI had never been in possession of any copies of Tesla’s papers (letter below). What? Missing Tesla papers that were briefly in the possession of Dr. Trump (whose brother was a suspected Nazi agent)?

Shades of the bathroom of Mar-a-Lago!

Dr. Trump’s suspiciously short examination of Tesla’s papers resulted in a dubiously short summation in his report on the veracity of Tesla’s work:

“His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

Copies of Tesla's papers on the “death ray” were not “speculative,” as cited by Dr. Trump, nor was the U.S, Navy’s interest in Tesla’s work on a “revolutionary torpedo.” Tesla was investigating particle beam weaponry, something that over three decades later would serve as the basis for Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic missile defense program.

Some of Tesla’s papers were sent by the U.S. government to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. A project code-named "Project Nick" received massive funding and was placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published nor was the involvement of Dr. Trump.

One thing is known for certain. The copies of Tesla’s papers held in Dayton disappeared and their whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

Did the Trump family profit from Tesla’s purloined research? Or was it their friends, the Nazis, Soviets, or Elon Musk?

It is also odd that in1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions held by the U.S. government were released to Sava Kosanovic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United States from 1946 to 1950 and Tesla’s nephew, and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where the Tesla Museum was created in honor of the naturalized American scientist.

Under Marshal Tito’s Communist government, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and researchers to access to the Tesla archive in Belgrade. Things were much different for Soviet scientists who sent delegation after delegation to the museum during the 1950s. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced before the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage." Based on the fact that in 1958, the U.S. began work on charged-particle beam weaponry at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. The top secret research, code-named Project Seesaw, was eventually discontinued with the principals of the research claiming that it had nothing to do with Tesla’s papers. That’s exactly the same sort of wave-off of Tesla’s research that was offered up by Dr. Trump.

The FBI stated for years that it had not been the first to enter Tesla’s hotel room after his death but it was the Office of Alien Property, the latter for which Dr. Trump was taking his marching orders. One of many FBI denial letters below:

Successive FBI directors and acting directors from Hoover and L. Patrick Gray III to William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, all denied that the FBI was ever in possession of Tesla’s papers. Yet, questions remain about the ultimate recipients of the valuable research. Was it Nazi nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg or rocket scientist Werner Von Braun via Dr. Trump and/or his brother Fred? The Soviets? Or the Japanese, who remain very interested in Tesla’s work to this very day.

In addition, did Elon Musk’s Tesla Corporation capitalize on any of Tesla’s research, especially considering the fact that Musk has never “invented” anything but has made his fortune on the research conducted by others.

During the 1930s, Tesla claimed to have developed the theoretical basis for a defensive weapon capable of projecting concentrated streams of electrically charged particles.

He suggested that such a weapon could destroy approaching bomber formations, defend national borders against aerial attack, deliver destructive energy over considerable distances, and potentially make conventional aerial warfare obsolete. During the 1930s, this research would have been relevant to Nazi Germany's military improvements, particularly as Germany developed advanced antiaircraft defenses and experimental weapons.

A nagging question remains. Why did Dr. Trump substantially diminish the government's immediate interest in Tesla’s proposed death ray when the record suggests that this research was pursued by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, the Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, a period when Donald Trump was sidling up to the Soviet Union and communist Czechoslovakia while also denouncing NATO. The Trump family has not been known to value the national security of the United States since the Woodrow Wilson administration and, now, with Donald Trump in charge of everything, how much of Tesla’s research and that of others has flown out of U.S. security vaults into the hands of Moscow, Beijing, or Elon Musk?

Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.

The Daily Beast noted the other day that Truth Social’s daily traffic has cratered, losing over 30% of daily traffic since last June.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social is hemorrhaging users, with daily traffic plunging more than 30 percent in a year despite the president’s relentless stream of posts.

The social media platform averaged roughly 260,000 daily users last month, a steep drop from its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.

It’s an astonishingly small number. Heather Cox Richardson has upwards of 2.8 million subscribers on Substack, plus a bunch on other platforms. Meidas Touch has 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. On the other side of the spectrum, Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners. Benny Johnson has 6.1 million YouTube subscribers.

Just 260,000 users use Truth Social as if it were a social media website.

Of course, Trump’s own posts don’t, primarily, circulate on Truth Social. They are disseminated by Trump loyalists, self-described journalists, and haters far and wide, achieving a total dissemination that no doubt rivals those other outlets for viewers. But that dissemination happens only via a largely unexamined faith about what Trump Truth Social posts are. For MAGAts, sharing them announces tribal loyalty to the performed power in them. For journalists, it’s a lazy relationship with newsworthiness. For haters, it is often, equally, a tribal statement, triggering the same kind of emotional — and therefore irrational — response.

And while the MAGAts need only the performance of power, for the latter two, there is a conceit that the Truth Social posts in some way provide a transparent view on Trump’s “true” views … even though they are routinely riddled with lies.The Diesel Tweet promising diesel that doesn’t exist

That’s how it happened that Trump’s Diesel Tweet came to be read not just as a statement of his reason for betraying Ukraine — he needed diesel to bring prices down before the election — but also of a momentous call with Vladimir Putin on October 9.

Even Chris Wright couldn’t paper over how absurd that interpretation is (I had been wondering whether Wright was lying to Trump to allow him to sustain this claim). He confessed that Russia didn’t have diesel to export, amid word salad attempting to explain how Trump stating that Russia might export diesel if they chose to stop invading Ukraine would induce them to make peace.

WRIGHT: They’re very different. Russia wants to and can export oil, as a — as was true when I said that, and as is true today. We have not removed the sanctions on Russian oil. We are removing sanctions on a product that Russia currently does not and cannot export.

The way forward for Russia to be able to export diesel is to reduce their war effort, make progress towards peace.

[Martha] RADDATZ: President Trump said that there was a deal, a ceasefire, an energy ceasefire a week ago. Russia and Ukraine said there was no such thing. Were you involved in that? Was there anything?

WRIGHT: This is President Trump encouraging Russia if they want to export diesel, if they want to get the benefits you believe that are about to be showered upon them, the only way they can do that is with an energy ceasefire or reduction of war effort. [my emphasis]

Because there is so much faith among data mules who treat these posts as some form of truth, there was little consideration of other possibilities, such as that the last person in the room — the FSB officer whom JD Vance lauded for being “soft-spoken,” the guy who has always played Trumps narcissism like a maestro — suggested he write the tweet like that, either told him to or leveraged his grievance to get him to scapegoat Ukraine for Trump’s own failures.Both Putin and Trump acknowledged the Diesel Tweet was (also) about Iran

And in fact, both Putin and Trump acknowledged that their October 9 conversations were about — were also about — Iran.

In his post scapegoating Ukraine for the diesel shortage Trump’s own invasion of Iran caused, he included the non sequitur, “it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”

Wright’s word salad with Martha Raddatz also included that rhetorical dodge. When Raddatz pointed out what everyone should about the Diesel Tweet — that Trump, not Ukraine, caused the diesel shortages, Wright suggested she was dismissing attempts to deprive Iran of nukes.

RADDATZ: I just — the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran War, you would admit, caused a lot of these problems.

WRIGHT: Absolutely. To prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons, absolutely comes at a cost. The Iranian regime killed 30,000 to 40,000 of their own citizens in January. Since then, they’ve bombed every neighbor they have. Are you comfortable —

RADDATZ: I understand that.

WRIGHT: Are you comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iranian regime?

RADDATZ: I understand the point of stopping a nuclear weapon. That has not happened yet, and there’s no end in sight at this point.

In Putin’s readout of the October 9 conversation, he listed Ukraine, Iran, and various aspects of a strictly bilateral relationship with the US “were touched upon.”

During the October 9 telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump, considerable focus was on prospects for settling the Ukraine crisis, while the situation surrounding Iran and various aspects of bilateral relations were touched upon as well.

I’ve been arguing since March we need to understand that this is a world war and one possible outcome — made more likely so long as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were Trump’s “negotiators” on both Ukraine and Iran — would be that Russia uses it to get Trump to flip sides, as he has now apparently done.

Trump lies, again, about Iran

And here’s where Trump betrayed his weakness and here’s where his betrayal remains vulnerable to a concerted response.

His and Wright’s pathetic explanation about the Diesel Tweet are bad enough.

But his subsequent tweet explaining why he refuses to sanction Russia is even more pathetic.

Amid the repeated scapegoating of Ukraine and more spin about Russia giving the US something that would recognizably benefit the country (hostage negotiations) rather than Trump personally, Trump claimed that Russia was not doing “what they could be doing” to help Iran, a claim Trump has attempted to repeat in his babbling public statements.

As numerous people point out, though, US intelligence knows (and Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reminding) Russia is helping Iran kill Americans.

What Trump said in this tweet and has babbled publicly, of course, is that Russia could be doing more.

And that’s why, Trump says, he refuses to sanction Russia: For fear his best friend Putin will help Iran do worse to America and its partners than they’re already doing in Iran. For fear Russia will help Iran deal Trump an even more humiliating loss.

If that’s not already proof that Putin threatened Trump even as he offered him carrots in the form of oil contracts, Sergei Lavrov met with Abbas Araghchi and made it clear they are, in fact, doing quite a bit to support Iran, including feeding them so they can outlast the US in this current standoff.

Trump said Moscow and Beijing had the capacity to provide Tehran with far greater assistance but had so far refrained from doing so.

“Russia could have done a lot more to help Iran. Russia’s done very little for Iran,” Trump told reporters on Monday. He said China could also have provided much more assistance and described the limited help from both countries as “a very positive thing.”

Trump’s remarks came as Lavrov held talks with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, where Moscow reaffirmed its commitment to its strategic partnership with Iran while calling for a diplomatic solution to the regional conflict.

At a joint press conference with Araghchi, Lavrov said Russia had no intention of abandoning economic and investment agreements with Iran despite the war.

He said Russian specialists were gradually returning to work at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant and pointed to continued cooperation on energy and transport projects, including the planned Rasht-Astara railway.

Lavrov also said Moscow had provided humanitarian assistance during the war and would continue supplying food to Iran.

And even though Putin is flaunting his support for Iran (and has, at similar moments in the past) Trump is nevertheless allowing Putin to convince him that his own failures in Iran are all due to betrayal from America’s allies and not his own failures and the incompetent blowhard he put in charge of DOD.

Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. As a narcissist, he needs scapegoats to blame for his own historic failure, and Russia’s dictator has scripted convenient scapegoats for him: Ukraine for attacking Russia’s diesel refineries, Europe, for failing to join Trump’s rudderless attack.

And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia. 

New York Times, Vance Defends Ramaswamy’s Ad as Backlash Threatens Ohio Campaign, Campbell Robertson and Bayliss Wagner, Oct. 21, 2026. The vice president backed an advertisement featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother, who has been estranged from Dr. Acton since her stepfather was charged with child rape.

Vice President JD Vance, right, on Wednesday defended an ad featuring the estranged mother of the Democrat running for Ohio governor, Amy Acton, dismissing condemnation of it from even fellow Republicans as “whining.”

In the ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, Dr. Acton’s Republican opponent, the mother said her daughter had lied and exaggerated about her childhood struggles. The ad was met with outrage, given that the mother’s longtime husband, Dr. Acton’s stepfather, was charged with raping the candidate when she was 12, according to records produced by the Acton campaign.

Mr. Ramaswamy is putting $4 million behind the spot. Mr. Vance lauded it, saying it “calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”

Child sexual abuse has been a surprisingly prevalent issue in the 2026 midterms. It has surfaced in Texas, where Democrats accused Attorney General Ken Paxton of treating a convicted abuser leniently; in Kansas, where Republicans said the Democratic candidate for Senate, Adam Hamilton, failed to respond to abuse accusations by a volunteer at his church; and in multiple races where Republican votes against releasing the Epstein files have become political fodder.

Even though Mr. Ramaswamy’s ad does not directly mention sexual abuse, it has brought it to the forefront of the Ohio governor’s race and whipped up national attention. In the ad, Donna Arthur, Dr. Acton’s mother, accused her daughter of lying about details she has relayed about a troubled childhood in which she was homeless for a time. During that period, Dr. Acton has said, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. She has said she and her mother have not spoken since she was 12, when Ms. Arthur lost custody of both her daughter and her son.

Documents provided by the Acton campaign this week show that a grand jury had indicted the candidate’s stepfather on charges of raping Dr. Acton in 1978, the year Ms. Arthur lost custody. The stepfather, Cledith Arthur, pleaded not guilty, and then fled the state before trial. He died in Pennsylvania in 2004.

This week, Dr. Acton’s campaign decried the ad and quickly responded with one of its own, in which her brother, Philip Stearns, says that she had for years been the victim of their stepfather’s physical and sexual abuse.

Asked Wednesday evening about the ad, President Trump tried three approaches. He first claimed not to know anything about it. Then he cited its contents at length, saying, “It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much.” Finally, he absolved Mr. Ramaswamy of responsibility for it, concluding, “I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”

Mr. Vance, at a Wednesday morning campaign rally in the state, lauded Mr. Ramaswamy for the spot even as the backlash threatened to engulf the candidate’s campaign.

“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Mr. Vance told reporters. “So I would say to Ohio Republicans, do you actually think that Amy Acton is unfit to serve as governor of the state of Ohio? I do.”

The downplaying of the ad’s significance by the president and vice president did little to stem the criticism.

MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, announced on Wednesday that she would put half a million dollars behind Dr. Acton’s campaign, accusing Mr. Ramaswamy of exploiting “a highly qualified woman’s pain for political gain.”

The editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch announced its backing for Dr. Acton for governor on Wednesday morning, describing the ad in its endorsement as “revolting and unsettling.”

Multiple well-known figures in the Ohio Republican establishment either criticized the ad or distanced themselves from it. They include Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state; Lydia Mihalik, director of the Ohio Department of Development; Ryan Smith, the Republican former speaker of the Ohio House; and Senator Jon Husted. In a statement, Mr. Husted, who is in the middle of a tight battle for his Senate seat, said, “I would not have run that ad.”

But denunciations also came from people far outside of establishment circles. Casey Putsch, a car designer who ran against Mr. Ramaswamy from the hard right in the Republican primary, slammed the ad on social media and said that he would vote for Dr. Acton. Mr. Ramaswamy and his campaign, he wrote, are “attacking Amy Acton over the abuse she endured as a child.”

With Election Day less than two weeks away, erosion of support from the Republicans’ Ohio establishment and its far right could spell trouble for Mr. Ramaswamy.

Kathy Barnette, a conservative radio host who advised Mr. Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, said that the stakes of the election could not be higher and that she could vouch “100 percent” for Mr. Ramaswamy’s character and vision. At the same time, Ms. Barnette, who said her mother was raped at a young age, called the ad a “very personal thing” for her.

“It is a very fine line that the Ramaswamy campaign are walking in sharing this information,” she said. “They’re taking a huge bet.”

Did she think it was a bet worth taking? “No comment,” she said.

AdImpact, a political ad-watching firm, said Wednesday that the Ramaswamy campaign added $2.8 million in advertising reservations to the nearly $15 million already in place.

Some Republicans said the angry reaction to the ad was more political than genuine, much of it coming from people who did not support Mr. Ramaswamy in the first place.

“This was a bold and raw move, but many of the critics of this ad have strong political motivations to launch their criticism,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Republican political consultant in Ohio.

At a rally at a convention center near Cincinnati that was headlined by Mr. Vance, at which Mr. Ramaswamy briefly spoke, attendees brushed off the criticism. Some said that Dr. Acton’s mother was entitled to give her side of the story, while others downplayed the whole controversy.

“We are not voting for ads, we are voting for people,” said Greg Garland, who was attending with a group of people supporting the Republican ticket.

On Tuesday night, after being heckled about the ad, Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters, “I would love for this race, this election, to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”

Lance's Substack, Opinion: J.D. Vance Rams His Salami In Ramaswamy,  Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 21, 2026. So, now J.D. Vance is officially on the record as:

• Defending Nazis marching in Ohio to incite violence against Haitian immigrants for eating their pets.
• Defending actual Nazis praising Hitler on Young Republican chat group platforms.
• Now defending Ramaswamy's attack ad against his opponent, a former child rape victim who he accused of lying.

Vance is the "unhuman" in this equation, not the woke left.

He is many things, and has perpetrated great evils in the form of policies on behalf of his tech billionaire controllers and Project 2025.

But above all, he is a Nazi, who is right at home with politicians and candidates who are also rapists in addition to being Nazis. That is why he was groomed for VP by Thiel and company.

Also remember some of the GOP's history in whitewashing their history of rape and pedophilia aside from the Epstein case. The engine of Vance's Senate campaign was the Nazi Church belt of Christian nationalists in the corruptly gerrymandered Ohio Congressional district of Congressman Gym Jordan, people in various cults who return him to office every two years despite his personal involvement in covering up the Ohio State gymnastic teams sexual assaults. (In addition to Jordan's direct role in launching the January 6th insurrection plot to assasinate Vice-President Pence and overturn the election of Biden-Harris)

I know from personal experience of having lived in Columbus off and on and run political campaigns in Ohio with my wife Martha for more than 30 years that Jordan's district is the epicenter of the most extreme white supremacist churches in Ohio tied to the "Christian Identity" movement of which Timothy McVeigh was a member. I have published the SPLC flow charts in the past tracking these Nazi networks run under cover of churches, and I can tell you that this is what runs the Ohio GOP.

When we were organizing in that area we went head to head with them, something I'll write about if I ever publish a book.

That is Vance's base, and that is the extremist cristo-fascist layer to whom Ramaswamy (whom I will refer to in the future as "Ramshismommy") is playing to with his malignant, destructive, violence-inciting nihilistic ad campaign.

Vance's attempts to downplay it are his way of endorsing them. Because that is who he is.

Vance is a lifelong chameleon who adapts to whatever new circumstances in which he is operating in order to advance himself. So in order to become the heir apparent to Trump's presidency, he has to absorb the worst pathological features of Trump's personality disorders to win over the most virulent haters in the GOP base, from Nazis, to QAnon, to the billionaire eugenics crowd that wants a new Confederacy, to the ultra-far right Catholics and evangelicals, to the testosterone junkies of the misogynist Alpha-Male rape camp set. They are the engine of fascist Trump core activists and megadonors which is running these ops.

I have friends in Ohio who are fighting this in different ways through local campaigns. Many of them still have difficulty facing what these people are, because they have known them for so long. They are neighbors, friends, family, co-workers, and fellow church congregants who always seemed Iike "nice people." But they never got to know them as they are beneath the surface, and naively think they can convert some of the hard core. I don't rule everyone out, some might break ranks, (and if anyone can, my friends are dynamite organizers) but the worst are the churchey types and the greedy business leaders, just as they were in the Sinclair Lewis book, "It Can't Happen Here."

When you scratch off the veneer of a MAGA Christian or GOP businessperson that donates to Trump, you'll find underneath a small time Hitler. Not someone who is "confused," or "low information," which are just Newspeak euphemisms for those who decide to become fascist assholes.

So, the bottom line is that when we think about it, Ramaswamy's ads make perfect sense, because they are intended to mobilize Trump's and Vance's movevent of fascist assholes.

Ramaswamy doesn't give a you-know-what about Ohioans. He wants to be Vance's Vice-President, and his campaign is his audition or job interview. Every issue on which they take a position, from immigration to data centers, is motivated by both of their personal ambitions and desire to curry favor with the gamemasters running them. That's the real story here.

Remember two years ago when Kristi Noem was trying out for Trump's VP? What did she do to get Trump's attention? She wrote her garbage biography bragging about executing her dog for no reason. Why did she do that? Maybe it was that she was putting her own cruelty and sadism on display in order to convince Trump she was his soulmate. And because she knows that Trump personally hates dogs.

So these ads by Ramaswamy are the same thing. They are performative cosplay for Vance's handlers, his version of the school kid trying to impress his teachers by keeping his hand raised to answer every question. ""Me, me, me." He consciously picked the most hateful, provocative, and despicable line of attack, in order to appeal to the very worst people, because his identity is rooted in advancing himself in any way he sees as necessary, regardless of truth, ethics, morality, or accountability.

It is the mentality of Hitler's newspaper publishers like Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosenberg, who published anti-semitic cartoons about Jewish men preying upon, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing young blonde German girls, in order to incite attacks against Jews. This was the modern incarnation of the infamous "blood libel."

Vance and Ramaswamy are doing something on similar lines, running a propaganda/brainwashing campaign to sell the idea that every rape victim that names their accusers is likely lying, in order to either run a grift, or hurt the careers of "Christian conservatives" whom they falsely accuse for political or personal reasons.

Both Ramaswamy and Vance are running that game. Now, who are they actually performing for, who are they trying to impress? It sounds like they both have an intended audience of one. Could it be anyone else other than the Mad King, the one who has the power to anoint them as his successors, the "Rapist-In-Chief" himself?

The media is playing this as just an awful election campaign "dirty trick," a new low in misogyny which has divided the Republicans and makes them look bad. That particular line of spin is just low-level brain dead reality TV horsepoop. It is way bigger than all of that.

This is what I'm saying it is. It is a part of a raging succession fight within the GOP in which one group of Nazis is trying to out-Nazi the others in order to win Trump's favor. And also to set the stage for trying to overturn candidate Amy Acton's victory if she wins, by demonizing her as a liar and a cheat first.

Because this is such an ugly and shocking headliner, everyone will have their own take on it, their own spin, and it will be tempting for some of our readers to want to add on, or call us out for what we left out, or even to change the subject to avoid discussing what is presented here. That is expected, and also an example of the damage done by prolonged exposure to social media and internet news.

It is a Truman Show bubble. You have to step outside of it to see what is really going on. Maybe my headline for this article will help give it a bit of perspective.

Special Reports: Venezuelan Earthquake Tragedy Reexamined

New York Times, How Venezuela’s Public Housing Towers Were Built to Fail, Julie Turkewitz, Helmuth Rosales, James Glanz, Malika Khurana and Isayen Herrera, Oct. 20, 2026. These 10 public housing towers collapsed within seconds of back-to-back earthquakes in June. The Venezuelan government suggested the intensity of the quakes was to blame.

But a New York Times investigation found that the design and construction were fundamentally flawed for towers perched so close to a major fault line.

New York Times, Death Toll From Venezuela Quakes Likely Far Exceeds Official Count, James Glanz, Julie Turkewitz and Helmuth Rosales, Oct. 21, 2026. A Times analysis and U.S. Geological Survey data indicate that the official 6,509 death toll is probably a severe undercount.

Venezuela’s government says 6,509 people died in the back-to-back earthquakes in June. But calculations from multiple sources, including a New York Times analysis of residential buildings and the U.S. Geological Survey, indicate that this is likely a severe undercount.

For years the U.S.G.S. has used shaking severity, historical data and population distribution to try to estimate deaths after an earthquake. The information is typically more accurate in higher casualty incidents, like this one, said David Wald, a seismologist at the U.S.G.S.

For the Venezuela quakes, the U.S.G.S.’s median estimate is that 53,000 people died — meaning there is a 50 percent chance the actual number is higher than that, and a 50 percent chance it is lower.

The U.S.G.S. also says there is approximately an 81 percent chance that the real number of deaths is higher than 10,000.

One obstacle to calculating a reliable death count in Venezuela is the absence of an up-to-date official government census.

To address that problem, the U.S.G.S. uses a model called LandScan to “age” the most recent census forward in time. The model, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also uses independent United Nations figures to refine the estimates. LandScan uses dozens of other variables, including land use, roads and proximity to urban areas to estimate where people are likely to be when the ground shakes.

The Venezuelan government did not respond to messages detailing our findings and asking for comment.

A Times analysis of satellite imagery, ground-level footage and building type also casts doubt on the government’s official death toll.

Our examination of public housing in the hardest-hit state, La Guaira, shows that 16 public housing towers collapsed there after the quakes. Each concrete tower had 12 residential floors with eight apartments per floor, according to floor plans obtained by The Times and site observations.

To arrive at an estimated number of residents per apartment, we used a census of one of the complexes taken by its community council, which indicated that an average of 3.4 people lived in each unit. We corroborated this information with former residents and an official government statement, which indicated that around four people lived in each public housing apartment.

This means that roughly 5,200 people lived in the 16 collapsed public housing towers in La Guaira alone.

Of course, all those residents might not have been home at the time of the quakes. But witness accounts and surveillance footage indicate that at least some of the buildings, including several tall towers, collapsed immediately — leaving those who were inside little or no time to escape.

Times reporters on the ground after the quakes witnessed how these towers, called OPPPEs for the government office that built them, became some of the densest pockets of death. Bodies were pulled out of some of the buildings every day for weeks.

More Global News

New York Times, A Battle for Control of India’s Biggest Business Empire, Alex Travelli, Oct. 21, 2026. A boardroom fight, an attempted veto and government intervention have plunged the Tata Group, one of India’s most revered institutions, into a fight over its future.

Who actually controls India’s biggest company?

A bitter power struggle over the Tata Group, a 158-year-old conglomerate with more than a million employees worldwide and $180 billion in annual revenue, has become a test of who calls the shots in Indian capitalism: owners, professional managers or the government.

The fight pits the family-led charitable trusts that own two-thirds of Tata Sons, the group’s holding company, against the powerful chairman who runs its businesses. India’s government has emerged as a wild card, pressing Tata Sons to list on the stock market — a move that could permanently reshape its ownership and weaken the founding family’s control.

The conflict simmered for at least a year before bursting into the open. In August, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, one of India’s most celebrated chief executives, stunned the business world by announcing he would not seek another five-year term as chairman. He cited opposition from one board member to his staying beyond February.

That “absence of unanimous support” would hurt the company when “many strategic projects” are under “critical stages of execution,” he wrote in a letter at the time. “Clarity on leadership is important for employees, investors, partners and other stakeholders.”

A month later, he reversed course. At a Sept. 17 meeting, a majority of the board voted to reappoint him. Noel Tata, a board member and head of the Tata Trusts, a group of public charities that owns 66 percent of Tata Sons, had cast the sole dissenting vote.

Oct. 20

Top Headlines

Russian missile attack kills one, wounds 112 in Ukraine's Kharkiv, officials say. 

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: The Traitor in Chief, Paul Krugman, right,Oct. 20, 2026. Trump and his allies hate America and what it stands for. What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started. Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• New York Times, Trump’s Push for Deals With Russia Powers His Frustration With Ukraine, David E. Sanger, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. The series of recent steps by the president that seem to favor Vladimir Putinreflect his intensifying desire to normalize the relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine.

More On Trump's Sellout Of Ukraine, Europe, American National Security 

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• Public Notice, News and Opinion: The plot against Ukraine (and Europe), David R. Lurie, Oct. 20, 2026. We are now part of the axis of evil. Donald Trump has never hidden his infatuation with Vladimir Putin and his brutal dictatorial regime, or his disdain for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s resilient democracy. Last week, Trump gave up any pretense of being a “mediator” in Russia’s War on Ukraine, and openly threw in his lot with Putin. The dire significance of Trump’s actions can’t be minimized. 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: More Terrible Polling For Trump Today. If Anything The Election Is Moving Further Away From Him And The Rs, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Fourteen days to go. Yesterday Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas started early in-person voting. Today Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin join them.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: These Midterms Could Matter *A Lot*, William Kristol, right, Oct. 20, 2026. There are two weeks left until election day 2026. It seems like it could be a big moment, even perhaps an historic one.
• Defiance.org, Opinion: Trump may try to hijack the vote. And we’re going to stop the steal, Miles Taylor, right, National security expert, ex-DHS Trump administration chief of staff, NYT best-selling author. Was “Anonymous” — now urging folks to take their masks off, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is getting desperate, but we’re more prepared than ever to protect our democracy.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases: ‘Independent’? Jennifer Rubin, right,Oct. 20, 2026. 🚨 14 Days to the Midterms 🚨 No incumbent Republican Senate candidate has fared worse than Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in debates. Her fundamental dilemma is simple: After years of feigning to follow in the tradition of Maine “independence,” her record reveals she has been a rubber stamp for the Trump regime’s worst nominees and policies.
• The Bulwark, Focus Groups: Darline Graham’s Seat Isn’t Safe. These Voters Explain Why, Sarah Longwell, Oct. 20, 2026. Some former Trump supporters are still waiting for a reason to like her.
• The Counteroffensive, Ukraine aid opponents risk losing House seats, Daria Shtonda, Oct. 20, 2026. The US administration withholds Patriot missiles for Ukraine… Witkoff and Zelenskyy head to Norway, for a new round of talks… Russians can’t access money after Ukraine hits datacenters. For Ukraine, the decisive factor is not just which party prevails, but the fate of a specific group: vulnerable Republican incumbents in tight swing districts who have consistently opposed aid, amplified skepticism of Kyiv, or pushed to halt military provisions.

News Roundup

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary:Musk Ordered Slowdown of Ukraine’s Starlink Himself as Trump Snaps at Reporters and GOP Turns on Trump’s Russia Policy, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. For weeks, Elon Musk insisted he had nothing to do with throttling the satellite internet Ukraine’s soldiers depend on. He said it was the U.S. military’s call, “and ultimately POTUS.”

Special Report: Another Trump Threat To White House Press Corps

• New York Times, Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Oct. 20, 2026. President Trump has talked about replacing the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with an indoor swimming pool.

Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal,Tyler Pager, Oct. 20, 2026. Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.

Special Report: Trump's Family's Big Lie -- About Spies

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.

Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: NEWS: Trump Lashes Out as Early Voting Shatters Records, Says Russia “Has Been Fine” as Drone Kills Baby, Musk Becomes Top Target, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is furious. He was heckled six times at his own rally in Kansas last night, a state he won three times, and he lashed out, calling protesters “idiots” and telling his crowd, “It never ends.” He’s rattled for a reason: early voting is shattering records in Texas, and in North Carolina, Democrats have cast 70% of the major-party ballots so far. Meanwhile, Democrats are making it clear that if they win the House, Elon Musk, the GOP’s $276 million megadonor, will be at the top of their list. 

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Taunting Trump Over Gas Prices, Iran Braces for Aftermath of U.S. Vote, Michael Crowley, Oct. 20, 2026. The midterm elections appear to be a factor for both sides in the war as President Trump weighs his next steps. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Iranian state media is gleefully chronicling high prices at American gas pumps — and their impact on President Trump’s political standing.

More Global News

• New York Times, News Analysis: It’s Not Just France. Europe’s Political Center Is Crumbling, Steven Erlanger, Oct. 20, 2026. Europe's centrist parties are losing ground among young people and workers, who are increasingly tempted by populist promises of radical change.
• New York Times, Voters in Oil-Rich Alberta Reject Leaving Canada, Ian Austen, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. Residents of the province were asked if they wish to remain in Canada or to hold another vote on breaking away, in a referendum that left both sides unhappy.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, above, died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune.

• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: MAGA Death Cult Strikes Again as Lawful Resident Dies in ICE Custody, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 20, 2026. The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. A lawful permanent resident who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody.
• The New Republic, Trump Tries to Ban Jack Smith Testimony as BBC Lawsuit Implodes, Hafiz Rashid, Oct. 19, 2026. The BBC has subpoenaed Jack Smith as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the media company. President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.

U.S. High Tech, Media, Culture

President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Beware of AI billionaires bearing gifts, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 20, 2026. On Monday morning, Elon Musk announced in a post on his social media platform X that he plans to give American children one share of SpaceX, his rocket, satellite, and AI company. “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk wrote. “This will be the first of many.”
• The New Republic, Meta Weakly Defends Blocking No Kings Instagram in the Middle of Event, Edith Olmsted, Oct. 19, 2026. Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.

More On Trump Corruption, Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement

• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Humiliates JD Vance By Refusing To Endorse And Falling Asleep On Him, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump not only refused to endorse JD Vance for 2028, but he also fell asleep on his vice president while Vance was talking. JD Vance doesn’t get it. Trump is using his vice president as a human shield who is often sent to the worst spots on the campaign trail and sent out in front of the media to take the hit when there is bad news.
• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Same rally, different day, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Oct. 20, 2026. It’s all so eternally exhausting. Yesterday’s event featured Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife, making one of her contractually-obligated appearances with the husband for whom she has such open, burning contempt. Shouldn’t Donny have figured out by now that any attempt at affection is going to result with him being on the wrong end of a public humiliation?

Top Stories

Russian missile attack kills one, wounds 112 in Ukraine's Kharkiv, officials say. 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: The Traitor in Chief, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Trump and his allies hate America and what it stands for. 

Writing in the New York Times, David Sanger highlights the extent to which Donald Trump is going all out to support Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine:

President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.

In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.”

As Sanger notes, Trump’s support for Putin is unique in American history. Previous administrations have made deals with erstwhile adversaries, as Nixon did with China, and given up on support for failing allies, as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But never before have we outright switched sides, let alone supported an aggressor while vilifying that aggressor’s victim.

What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started.

Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, right, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the aid goes beyond intelligence sharing that has helped Iran target U.S. forces. Russia has also reportedly been sending Iran explosives and weapons components.

What would Republicans be saying if a Democratic president were supporting a foreign dictator even as that dictator was helping another nation kill American troops? They would be crying “treason.” But this is all apparently “fine” with Trump.

What’s going on here? It’s important to understand that — as Phillips O’Brien documents — Trump hasn’t “pivoted” away from Ukraine toward Russia. He has been a Putin supporter all along.

Thus when Trump says that “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine,” who, exactly, does he mean by “we”? He cut off all economic and military aid to Ukraine as soon as he took office. Here’s total support for Ukraine, by country, since January 2025:

True, the U.S. continued to share military intelligence with Ukraine while allowing Ukraine to use Elon Musk’s Starshield and permitting European nations to transfer some U.S. weapons to Ukraine. But these actions cost America nothing. The most you can say is that until recently Trump shied away from actively sabotaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

And now even that restraint is gone. According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. intelligence sharing was blocked “for some period of time,” although it appears to have resumed for now. Ukraine’s access to Starshield has been limited. And the Washington Post reports that the U.S. has been holding up European transfers of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.

There are two questions here. First, why does Trump love Putin and hate Zelenskyy? Second, why has he ripped off the mask and gone full pro-Russia in the past few weeks?

On the first question, Zelenskyy gave a blunt answer in a recent interview with the Financial Times: Trump, he asserted, has an instinctive affinity for autocrats and the super wealthy: “He speaks about it openly that he loves such people and he respects such people.” That’s clearly right.

I would add three points. First, Trump and his inner circle don’t just love autocrats. They hate democracy and rule of law — which means that they hate America and American values.

Second, Putin-worship was widespread on the authoritarian right even before Trump entered the picture, with many celebrating Russia’s anti-wokeness and perceived masculinity. Remarkably, the valorization of Russia’s supposed toughness has survived despite Russia’s repeated military humiliations. So Trump has been following a well-trodden path.

Finally, whatever else you may say about Zelenskyy, he’s a genuine hero, who showed great personal courage by staying in Kyiv when Russia invaded. And Trump surely resents the fact that Zelenskyy is everything he is not.

The second question is, why now? Why has Trump chosen this moment to switch from covert, deniable support for Putin to overtly, explicitly taking Russia’s side?

As I suggested yesterday, the answer lies precisely in Trump’s collapsing support at home. Nothing he does now is likely to avert Republican catastrophe in the midterms. Republican politicians have been going out of their way to avoid being seen with him on the campaign trail. Trump officials are already lawyering up in preparation for the probes a Democratic Congress will launch.

At this point, then, Trump effectively has nothing left to lose on the political front — and his political bankruptcy has freed him to become his worst self, indulging himself by doing what he always wanted to do — which includes supporting corrupt, murderous dictators.

And there will be much more of this to come. Trump can’t and won’t make America great again. But he can betray everything America stands for, and he’s doing it as we speak.

New York Times, Trump’s Push for Deals With Russia Powers His Frustration With Ukraine, David E. Sanger, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. The series of recent steps by the president that seem to favor Vladimir Putin reflect his intensifying desire to normalize the relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine.

He shunted aside a bipartisan law, signed just weeks ago, imposing new tariffs on Russia. He cut a deal to purchase diesel from Moscow. His negotiators agreed on the vague outlines of a deal for much of Lukoil, a battered Russian energy firm. And he called for the replacement of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whose success in taking the fight inside Russia deeply frustrates him.

President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.

In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.” He repeated the statement for emphasis. The night before, he wrote on social media that Mr. Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” because it brought him a flow of cash and arms from Europe, making no mention that Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty and even survival in a war that it did not start.

Mr. Trump’s disdain for Mr. Zelensky is hardly new. Nor is his willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Putin, for whom he has often expressed respect and even admiration.

But what is different now is Mr. Trump’s increased determination to force a deal on Mr. Zelensky, telling him that holding out to retain occupied portions of the country’s eastern provinces is not worth it — and that there is money to be made for Ukraine, as well, if it would only drop its objections to an accord, even one written largely on Russia’s terms. 

President Trump's Russian and Iranian war negotiators Jared Kushner, left, and Steve Witkoff have business ties to two of the Middle Eastern investors involved in the deal (Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin).

That will be the American message to Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday in Oslo, where Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff is expected to meet the Ukrainian president. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, will participate in the meeting remotely, the Norwegian government said in a statement.

Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, and Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, will also take part in the discussion, the statement said. (Finland has become an enthusiastic member of the NATO alliance. In World War II, it ceded about 12 percent of its territory to Russia, and has never gotten it back.)

The next day Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner will fly to St. Petersburg, Russia, to meet Mr. Putin in his hometown. There, Mr. Trump’s representatives are expected to take the next step in their efforts to show the benefits of deal-making with Mr. Putin by securing the release of a long-held American.

Mr. Trump discussed the prospect of a hostage release again on Monday, but did not say who was involved. The only American the State Department categorizes as “wrongfully detained” in Russia is Stephen Hubbard, who Russia accused of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine when he was seized in 2022. Mr. Hubbard, who is in his mid-70s, was sentenced to more than six years in a penal colony.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The timing of the release, if it happens, says volumes about Mr. Putin’s strategy. Ridding Russia of an elderly American hostage costs Mr. Putin nothing, and does no good for Ukraine. But in the midst of midterm elections in the United States it allows Mr. Trump to make the case that he is pursuing an America First foreign policy, complete with the heartwarming images of a prisoner being reunited with his family.

But the larger goal here, for Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, is to normalize a relationship that began to go off the rails more than a decade ago, when Mr. Putin took Crimea, a territory that was integrated with Ukraine during the Soviet era, and when he began to send Russian fighters into eastern Ukraine.

Europe and the United States responded with sanctions. But a year later, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany signed a deal with Mr. Putin to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, calling the Russian leader a “reliable supplier.”

The idea was to reintegrate Russia with the West, in hopes of curbing Mr. Putin’s territorial appetites. The effort failed; seven years later Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine.

Today, that history, and the rationale behind it, is replaying itself. But it is Mr. Trump who is taking the role that Ms. Merkel once played.

Mr. Trump’s ambitions are clearly bigger. There is already talk of a three-way meeting in China between Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping of China on the sidelines of a larger summit of Pacific Rim countries scheduled for next month. Mr. Trump said on Monday the goal would be to discuss the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and “denuclearization.” (He likely meant arms control, since none of the three powers seems remotely interested in eliminating their nuclear stockpiles.)

That is exactly what Mr. Putin has in mind: Expanding the discussion with the United States to other topics, apart from Ukraine, that make the long-running conflict look like just one of many issues to be managed. And should the three-way meeting happen, the image of the leaders of the three largest nuclear powers talking would likely carry the suggestion that they are carving the globe into zones of influence, much as Stalin, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt did at Yalta.

News Roundup 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary:Musk Ordered Slowdown of Ukraine’s Starlink Himself as Trump Snaps at Reporters and GOP Turns on Trump’s Russia Policy, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. For weeks, Elon Musk insisted he had nothing to do with throttling the satellite internet Ukraine’s soldiers depend on. He said it was the U.S. military’s call, “and ultimately POTUS.”

Tonight, The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk ordered the slowdown himself, and that he may have discussed it with Trump before he flipped the switch. Ukrainian officials say those restrictions left drones useless and helped Russian missiles get through their defenses.

Some of you will remember that when I spoke out about Musk’s role in this, his allies demanded that he sue me.

And the walls are starting to close in politically, too. Republicans like Don Bacon and Brian Fitzpatrick are openly breaking with Trump over his Russia policy, with Bacon saying flatly, “What I see him doing here is surrendering.” Meanwhile, Trump spent today saying it’s “time for Ukraine to end this war,” snapping at reporters in the Oval Office, and telling one, “You better be careful.”

For me, this is personal. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. That’s why I’ve decided to do a deep dive outlining all of Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials, going back decades. It’ll be out soon, and it’s one you won’t want to miss.

Journalism like this takes time and resources, and there’s no billionaire, corporation, or politician behind it. Just you.

Let’s get into it.

Elon Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine, as Republicans Revolt Over Trump’s Russia Policy

Elon Musk personally ordered the slowdown of the military-grade Starlink service Ukraine relies on, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the network beginning October 14, leaving some attack and interceptor drones virtually useless. Ukrainian officials said the restrictions allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses. The move came four days after Musk responded to Trump’s attacks on Zelenskyy by posting, “Zelensky has gone too far.” Musk had publicly claimed that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” and Trump told reporters Monday he didn’t know who was responsible but “would like to find out.” The Journal reports that Musk and Trump discussed the slowdown on a call after it became public, and one person said they discussed it before Musk imposed it.

The revelation contradicts weeks of denials and finger-pointing from Musk and the administration. Some U.S. officials told the Journal that Musk acted on his own and that Trump never ordered retribution against Ukraine, but a person familiar with the situation said Musk spoke with multiple senior administration officials, including Trump, before imposing the speed cap. During the uproar, SpaceX representatives reportedly called White House officials seeking a unified message suggesting the company and the administration had coordinated in advance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “we haven’t pulled anything back,” adding that “Starlink has the option to make decisions concerning its terms of service.” Analyst Michael Kofman said Ukrainian drones are still being throttled below the speeds they need, hampering both strikes and air defense. Ukraine’s top diplomat in Washington said Kyiv is still waiting for answers from the Pentagon and SpaceX.

Zelenskyy said U.S. intelligence warnings on Russian strikes “work now” after meeting Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in Oslo, even as Trump escalated his attacks. Speaking alongside the leaders of Norway and Finland, Zelenskyy said he was “thankful” the early warning system had been restored and that he expects “good results” on Patriot missiles and Starlink, though he said the Starlink restrictions are ongoing. He said Ukraine is “ready for negotiations” and wants trilateral talks with the U.S. and Russia, adding, “We are not losing this war, but we are losing people because Russia attacks.” Witkoff will travel to St. Petersburg on Wednesday to present updated proposals to Putin. At almost the same time, Trump said from the Oval Office that “it’s now time for Ukraine to end this war,” complaining that the U.S. has gotten “absolutely nothing back except grief, death, tremendous monetary loss.” Earlier this month, Trump said it was time for Ukraine to get “a new president.”

Republicans are breaking with Trump over Russia, with some threatening to withhold support for his agenda. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska called Trump’s diesel deal and sanctions waiver “absolutely disgraceful,” accused him of cozying up to “a war criminal” in Putin, and said, “I think the president’s leverage in this Congress is shot.” Bacon said he won’t back Trump’s priorities like a triumphal arch or White House ballroom, adding, “What I see him doing here is surrendering.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania called the situation “wildly unacceptable” and warned of “punitive budgetary action” to force answers. Sen. Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, said she would choose to pressure Russia because “I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia.” Outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy wrote that Ronald Reagan and Lindsey Graham “would be ashamed of this.”

A CNN analysis says Trump’s recent moves on Ukraine read like policy Putin could have written himself. The analysis lists what it calls an extensive set of “Trump gifts to Moscow”: a diesel deal likely to pour billions into Putin’s war chest, a short-lived energy ceasefire that paused Ukraine’s refinery strikes, Starlink restrictions, gaps in intelligence sharing that left Ukraine without missile warnings for several nights, and repeated calls for Zelenskyy to step down. “If Putin could write US policy, it might look much like this,” the analysis concludes. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that the remaining Ukrainian-held part of the Donetsk region is “the last defensible line” before “a straight shot into Kyiv,” undercutting pressure on Ukraine to give it up. The analysis argues Trump’s moves are damaging Republicans ahead of the midterms and may reflect what it calls his “last unbridled moment” to act on his sympathy for Putin.

Video Featuring Amy Acton’s Estranged Mother Turns Ohio Governor’s Race Even Uglier as Ramaswamy Campaign Stands By It

A video featuring the estranged mother of Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a liar has sparked a fierce backlash two weeks before the election. In the minute-long, ad-style video, Donna Arthur claims Acton lied about growing up homeless and tells voters, “Don’t let her become your governor.” Acton has said she hasn’t seen her mother since she was 12, when her stepfather was charged with raping her and Arthur stood by him. Court records provided by Acton’s campaign show her stepfather was indicted and fled the state before trial, and he died in 2004 without ever appearing before a judge. The video was shared widely on social media, including by Donald Trump Jr. It carries no legally required disclaimer showing who paid for it, and it has not appeared as a paid ad on Ohio television.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign won’t say whether it was behind the video, but it appeared to endorse its message. A campaign spokesperson said, “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother,” but called Acton “a serial fabulist” and said Ohioans “deserve to know” what her mother says. The campaign argued that everyone who knows Acton best, “and now her own mother,” is warning voters not to support her. The campaign didn’t answer whether Arthur was paid to appear. The main super PAC backing Ramaswamy said it didn’t make the video. A blogger who first posted it said he got it from a voter who saw it as part of a poll. Acton said this in response:

Acton’s brother and allies blasted the video as a “despicable low.” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said he and his sister were removed from their mother’s custody after the arrest, and that “our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” He called Ramaswamy “a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants,” and appears in a new Acton campaign ad saying, “Shame on Vivek.” Acton said it was “awful” to see her mother this way and accused Ramaswamy of taking advantage of “someone who’s clearly not well.” Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, called it “a dastardly ad” that “never should have been created.” Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown called it “disgusting” and urged his opponent, Sen. Jon Husted, to condemn it.

The video is the latest in a series of deeply personal attacks in one of the nation’s ugliest races. Republicans have repeatedly attacked Acton over a 2019 police call to her home in which no charges were filed, portraying her as having a substance problem. Another Ramaswamy ad featured a woman blaming Acton for her mother’s COVID death, though fact-checkers found the woman was a political operative and her mother died in Kentucky, not Ohio. The Bulwark also reported that a separate Ramaswamy ad featured a man convicted of sexually abusing a child under 13. Ramaswamy’s campaign said it removed the clips, but ad tracking shows the spot is still running unchanged. Acton has refused to debate Ramaswamy, saying, “I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is something I’m just complaining about.”

The race remains a toss-up, with Acton holding a narrow lead in most public polls. Acton, the former head of the Ohio Department of Health during the early COVID pandemic, and Ramaswamy, a billionaire former presidential candidate, are competing to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate the race a toss-up. Acton’s campaign has painted Ramaswamy as a “con man” and an out-of-touch billionaire, while his campaign accuses her of lying about her record and hiding from debates. A Democrat hasn’t won the Ohio governor’s race since 2006. One political scientist said that this late in the race, many voters have already made up their minds and tune out the flood of attack ads.

Trump Snaps at Reporters, Says Ilhan Omar Could “Go to Jail,” and Promises Tipsters Will “Become Rich” in Chaotic Oval Office Event

Trump lashed out at a string of reporters during an Oval Office event Tuesday, telling one, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful.” The outbursts began when Trump shouted down a female reporter, saying, “Wait! Shh! No, no no!” before calling on someone else. He then repeatedly targeted Andrew Feinberg of The Independent, who had asked why Trump’s new anti-fraud program pays tipsters only 1%, far less than the 10% to 25% whistleblowers can receive under existing federal law. Minutes later, Trump appeared not to recognize Feinberg and threatened him, then snapped again: “Quiet. Quiet! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” When Feinberg replied, “Not that I know of, sir,” Trump said, “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.” JD Vance later shared the exchange online, calling Feinberg an “imbecile journalist,” to which Feinberg replied that if Vance was going to insult him, he should “at least have the guts to tag my account.”

Trump launched a $25 million anti-fraud program promising tipsters a 1% commission, saying people who report fraud are “gonna become rich.” The Justice Department program, run through Fraud.gov, offers rewards to anyone who reports government fraud. “If anybody turns anybody in [for fraud of] a billion dollars, $5 billion, $100 billion, you get a 1 percent commission,” Trump said, calling it “the largest commission ever paid, probably for anything anywhere.” He claimed, without evidence, that “trillions” have been stolen by “crooked politicians.” During the event, Trump handed a $10,000 check to Nick Shirley, a 24-year-old right-wing YouTuber whose widely criticized videos about Somali daycare centers in Minnesota were followed by a rise in attacks on that community. The announcement comes as Trump faces his own growing list of corruption allegations, including the recent resignation of Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle amid pay-to-play accusations.

Trump said Rep. Ilhan Omar could be deported or “go to jail” and called Somalia “a real shithouse.” In a lengthy rant, Trump called Omar a “sick” and “very dishonest person who hates our country,” referring to the federal investigation into whether her father misstated her age on a citizenship application nearly three decades ago. “She comes from a country that is essentially not even a country,” Trump said. “It’s a real shithouse.… Then she comes over here and she wants to tell us how to run America.” He also claimed, without evidence, that 98% of Somalis in the U.S. “don’t work” and that “most of them shouldn’t be here.” In a bizarre aside, Trump suggested Minnesota once had more lakes before Somali immigrants arrived, saying, “They’ve ruined a great state.” He used the remarks to boost Republican Lisa Demuth, who is running for Minnesota governor against Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

New reporting shows the mysterious mailers targeting transgender students in Texas came from an organization that doesn’t exist. The flyers, sent to homes across Texas, claim to come from the “Texas Transgender Student Union” and offer guidance on emancipation and out-of-state medical care. The Concho Observer, a local outlet in San Angelo, found that the group’s listed address is a UPS Store in Flower Mound, Texas. The outlet estimates the mailing would cost between $3 million and $4.4 million, suggesting a well-funded, deliberate operation. The real Transgender Education Network of Texas, whose branding the flyers appear to mimic, says it had nothing to do with them or an earlier text message campaign. The mailers have sparked outrage among conservative voters as early voting began, and it remains unknown who is behind them.

Other news:

The Trump administration is telling states to prepare to handle most disasters without federal help, according to remarks by FEMA’s administrator obtained by Politico. Speaking to state officials at a conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton said “every state must have the appropriate financial reserves” and capabilities so recovery can begin without waiting on federal disaster declarations. According to Politico, the administration plans to begin cutting disaster aid in as few as six months and shift that responsibility to the states. Hamilton said he hopes for a future in which the federal government “wouldn’t require as many disasters” to be declared because states’ capabilities are “so high and so substantial.” His remarks offered the most detailed look yet at the administration’s long-planned effort to scale back FEMA’s role. The shift would leave states, many of which have limited budgets, to shoulder far more of the cost of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other disasters on their own.

Los Angeles election officials say the Justice Department’s list of suspected non-citizen voters includes a “high percentage” of people born in the United States. The DOJ sent California a list of 20,000 names last week and gave officials 48 hours to set aside ballots from anyone on it unless they could verify citizenship, then sued when the state refused. In a court filing, Los Angeles County said only about 7,000 of the names even had an address in the county. In a sample of 200 records, nearly 39% of those with meaningful birthplace information listed the United States, 43% had cancelled registrations, and 71% had never voted. Homeland Security, which compiled the list, has refused to share how it matched voter rolls to its records, and a similar list it sent Nevada turned out to include 185 people who were all citizens. A top DOJ official acknowledged there “may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.”

The man who tried to ambush Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over the Muslim Brotherhood is the son of a Republican operative recently paid $250,000 to oppose him, The Guardian reports. Thomas “Tommy” Teepell, a former aide to Sen. Josh Hawley, asked El-Sayed to “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood, sparking a five-minute exchange about religious freedom that has drawn more than 50 million views and become a highlight of El-Sayed’s campaign. His father, longtime Hawley strategist Timmy Teepell, runs a firm that was paid $250,000 last month by the dark-money group America Next for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed. America Next has reportedly tried to stir up “organic” opposition, including allegedly offering students $200 to boo El-Sayed at a Flint town hall. Nothing in the filings shows the younger Teepell himself was paid. There is no evidence El-Sayed has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, despite Trump claiming without evidence that he is “100%” connected.

Italy and France are deploying troops ahead of more cost-of-living protests planned for Saturday. Italy is sending 500 soldiers to Milan after weekend unrest in which hooded youths set fires and looted stores near the city’s cathedral, leading to 271 detentions. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is moving to approve tougher security measures, including extending preventive detention for minors and banning gatherings by people deemed a public threat. In France, the interior minister said military forces would be deployed to free up police, while the prime minister promised a “massive” police presence after riots that led to nearly 2,400 arrests. Curfews remain in place in parts of Paris and other cities. A new Italian movement has vowed to protest every Saturday “until this government of thieves collapses.”

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is facing a conservative backlash after calling for a national wealth tax and near-100% inheritance taxes. In an interview with The New York Times, Kirby called wealth inequality “a danger to society” and said, “We should have a national wealth tax – it won’t work by state because people will just move.” He added that inheritance taxes should “get close to 100% at some level,” saying, “I would pay them.” Conservatives pointed out that Kirby made $32 million last year, and commentator Glenn Beck called for a boycott of United. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called the comments “audacious” and suggested Kirby give his salary to his lowest-paid employees. The remarks come two weeks before Californians vote on a proposed 5% tax on the state’s billionaires.

Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of vaccine researchers praised by RFK Jr. and seized doses of hepatitis B vaccine. The researchers, whom Kennedy once called “the deities of vaccine research,” are at the center of a controversial study backed by $1.6 million from the CDC that would deny hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 newborns for their first six weeks of life. Hepatitis B infects about one in five adults in Guinea-Bissau and can cause liver cancer and failure, while vaccination at birth is safe and highly effective. The World Health Organization called any study that withholds the vaccine “unethical,” warning it exposes newborns to “serious and potentially irreversible harm.” Guinea-Bissau’s health minister has denied that the trial will move forward. Kennedy has repeatedly cited the group’s research, including when he cut U.S. funding to the global vaccine alliance Gavi.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey spared the life of a death row inmate, citing doubts about the evidence against him. Ivey commuted Toforest Johnson’s death sentence to life in prison without parole, saying there was “not enough direct evidence to carry out the most serious punishment.” Johnson was convicted of the 1995 murder of a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy and has long maintained he was on the other side of town at the time. The current district attorney, along with a former Alabama attorney general and former chief justices, has supported his bid for a new trial. The key prosecution witness, who claimed to overhear Johnson confess on a phone call, was paid $5,000, and his lawyers say the state hid that motive. Ivey, who has overseen 27 executions, said her decision “is not a determination of innocence,” and Johnson’s attorneys vowed to keep fighting to clear his name.

Kyle Kennedy, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and an advocate for education and disability rights, has died at 42. According to her obituary, she died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts on September 21, though her cause of death was not announced. Kennedy suffered a severe spinal cord injury in 2020 that left her with long-term paralysis and other medical challenges. She built a career in early childhood education, starting with Teach for America in New York City public schools, and earned master’s degrees from Pace and Harvard. After her injury, she advocated for people with disabilities, including testifying at the Massachusetts statehouse on discrimination in health care. She is survived by her two sons, her mother, and her siblings.

Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million AI-generated “slop” and spam tracks from its recommendations this year. The company said it identified the tracks by analyzing songs listeners frequently skipped or ignored, which consistently overlapped with AI-generated audio. Spotify combined that data with metadata and outside AI-detection tools to keep such content out of users’ recommendations. The flood of AI music threatens human artists’ earnings, since royalties are based partly on their share of total streams. Spotify has also begun labeling suspected AI artists with an “AI Persona” badge and excluding them from recommendations by default. “As AI makes music more abundant, we believe listeners will value human artistry even more,” the company said.

A Connecticut woman accused of holding her stepson captive for more than 20 years is set to go to trial in February. Kimberly Sullivan is charged with kidnapping, assault, unlawful restraint, and cruelty after her stepson told police he had been abused, starved, and held captive since he was 11. Police said he weighed just 68 pounds at 5-foot-9 when he was found, after setting a fire in his room to escape. Photos released by police showed squalid rooms and doors locked from the outside. Sullivan has pleaded not guilty and rejected two plea deals that would have sent her to prison for 10 to 20 years. If convicted, she faces more than 45 years in prison.

British police have rearrested two men on suspicion of helping Iranian intelligence in a suspected plot against a U.S.-run air base in England. The men, a 24-year-old British national and a 25-year-old dual British-Iranian national, were arrested under the National Security Act. The incident occurred in late September at RAF Fairford, a base used to launch bombing missions against Iran during this year’s war. Police found gasoline in three vans at the site but no explosives, and the U.S. later pulled its bombers from the base. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, though Iran denies involvement. Britain’s MI5 chief said more than 50 people have been arrested over Iran-linked plots in the past year.

Prince Harry says he wants to reconcile with his brother Prince William and his father, King Charles. In an interview with GQ about grief and family, Harry said, “Some people don’t want it to work out – I want it to work out.” He added that “with everything else that’s going on in the world, the most important thing is to reconcile.” Harry, Meghan, and their children moved back to the U.K. in August, six years after stepping away from royal duties. Asked whether the rift could be repaired, he said, “Scars stick around forever,” but encouraged everyone to let go of the past. A spokesperson later said his “some people” comment was not a swipe at his brother or any other family member.

The woman who accused Cornell fraternity members of gang-raping her says the university’s president appeared to question her account. In a letter to the faculty senate, the woman, known as Jane Doe, said her sorority’s former president told her that Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff asked, “Why did she wait so long to report it?” She wrote that she “felt unsupported and disbelieved.” Cornell disputed the account, saying Kotlikoff’s question was directed at bystanders who didn’t use the school’s anonymous tip line despite social media chatter about the incident. Doe’s civil lawsuit accuses seven members of the now-shuttered Chi Phi fraternity of drugging and assaulting her in 2024, allegations several of the men deny. The faculty senate is weighing a possible no-confidence vote, and Cornell has hired former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to lead an independent review.

An elderly California couple pleaded not guilty to murdering their son-in-law, a New York Times engineer, at a park. Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, are accused of shooting Jonathan McKinsey in a crowded Dublin, California, parking lot in September as he was leaving a supervised visit with his children. Prosecutors say the couple waited for him, while their attorney says they did not premeditate the shooting and acted out of fear after McKinsey allegedly threatened Chen’s life three times. McKinsey was in a bitter divorce and custody fight with their daughter and was facing misdemeanor child abuse charges that limited him to supervised visits. Police say Zhang admitted to the shooting. If convicted, both could face life in prison without parole.

Pennsylvania health officials are warning of a rise in measles among pregnant women and in rare cases of congenital measles in newborns. The state says 66 pregnant women have been infected since its outbreak began in April, raising the risk of miscarriage, early labor, and low birth weight. Doctors say at least six babies have been born with measles, two of whom ended up in intensive care with pneumonia, and at least one baby has died. Congenital measles was rare even before vaccines, because most women had been infected as children, and is now re-emerging as vaccination rates fall. The U.S. has recorded more than 4,400 measles cases this year, including nearly 1,300 in Pennsylvania. Officials urge women to get vaccinated before becoming pregnant, since the vaccine can’t be given during pregnancy.

A drone strike on a market in the disputed Abyei region killed more than 150 people, South Sudanese officials say. Officials blamed Sudan’s military for the attack, which they say hit a market north of Abyei town on Monday, displacing about 8,000 people. Diplomatic sources told Reuters the strike hit a fuel depot that had previously been used to supply Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The death toll more than doubled overnight as fires continued to burn and rescuers struggled to recover bodies. Doctors Without Borders said it was treating more than 20 wounded, many with burns. Sudan’s civil war, which began in April 2023, has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and increasingly spilled across its borders.

Israeli fire killed at least four Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, including a married couple and a 17-year-old, despite an ongoing ceasefire. Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed Akram Yassin and his wife in their Gaza City apartment, and Israel said Yassin was a senior official in Hamas’s security apparatus. A 17-year-old boy was killed by Israeli gunfire in Khan Younis, and another person was killed east of Gaza City. “We’re supposed to be in a ceasefire period, but honestly, we are not seeing a ceasefire or anything,” said the brother of one of the victims. Israel accuses Hamas of rearming and launching attacks, which Hamas denies. Gaza health officials say at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire began a year ago, while Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed.

More On Trump's Sellout Of Ukraine, Europe, American National Security 

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

Public Notice, News and Opinion: The plot against Ukraine (and Europe), David R. Lurie, Oct. 20, 2026. We are now part of the axis of evil.

Donald Trump has never hidden his infatuation with Vladimir Putin and his brutal dictatorial regime, or his disdain for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s resilient democracy.

Before entering the White House for the second time in 2025, Trump agreed with Putin’s fictional grievances over the expansion of NATO — which provided the pretense for Putin’s assault on his neighbor, saying “I could understand their feeling.” Nonetheless, the Trump regime still purported to be supporting Ukraine’s defense.

But last week, Trump gave up any pretense of being a “mediator” in Russia’s War on Ukraine, and openly threw in his lot with Putin.Putin needs Trump's help more than everPutin needs Trump's help more than everDavid R. Lurie·January 14, 2025Read full story

The dire significance of Trump’s actions can’t be minimized. Trump has declared his desire to make the United States an ally in Russia’s ever more brutal effort to annihilate Ukraine, including by bolstering Russia’s flagging economy with US funds, and using Ukraine’s dependence on US defense systems against it by hobbling the country’s successful offensive and defensive actions.

But there may be a silver lining in a very dark cloud: Ukraine’s true supporters are being forced to face facts many have long avoided.

Over the past two years, many have clung to the false proposition that pandering and supplication could induce Trump to change his mind and support Ukraine. That baseless theory allowed some Europeans to avoid the reality that they must take on the full burden — including the costs and risks — of supporting Ukraine, or face the inevitability that Russia will come after them next.

The false notion that Trump was not fully committed to Putin also allowed many Republican supporters of Ukraine to justify looking the other way while Trump uttered his endearments to the Russian dictator.

Now that the Trump/Putin alliance has been indelibly formalized, denial is no longer a remotely reasonable option.The fake peace plan

Trump’s announcement of his full-blown alliance with Putin was preceded by an attempt by his incompetent and absurdly corrupt team of “envoys,” real estate investor Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to advance a predictably bogus Ukraine “peace plan.”

On October 9, Witkoff and Kushner made a show of inviting representatives of Ukraine, as well and European and NATO representatives whom they had previously frozen out of their “mediation” efforts, to a meeting at Witkoff’s Florida golf club.

The purpose, as columnist (and Kushner mouthpiece) David Ignatius explained in a recent column, was to announce a “peace” initiative.

As Ignatius touted, instead of going along with Putin’s demand for all of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, the Trumper plan offered Ukraine the “carrot” of a ceasefire based on the current lines — “guaranteed” by the US (whatever that is worth).

The only problem with the “plan” was that Putin has resolutely refused such terms in the past, and there’s no indication he’s changed his mind.

Ingnatius asserted that the Trumper “envoys” had extended a generous offer of funding the rebuilding of Ukraine once Russia’s campaign of devastation ends. What Ignatius failed to mention, but later emerged from press reports, is that Kushner and Witkoff also demanded (as they have in the past) that Europe hand over to Trump as yet undisclosed portions of the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets currently held in Belgium.

In sum, their “peace plan” was to use those monies — which rightfully belong to Ukraine — to fund the “rebuilding” effort, presumably after skimming a large amount off the top for Trump cronies.The one-sided “ceasefire”

To cap off this great proposal, Witkoff and Kushner reportedly announced that the “peace plan” would involve an immediate halt on some of the most devastating attacks in the war … but solely by Ukraine.

For months, Ukraine has been striking key elements of Russia’s war economy, particularly its oil and gas industry, by attacking hydrocarbon industry plants and other infrastructure, including refineries and tankers. As a result, Russia’s ability to generate oil revenues on the black market is becoming impaired, as is Russia’s ability to produce the refined fuel that is crucial to the operation of its economy and prosecution of its war of conquest against Ukraine.

One would expect that Kushner and Witkoff, as supposed “mediators,” would want Ukraine to continue its strikes. After all — as demonstrated during Zelenskyy’s notorious February 2025 Oval Office encounter with Trump and JD Vance — Ukraine needs to have such “cards” of its own both to defend itself and obtain leverage over Russia in any actual negotiations.

But the very opposite was true. Over at least the past several months, it has come to light that US representatives from Vance on down have been demanding that Ukraine cease attacking Russian refineries. And during the Florida golf course meeting, Kushner and Witkoff formalized that demand for what Trump later called an “energy ceasefire.”

The problem, of course, is that such a one-sided “deal” would leave Russia free to continue hitting Ukraine’s heating and electrical infrastructure in advance of the winter, as Putin’s regime has been doing with ever greater ferocity — including immediately after Trump announced the “ceasefire.”

The peace “proposal,” therefore, was actually a proposal for Ukraine to hobble its own military and defense activities, while Russia assaults Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure.

Trump’s “diesel deal”

But Trump himself all but put the kibosh on his purported mediators’ “peace plan” by announcing his intention for the US to join Iran, North Korea, and China in becoming an open ally in — and profiteer from — Russia’s “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine.

The vehicle for that announcement was Trump’s declaration that he had reached a “diesel deal” with Russia, pursuant to which the US would purchase diesel fuel from Russia and facilitate the sale of the fuel by Russia to other countries.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States has cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas and has strongly pressured allies, particularly Europeans, to do the same. Some countries, particularly Germany, have substantially reconfigured their economies to end dependence on Russian hydrocarbons.

Furthermore, just weeks ago, Trump signed into law the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which was to impose massive secondary tariffs on countries that continued to purchase Russian oil and gas, including China and India. Trump’s announcement was, therefore, a complete about-face, rendering the US into a buyer and marketer of the very same Russian oil products the US has pressured others to shun.

It was hard to make sense of Trump’s actions in light of actual energy market realities.

Because of Ukraine’s successful refinery strikes, as Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged during two Sunday interviews, Russia has been experiencing a serious shortage of diesel.

Indeed, Putin has had to turn to other countries, including South Korea, for supplies of the fuel. Furthermore, the US produces more diesel that it consumes, so it’s unlikely that Russian diesel would be imported to the US even if it was available.

But Trump’s actual purpose was plainly not to increase US diesel supplies, or otherwise lower consumer prices, but rather to make clear his intention to definitively change sides and become Russia’s wartime ally — and to undermine the international sanctions regime against Russia that the US worked so hard to implement over the past nearly five years.

This became all the more clear when reports began leaking out that Trump’s “peace” envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, have been working on a plan with their close associate, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to pressure Germany to start buying Russian gas again — but this time in a commercial arrangement that will give Trump-associated American firms a cut. This jibes completely with another Kushner/Witkoff scheme that was recently leaked to sell the assets of a large Russian oil company, Lukoil, to an American investor named Todd Boehly who has donated millions to Trump.

If Russia is going to be an ally, why shouldn’t Trumpers get a piece of the resulting gusher of oil profits?Trump loves Xi because he wants to be himTrump loves Xi because he wants to be himNoah Berlatsky·Sep 28Read full story

Trump capped off the week by announcing last Friday that he was “implementing” the Graham Act by suspending its provisions and preventing the sanctioning of purchasers of Russian goods, including the diesel fuel Trump has effectively been marketing for his ally Putin’s part.

The Graham Act requires the president to provide certification that any such waiver “is in the national interests of the United States” and to report to Congress on why that’s the case. But Trump made a mockery of these requirements by simply declaring that his about-face in US policy is in the national interest without any substantial explanation.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in typically disingenuous fashion, later said that Trump “wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” despite the fact that the president signed a law calling for those sanctions and tariffs just days ago.

But, of course, by that time, everyone knew Trump’s actual purpose was to help Putin vanquish Ukraine and endanger the rest of Europe.

The scheme to hobble Ukrainian defenses

Trump’s decision to ally the US with Russia became clear last week, when the Defense Department — which uses its sophisticated aerial intelligence to warn Ukraine of incoming Russian ballistic missile attacks — repeatedly failed to provide such warnings in advance of massive Russian assaults on Kyiv. That came on the heels of reports that Kushner and Witkoff had threatened a complete cutoff of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine during the “peace” talks in Florida.

Then, on October 12 — entirely without warning — the Ukrainian armed forces began to incur sudden speed and connection interruptions in the SpaceX-owned Starlink systems used for navigation of many Ukrainian drones. As a result, Ukraine’s ability to both intercept incoming Russian drone attacks and conduct the midrange attacks the country has been pursuing with great success on Russian military logistics hubs were drastically impaired.

The unexplained cutoff was met with such anger and dismay by Ukraine and its allies that even Putin-friendly oligarch Elon Musk distanced himself from it, stating it was ordered by the US military. Defense Department sources then pointed the finger at, you guessed it, the White House.

Rubio later acknowledged that the US government has wholly cut off Ukraine from the “military” elements of Starlink. Rubio went on to say that it is “under discussion right now how [Ukraine] would want to use” the services Trump has cut off, more than implying that Trumpers are continuing to try to blackmail Ukraine into a one way “energy ceasefire.”

Just yesterday, reports emerged the United States has been holding off on giving necessary approvals to Ukraine of the transfer of Patriot missile interceptors — which provide virtually the only effective defense to increasing Russian ballistic missile attacks. This comes as the US itself has largely refused to provide these interceptors to Ukraine from its own stockpiles.

Also on Monday, Trump opined that Russia "hasn't been doing much" to Ukraine and that its brutal war of annihilation is “fine.”

Facing facts

During a Sunday morning interview Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked if Ukraine is an ally of the United States. He refused to give a straight answer, but effectively responded in the negative by berating Zelenskyy.

Trump himself is far less cagey than Bessent on the topic of who his allies are. He recently announced that he was going to invite Putin to attend the G20 meeting, to be held in December at his own Doral golf club. It is now clear that if Putin attends, it will be in his newly anointed role as US, or rather Trump, ally.

Trump’s open effort to join nations like Iran, North Korea, and China in aiding Putin’s murderous assault on Ukraine is nothing short of disastrous, and it will leave a lasting moral stain on the United States. But there may be something of a silver lining to this dark cloud.

Since Trump returned to the presidency, many of Ukraine’s supporters — including some allies in Europe and Republicans in the US — have clung to the theory that, despite Trump’s fondness for Putin, he was not ineluctably committed to a pro-Russian position. All that was needed, these “optimists” argued, was continued sweet-talking and submission from Ukraine’s leaders — including a lot of plaintive “thank yous” — and Trump would come around.

This never made much sense, particularly given the ample evidence that Russia helped Trump get elected, and continues to cultivate him through elaborate disinformation campaigns and by offering lucrative financial “deals” to the likes of Kushner, Witkoff and other Trump cronies.

But it was also, in certain respects, a reassuring fiction.Diesel Don is tanking the GOPDiesel Don is tanking the GOPTom Schaller·Oct 3Read full story

Many European countries have been notably hesitant to take all of the steps necessary to assist Ukraine in defending itself against Russia. Those include sharing weapons systems and stocks of anti-missile defense weapons (if the US allows it), and by providing Ukraine with access to frozen Russian assets, which are needed both to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat and fully fund the country’s defense.

That European hesitation has continued despite, and possibly in some respects because, Russia has been increasing its so-called hybrid war on other European countries, consisting of everything from cyber attacks to kinetic terror attacks on airports and infrastructure. The use of the term “hybrid warfare” itself reflects a form of self-denial by Europeans, many of whom are hesitant to acknowledge that they are now effectively at war with Russia.

Trump’s now open alliance with Russia may increase the impetus for European leaders to take more steps necessary to provide Ukraine — which after all is the frontline defender of the entire continent against Russian aggression — the resources it requires to prevail. But even if such full-throated resolve is forthcoming, it could also be too late given that (with the help of Russia) pro-Russian politicians may soon come to power in France and potentially Germany.

There also remains a chance, albeit a small one, that some of the vast majority of Republicans who have long claimed to support Ukraine against Russia’s murderous assault will finally stand up to Trump, even feebly. Lindsey Graham’s sister, who Trump plucked out of obscurity to become her late brother’s successor, took a first step in that direction last week by opposing Trump’s “diesel deal” with Putin. A drubbing in the midterms and Trump’s descent into the political basement could encourage that process.

Recent history makes it hard to say that optimism is warranted. But continued, and ever greater, efforts by Ukraine’s supporters are nonetheless essential. The stakes not only for Ukraine, but also the world, could not be higher.

 Proof, Investigative Commentary: Second Treason Scandal Hits Donald Trump and the White House, Seth Abramson, left, Oct. 16-17, 2026. A Trump-Israel Treason scandal that’s already embroiled Trump, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee deputy David Milstein has deepened—even as a new Treason scandal involving Russia blows up.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: More Terrible Polling For Trump Today. If Anything The Election Is Moving Further Away From Him And The Rs, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Fourteen days to go. Yesterday Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas started early in-person voting. Today Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin join them.

Millions and millions will be voting now as we hurdle deeper into the general election. Let’s now spend a little time looking at where we are with two weeks of voting left.

If anything -- despite the billions in ads, his intense campaigning, the escalating voter bribes, his corrupt control over legacy and social media -- Trump just keeps dropping as we get closer to the election. It is a bit stunning. On Sunday we reviewed the NBC and ABC/WaPo polls which had him at 34% and 33%, the worst showing for Trump in these polls this cycle.

Today we see decline in two more polls. The first is Reuters/Ipsos, and just look the trend lines in this data:

The second is the daily Civiqs track where Trump also hit a new low today:

Reuters/Ipsos also found the generic blowing open for us:

This graph looks a lot like the Gallup Party ID graph we’ve been gawking at this past week.

We got a very encouraging poll of Ohio from Marist, a highly regarded independent pollster:A respected Alaska poll has our gubernatorial candidate up 10 points, 55%-45%, when ranked choice voting is played all the way through (no data on the Senate race, assume we will get that tomorrow):

We are starting to get enough early in-person voting to start diving into the early vote in some states. For our early vote analysis our baseline will always be 2022, we use TargetEarly “modeled party” data, and we should assume with independents breaking 2:1 Dem right now that in each state we pick up between 1 and 3 points net in share from the unaffiliated vote. Let’s look at two high performing states now.

Georgia. Aggregate vote higher than 2022, Dem share up 6 points over 2022:

North Carolina. Aggregate vote way up over 2022, Dems running 19 points over 2022. Anderson Clayton is bringing it!

Another encouraging bit of data is the strong performance of Hispanic voters across the country who we know are trending very Democratic this time. Traditionally a late voting electorate the Hispanic share of the 2026 vote is 22% higher today than at this point in 2022:

I know there are encouraging signs from the first day of voting in Texas but I want to let a little more vote come in before diving in there. I am struggling to figure out how to convey all this to you each day for there is so much data, and more is coming in every day!Subscribed

With 14 days to go here’s the bottom line my friends - if anything the election is moving further away from Trump and the Rs right now, despite their enormous cash advantage, Trump’s ferocious campaigning, their escalating bribes of the electorate, and their control over legacy and social media. It’s stunning. And righteous, for we are on the cusp of having the election we all wanted to have, and the Trump and the Rs certainly deserve.

Which is why we just need to put our heads down now, my friends, drive the early vote, support our candidates and state parties, and go win this thing, together!

Yes, It’s Time To Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight The Fuckery That Is Already Here  

Defiance.org, Opinion: Trump may try to hijack the vote. And we’re going to stop the steal, Miles Taylor, right, National security expert, ex-DHS chief of staff, NYT best-selling author. Was “Anonymous” — now urging folks to take their masks off, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is getting desperate, but we’re more prepared than ever to protect our democracy.

In 2020, Donald Trump’s mob chanted “stop the steal” while he tried to steal an election he lost. Two weeks out from the midterms, that phrase is about to be turned against him.

I want you to zoom out for a moment on what Trump has said and done this election cycle. It’s the best preview you can get of what he might try to do in two weeks. It’s scary. But it’s also been met with an unprecedented response.

In January, he told the New York Times he regretted not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020. Weeks later, armed FBI agents raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and carted off more than 600 boxes of ballots and voter rolls, proof that he’s willing to lay hands on the actual votes. In February, he said Republicans should “take over the voting” and “nationalize” elections, and then he signed an executive order to gut mail-in voting. In the meantime, his allies pushed the SAVE Act to bolt new ID requirements onto registration and purge the rolls.

And then his Justice Department demanded every state’s voter file and sued roughly 30 states that refused. Last week, it gave California officials 48 hours to act on a list of 20,000 supposed “noncitizen” voters or face prosecution. ICE has also bought voter data, ingested more than 50 million voter records, opened “voter fraud” investigations in nine states and run voter rolls through USCIS citizenship databases known to be faulty and flag actual citizens. Meanwhile, the administration has sidelined CISA (the agency that guards elections from foreign interference) and has threatened election workers with prosecution, including refusing to rule out sending armed agents to the polls, which Steve Bannon says is the plan.

That’s just an off-the-cuff summary. And much of it rests on the phantom menace of the “noncitizen voter,” a threat that doesn’t exist and has never been shown to have affected the results of an American election. Ever. Yet the Trump administration appears to be planning to use that non-existent danger to take dramatic action if they don’t like the results of the midterms.

Already, this is the most sweeping campaign of election interference by a sitting president in American history. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s colliding with the most sweeping mobilization ever assembled to stop one. He’s been getting crushed in the courts, as groups have sued him top to bottom over his attempts at voter suppression.

Just look at DEFIANCE.org alone and what we’re up to. I want you to do that because it’s a powerful reminder of how much more prepared the pro-democracy side is this time around than in 2020. In the past few months alone, our members have:

• funded independent media in battleground states…
• pushed young voters in a major mobilization to the polls…
• backed turnout and election-security efforts in crucial swing states…
• helped sue the Trump administration over its illegal election orders…
• supported the May Day walkouts as a rehearsal for post-election protests…
• partnered with groups briefing officials in all 50 states so that lawsuits are ready to be filed against Trump’s meddling, including the abuse of “emergency powers”
• created and funded FAFO to prepare local prosecutors to go after federal agents who break the law at the polls…
• backed sheriffs’ plans to stop unlawful ballot seizures…
• launched pro-bono defense for any poll worker Trump retaliates against (and a channel for DOJ and FBI employees to blow the whistle on election interference)…
• stood with Latino voters facing intimidation…
• funded an off ramp for Americans leaving MAGA…
• bankrolled turnout in Texas, Georgia and the Black church…
• put all 3.5 million Epstein files on the road and parked them in Dallas outside Trump’s midterm convention to call out corruption…
• …and tomorrow, we’ll release the first teasers from CORRUPTIONLAND, our midterms “closing argument” — a documentary about Trump and his enablers’ abuses of power.

And that’s just what one small organization has helped make happen.

Multiply it across the whole pro-democracy movement, and you’ll begin to see what Trump is up against. He’s facing hyper-prepared election officials… prosecutors and sheriffs… armies of lawyers with briefs already drafted… millions of Americans ready to fill the streets… and an independent media operation big enough to shoot down the president’s lies in real time. This isn’t a repeat of 2020, when people scrambled to respond to Trump’s bogus election claims.

This year, a corrupt president is walking into a pro-democracy buzzsaw. And he’s desperate because he knows he’s losing.

So as we go into the final two weeks before the midterms, let me just say this: if Donald Trump tries to steal this election, WE will come together to turn his old catch phrase against him. WE will “stop the steal.” And if he lays a hand on our ballots, WE will lay down the law.Inb

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: These Midterms Could Matter *A Lot*, William Kristol, right, Oct. 20, 2026. There are two weeks left until election day 2026. It seems like it could be a big moment, even perhaps an historic one.

Or are we too swept up in the moment? It’s only a midterm election, after all. And midterms come and go, oscillating back and forth, absorbing for a moment and then pretty quickly forgotten. History with a capital ‘H’ is surely made by presidential elections, not midterms. We think of our political eras as beginning in 1876, or 1932, or 1980. Who today remembers 1874, or 1930, or 1978?

Take 1930. It was important in its own right, and a harbinger of things to come. That midterm saw Democratic gains of 8 Senate seats, 52 House seats, and seven governorships. It effectively ended a decade of Republican political dominance. The new Congress—though not under full Democratic control—began passing some progressive legislation. In New York, Franklin Roosevelt, who two years earlier had been elected with a margin of less than one percent of the vote, won re-election with a margin of 23 percent, laying the groundwork for his winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, and thus for the New Deal, and ultimately for the history of the next several decades.

Or consider 2010. The Republican party rebounded from disastrous defeats in 2006 and 2008 to win 63 House seats and control of that body, along with six Senate seats and six governorships. That off-year election turned out to forecast a decade and a half of Republican political dominance. Barack Obama’s re-election was the exception to the rule: Over the subsequent sixteen years, Republicans controlled the House for twelve and the Senate for ten. And ideologically and temperamentally, the Tea Party movement was something of a harbinger of the Trumpist takeover of the GOP. When the history of the Trumpist decade 2016–2026 is written, 2010 will be the first chapter. Or perhaps the second, after the midterm elections of 1994.

We can’t know what’s going to happen on Election Day in two weeks, let alone over the next two years. Democrats did well in 2018, but that didn’t amount to the decisive repudiation of Trump many of us then hoped. History doesn’t move in straight or smooth lines. Nor does it repeat itself. I’m not even sure it rhymes. The future is undetermined.

But while midterms may not be the moment recognized by history, they can matter historically. They can signal the waning of an old era. And they can be a preamble, a prelude, to a new one. This year may be no exception.

Assuming the electoral repudiation of Trump’s Republican party is as decisive as now looks likely, Trump’s standing in the nation and his party will be weakened. He’ll still be president and can do a lot of damage to the country and the world in his last two years. And he’ll still mostly control the Republican party. But it’s hard to see him having the kind of dominance going forward he’s had for the past decade. This doesn’t mean we’ll see a responsible or even defensible Republican party any time soon. But it means turmoil ahead in the GOP.

And unless Trump’s public approval recovers, Democrats will have a good shot at winning the presidency in 2028. Parties tend not to retain the presidency when they have to face the voters with very unpopular incumbent presidents—whether the incumbents are on the ballot (1932, 1980, 1992) or not (1952, 1968, 2008). And if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, he’s very likely to have majorities in both houses of Congress, and Democratic governors in a substantial majority of the largest states.

No less important than a possible electoral inflection point is a likely ideological one. It’s obvious that in many important areas of national life we’re going in the coming years to have fundamental debates and face new choices: regarding America’s role in the world, the problems of excessive oligarchic wealth and power, radically new challenges like artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of the American experiment.

It also seems likely that 2028 will mark the end of the long period of Baby Boomer dominance of our politics and society, the demographic end of the Clinton-George W. Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump era. January 2029 will surely see a younger president than any of these men—perhaps much younger, formed in a different era. And one sees harbingers of this generational transfer of power in races across the nation this year.

So 2026 probably won’t be a red-letter date in the history books. But 2028 could be one. If it is, it will be due in part to groundwork that was laid this year. So if future historians write of a No Kings era beginning in 2028, those of us who are still around can quietly interject to say: Don’t forget 2026.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Siding With Russia Is a Double Betrayal… America is turning its back on its allies and its values, argues MARK HERTLING.
• Republicans Finally Have Their First “Goth Groypette”... House Candidate Kelley Dennison has embraced the movement’s symbolism. Its leaders are fixated on her weight and tattoos, reports WILL SOMMER.
• Trump Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes… Trump’s decline is accelerating, and RICK WILSON joins GEORGE CONWAY on Psycho Politics to explain why he sees a GOP catastrophe ahead.
• A Reckoning Is Coming… KARA SWISHER joins CATHERINE RAMPELL to warn Elon Musk to batten down the hatches.
• You Can’t Hide Your Lyin’ Eyes, JD… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily to discuss JD Vance’s galling attempts to pretend he didn’t know Trump was using his office to enrich himself or that the administration had made major mistakes in its war in Iran.

QUICK HITS

WORSE THAN EVER: As Russia’s war on Ukraine grinds on, Russian strikes on population centers continue to kill civilians by the hundreds. At least 328 were killed and 2,105 injured in September alone, per UN human-rights monitors, who added that the first two weeks of October were even worse: “among the deadliest for civilians in recent years.”

Donald Trump isn’t concerned. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” he told reporters yesterday. He’d be happy, he said, to take the trilateral meeting between the United States, Russia, and China that Vladimir Putin recently suggested, but he doesn’t know why the subject of Ukraine would even come up much: “I would do it, not so much for Ukraine. . . . We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization.” (Trump didn’t elaborate on which of the three powers he sees as likely to consider giving up its nuclear weapons, or why he thinks there is the remotest possibility of that happening.)

It’s not like Trump had nothing to say on Ukraine, of course. He got in a few extra punches against the embattled supposed U.S. ally: “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.” We’ll certainly remember the disgrace of a president who says things like this for a long, long time.

NETANYA-WHO?: Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t split openly on much. But after Trump made a glowing endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection Sunday—calling him “a Great Warrior Prime Minister, and an even greater Partner for Peace”—Vance quietly declined to share in his boss’s enthusiasm. Asked about the endorsement by pool reporters yesterday, Vance “declined to endorse Netanyahu and replied that he endorses American candidates and is not getting involved in Israeli elections.”

Vance is not always so circumspect. Since becoming vice president, he has frequently thrown his support behind hard-right candidates and parties abroad, campaigning this year for Viktor Orbán in Hungary and speaking last year on behalf of Germany’s growing Alternative für Deutschland party. But Vance—who is far more attuned to the currents of the online right than Trump is, and who unlike Trump has to worry about winning Republicans’ votes going forward—seems far more cautious about tying himself to Israel’s controversial leader.

THE SCAPEGOAT OLYMPICS: With a likely blue wave looming just over the horizon, everyone is already scrambling for positioning to shape the narrative of who gets to take credit—and who will have to take blame. Last week, our Lauren Egan had a great newsletter on the credit side of things, focusing on the proxy fight over Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (Short version: If he wins, progressives will see it as a signal that their brand of politics can win even in tough, purple races; if he loses, centrists will be quick to brand him a cautionary tale.)

Over on Team Red, Politico reports, there’s a grumpier, more vicious fight brewing: Who will be the fall guy?

Much of the GOP’s ire is focused on a couple Senate candidates who, strategists grumble, shouldn’t have let their races get close in the first place: Ken Paxton in Texas and Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas. Much of the cash being trucked in to try to drag that pair over the finish line could have been extremely helpful elsewhere: “All of this money that was expected to go to the House, for the most part, is now being wasted on the Senate because they fucked up so bad,” one operative working on House races complained.

Trump has his own scapegoats in mind. In a Truth Social post last week, he berated Sen. John Cornyn—whom Paxton humiliated in the Texas primary after securing a late Trump endorsement—for failing to throw his enthusiastic support behind the guy who beat him. “If Ken Paxton loses,” Trump fumed, “it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”

If you’ve paid any attention to the last decade of Cornyn’s career as a loyal footsoldier for Trump, this is a particularly funny line of attack. Read the whole thing.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases: ‘Independent’? Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 20, 2026. 🚨 14 Days to the Midterms 🚨 No incumbent Republican Senate candidate has fared worse than Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in debates. Her fundamental dilemma is simple: After years of feigning to follow in the tradition of Maine “independence,” her record reveals she has been a rubber stamp for the Trump regime’s worst nominees and policies.

In the first Trump term, she voted to confirm both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, two obviously anti-choice justices selected in large part because they could be relied upon to reverse Roe v. Wade. She regrets nothing, as the New York Times reported in June:

“I do not regret that vote,” Ms. Collins, widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican senator up for re-election this year, said when asked about the episode by The Portland Press Herald. “I do disagree with Justice Kavanaugh’s vote.” . . .

“When I look at a justice, I look at their qualifications, their integrity, their background, their experience in reaching a decision,” she said. “Obviously, I’m disappointed in that decision.”

“Disappointed” does not begin to describe the reaction of millions of women and their loved ones. Thanks to Collins’s votes, women denied access to abortions have died, suffered serious health complications, and otherwise had their constitutional rights stripped from them. “Disappointed” does not capture the reaction of Maine pro-choice voters who believed her gibberish over the years about defending a woman’s right to choose.

Moreover, Collins now paints herself as a willing dupe, insisting Kavanaugh did not lie to her in saying Roe was settled law. “I do not feel that he lied, but I think that he should not have said it was settled law because, to me, that meant that it would not be overturned,” she lamely offered in a debate. “But to be fair, you cannot ask a nominee how he might vote on some hypothetical future case.” But she did ask him, hypothetically; he misled her, and she doesn’t regret her vote. Independent-minded Mainer or Trump rubber stamp?Subscribed

Collins also voted to confirm Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has become an infamous anti-vaccine crank. In her most recent debate, she stated she does not regret voting for him, either. “I agree with him on some issues; I don’t with others,” Collins declared. “He was very helpful in expediting the release of the low-income eating assistance program.” Well, in that case, the deaths from measles, the thousands of contracted illnesses, the decimation of our national health research infrastructure, and the loss of hundreds of seasoned medical professionals are just the price of…expediting the release of a low-income eating assistance program?!? Maybe this is what she thinks it means to be an independent Mainer. But many voters now see this as a pathetic excuse for rubber-stamping yet another plainly unfit Trump nominee.

Speaking of food, the Big, Ugly bill cut roughly $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over 10 years, making it the biggest cut in the program’s history. The Center for Budget and Public Policy Priorities found, “We estimate that SNAP participation nationwide fell by over 5 million people (nearly 13 percent) between the law’s July 2025 enactment and June 2026, based on the latest month of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)… It’s very likely that nationwide, the number of children receiving SNAP has dropped by about 2 million since July 2025.” In Maine alone, well over 14,000 people lost SNAP benefits.

Collins has perfected the art of keeping her fingerprints off the worst, most egregious right-wing legislation, but not even she has been able to disguise her role in this one. As Maine Democrats pointed out at the time, when the bill could have been stopped in its tracks, Collins provided a key vote to move the bill from committee to the floor. “Collins ended up voting against the overall bill, but only after it was clear her vote was no longer needed to pass it,” academic and social services community leader Shawn Yardley pointed out.

Collins’s refusal to stop the Big, Ugly bill also has had tragic consequences for healthcare in Maine. “President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (HR 1), passed in July 2025, made massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy,” Mark Shaffer wrote in the Maine Morning Star. “Around 31,000 Mainers are expected to lose Medicaid due to new administrative burdens from the bill. Many people who lose Medicaid will have to rely on charity care at hospitals or take on debt, harming Mainers and hospitals alike.” Multiple Maine hospitals are at risk of closing due to Medicaid cuts scheduled to hit next year. (Some 9,100 Mainers have already lost coverage.) Collins only feigned “independence” when it came to the Big, Ugly bill. When it mattered, once again, she was a reliable rubber stamp for Trump’s radical MAGA agenda.

Pick a topic — the Iran war, ICE funding, Kash Patel’s nomination, etc. — and Collins was never “independent” enough to thwart Trump’s agenda. Faced with the devastating results of her votes supporting his policies, she has looked clueless and frankly deceptive in debates. Voters now have a chance to render their own verdict. If they’ve gotten sick of the phony pretense of “independent Mainer” they now have the opportunity to reject the rubber stamper and vote for someone who clearly opposes Trump’s extreme right-wing agenda.

The Counteroffensive, Ukraine aid opponents risk losing House seats, Daria Shtonda, Oct. 20, 2026. The US administration withholds Patriot missiles for Ukraine… Witkoff and Zelenskyy head to Norway, for a new round of talks… Russians can’t access money after Ukraine hits datacenters.

As Republicans face a challenging midterm election, several lawmakers who have opposed assistance to Ukraine are defending seats in highly competitive districts.Congress has the power to approve military assistance, allocate funding, impose sanctions on Russia, and scrutinize the president’s foreign policy.

These powers matter all the more as President Trump pressures Kyiv to make concessions while moving to ease sanctions on Moscow.

The upcoming U.S. midterm elections will help determine whether Kyiv receives renewed American military and financial aid. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Congress has not authorized any major assistance packages for Ukraine.

On November 3, American voters will elect all 435 members of the House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate.

As of today, Democrats are leading Republicans by 9 percent on the generic congressional ballot. For Ukraine, the decisive factor is not just which party prevails, but the fate of a specific group: vulnerable Republican incumbents in tight swing districts who have consistently opposed aid, amplified skepticism of Kyiv, or pushed to halt military provisions.

Their re-election would not automatically determine U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Yet if these seats are flipped, the balance of power may shift — and with it the future of American support for Ukraine.

The Counteroffensive identified the most vulnerable lawmakers whose Ukraine records could make their electoral losses particularly consequential.

• Derrick Van Orden (WI-03, R+3): The Republican who welcomed Russian lawmakers to the Capitol.
• Eli Crane (AZ-02, R+7): The congressman seeking to cut off any aid to Ukraine.
• Scott Perry (PA-10, R+3): The lawmaker who blames Biden for Russia’s war.
• Monica De La Cruz (TX-15, R+7): The congresswoman who wants the U.S. to stay out.
• Nick Begich III (AK-AL, R+6): The Alaskan who backed the Trump-Putin summit.
• Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07, R+1): The Republican who doesn’t think Ukraine stands a chance.
• Brad Finstad (MN-01, R+6): The lawmaker who condemned a show of support for Ukraine.

For Ukraine, the stakes of the midterms will not be decided by a single vote or a single politician. But in a closely divided Congress, a handful of races could determine how much room there is for lawmakers willing to sustain U.S. support for Kyiv — and how much influence those seeking to restrict it will have.

The Bulwark, Focus Groups: Darline Graham’s Seat Isn’t Safe. These Voters Explain Why, Sarah Longwell, Oct. 20, 2026. Some former Trump supporters are still waiting for a reason to like her.

South Carolina Democrats have had their hearts broken before. In 2020, future Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison spent a gajillion dollars (okay, $132 million) and lost to Lindsey Graham by 10 points.

Now, after Lindsey’s passing, his sister, Sen. Darline Graham, is running for a full term against Dr. Annie Andrews, a physician who previously ran for Congress in 2022.

South Carolina is a tougher state for Democrats to compete in than some of the others we’ve covered, like Iowa, Texas, or even Kansas. Donald Trump won here by 18 points in 2024, and racial polarization can also make it even less elastic than other states that are competitive this year.

But there are glimmers of hope. Darline Graham hasn’t had her patients arrested like Roger Marshall or been comically corrupt like Ken Paxton, but South Carolina Republicans didn’t send their best when they sent Darline.

Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews is running a good race. I got to see her up close last week, and she’s incredibly charismatic.

But still, the voters who will decide this race are reverting to their tribal instincts. Last week, we conducted two groups of disaffected 2024 Trump voters, many of whom were from South Carolina and had some choice words for the GOP Senate nominee there.

Those groups tell you why Andrews could get close. And even getting close could mean helping Democrats net a House seat along the way, like the same Charleston-based 1st district that Andrews lost to Nancy Mace in 2022. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Humiliates JD Vance By Refusing To Endorse And Falling Asleep On Him, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump not only refused to endorse JD Vance for 2028, but he also fell asleep on his vice president while Vance was talking. 

JD Vance doesn’t get it. Trump is using his vice president as a human shield who is often sent to the worst spots on the campaign trail and sent out in front of the media to take the hit when there is bad news.

Vance’s ambition and arrogance do not allow him to see that he is being used, and Donald Trump has no intention of turning the Republican Party over to him. Trump considers the Republican Party to be his property.

Republican strategists have been saying for months that they don’t expect Trump to step aside and hand the limelight to Vance. The vice president is going to have to battle Trump and a Democratic opponent to get attention during the 2028 campaign.

Vance seems to be heckled or protested nearly everywhere he goes, and polling shows he is the second-most unpopular politician in America, behind his current boss.

JD Vance is not charismatic or personable. He isn’t the new face that Americans seem to be yearning for.

Trump has never shown enthusiasm for JD Vance’s 2028 campaign, but his actions at an Oval Office event with Vance present were an act of sabotage.Trump Refuses To Endorse Vance And Fell Asleep While Vance Spoke

Trump finished his remarks in the Oval Office, and this is what he did as Vance spoke:

Trump was asked, “ I wanted to ask Mr. President, since we have the vice president here, the vice president said in an interview yesterday that he thought that you would endorse him if he does decide to run in twenty twenty-eight. Since we're here could you tell us- “

Trump cut off the question and said, “I tell you this, he's a very talented person, and he's a very good person, but we've literally... I don't think we've ever talked about it.”

Vance said, “No, sir.”

Trump continued:

I said that, too. I don't think we've... who would believe that? I don't talk about it with him. He doesn't talk... It's early. We are very early right now. We have to get through the midterms. We'll see how it goes.

I'm going to a rally in North Carolina. We had an amazing rally last night, Kansas, for a tremendous person, a number of great people, but in particular a senator who's done a fantastic job, as Roger. And I think Roger Marshall was helped a lot last night when we had that... I think it was... It really took him to a very high level, which-- where he's-- where he should be.

Trump gave Vance one sentence, then turned the subject back to himself and his rallies.

Donald Trump isn’t going to endorse Vance until he absolutely has to.

JD Vance is never going to be president, and Trump seems to be determined to make sure that his vice president never outshines him.

Special Report: Trump's Family's Big Lie -- About Spies

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.

This publication has delved into the espionage activities of a number of members of the Trump family, ranging from Donald Trump, Sr.’s longtime questionable links to Soviet and Russian intelligence during the Cold War and post-Cold War; Fred Trump. Sr.’s ties to Nazi German and Fascist Italian intelligence before and during World War II; and the paternal grandfather, Fred (Friedrich) Trump’s espionage at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel — location of the I.S. Navy’s transceiver radio unit — on behalf of the German Kaiser during World War I.

One Trump who has evaded suspicion is Donald Trump’s professorial uncle, Dr. John G. Trump. The president has often praised his uncle, a longtime professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using him as a benchmark of high intelligence and genetic superiority.

Trump often cites his uncle to claim "good genes" or "much better blood," a common feature of Nazi theories of racial superiority, stating during campaigns and public speeches that his uncle's academic pedigree proves his own natural intelligence. Trump has highlighted John Trump’s scientific background—including his work with high-voltage X-ray cancer treatments and radar development during World War II.

This month, Trump was presented with his uncle’s original 1983 National Medal of Science award. The occasion was the so-called Golden Age of American Innovation Summit held at the Trump-commandeered and renamed “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Trump has often inflated the curriculum vitae of his uncle. In July 2025, Trump told a story claiming that his uncle taught the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) at MIT. This was chronologically impossible, as John Trump died in 1985—a decade before Kaczynski was identified—and MIT records confirmed Kaczynski never attended the university. Trump has often misstated his uncle's academic credentials — claiming degrees in nuclear, chemical, and mathematics, when, in fact, his degrees were in electrical engineering and physics.

Trump has also briefly mentioned that his uncle was among the first to see Nikola Tesla’s highly-valued papers after the scientist’s death in 1943. On January 7, 1943: Tesla died at age 86 in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. At the time, Tesla’s innovative notebooks and papers were highly sought after by not only the U.S. government but by Nazi intelligence units operating in and around New York City. Fred Trump, Sr., who had been affiliated with both the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Queens and, later, the Nazi-led German American Bund, served as an important conduit between the Bund and German spies.

It is well known that Fred Trump was so ardently pro-German, he spoke only German in his house and with his German friends. Whether this camaraderie extended to his brother at MIT is sketchy but they did share one thing: their father, Fred Trump, also known as Friedrich, had been doing everything possible to regain the trust of Kaiser Wilhelm’s government after having been banished from Germany by a Bavarian royal decree issued in February 1905. The banishment was due to Friedrich’s failure to register his emigration to North America as a teenager in 1885 and his evasion of mandatory military service. Friedrich left Germany to strike it rich in the United States, which he did by starting hotels, restaurants, and whorehouses during the California and Yukon gold rushes. Friedrich and his wife, Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents, were never happy being Americans but longed for their German homeland. Friedrich’s dream of returning to Germany was never realized as he died from the Spanish flu on May 30, 1918, at the age of 49.

Although the focus on the Trump family has been on Fred, Sr, and his son Donald, relatively little attention has been paid to Friedrich’s other son, Dr. John Trump.

Upon Tesla’s death, federal authorities, acting through the Office of Alien Property Custodian, took control of Tesla's belongings, including technical papers, drawings, and equipment. This occurred despite Tesla having been a naturalized American citizen since 1891. It remains perplexing that the federal government asked Dr. Trump, the son of a pro-German hotel manager and bartender at the McAlpin Hotel, where war plans were devised among U.S. and visiting Allied officers, to examine Tesla's technical documents and determine whether they contained inventions or scientific information valuable to the American war effort.

Although Tesla’s papers were sought after by the intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, Dr. Trump concluded that the papers contained no immediately usable scientific or military breakthroughs. In particular, he found no practical evidence supporting Tesla's claims about a revolutionary particle-beam weapon, popularly called a death ray. But was this a feint by the MIT professor? Did he claim the papers were of no value, while passing on copies of them to his family’s valued German homeland either directly or via his brother, Fred? Considering the Trump family’s four generations of treasonous behavior, Dr. Trump should be considered as suspect as everyone else in the family.

In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a message from someone in Weehawken, NJ referring to a New York Times article about Tesla’s work on a “teleforce” death ray perfected by Tesla. The letter’s author urged Hoover to provide protection for Tesla lest he and his invention falling into the hands of “alien enemies.” The letter and article are found below:

There is also a problem with the chain-of-custody for Tesla’s papers. Dr. Trump's signed report, dated January 30, 1943, confirms that he examined the material on January 26–27 at the Manhattan Warehouse in New York, not in Tesla's hotel room. It also confirms that selected documents were retained by the Office of Alien Property Custodian. But how many may have been retained by Dr. Trump? Some papers were retained by government authorities, and subsequent FBI correspondence acknowledged uncertainty about the whereabouts of portions of Tesla's materials. A January 12, 1943 FBI memo reported that there was fear that “enemy agents” had confiscated some of Tesla’s trunks of documents after his death on January 7th and that the “War Department was interested in this matter.” In a later letter, Hoover wrote that the FBI had never been in possession of any copies of Tesla’s papers (letter below). What? Missing Tesla papers that were briefly in the possession of Dr. Trump (whose brother was a suspected Nazi agent)? Shades of the bathroom of Mar-a-Lago!

Dr. Trump’s suspiciously short examination of Tesla’s papers resulted in a dubiously short summation in his report on the veracity of Tesla’s work:

“His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

Copies of Tesla's papers on the “death ray” were not “speculative,” as cited by Dr. Trump, nor was the U.S, Navy’s interest in Tesla’s work on a “revolutionary torpedo.” Tesla was investigating particle beam weaponry, something that over three decades later would serve as the basis for Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic missile defense program. Some of Tesla’s papers were sent by the U.S. government to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. A project code-named "Project Nick" received massive funding and was placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published nor was the involvement of Dr. Trump. One thing is known for certain. The copies of Tesla’s papers held in Dayton disappeared and their whereabouts remain unknown to this day.Did the Trump family profit from Tesla’s purloined research? Or was it their friends, the Nazis, Soviets, or Elon Musk?

It is also odd that in1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions held by the U.S. government were released to Sava Kosanovic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United States from 1946 to 1950 and Tesla’s nephew, and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where the Tesla Museum was created in honor of the naturalized American scientist. Under Marshal Tito’s Communist government, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and researchers to access to the Tesla archive in Belgrade. Things were much different for Soviet scientists who sent delegation after delegation to the museum during the 1950s. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced before the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage." Based on the fact that in 1958, the U.S. began work on charged-particle beam weaponry at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. The top secret research, code-named Project Seesaw, was eventually discontinued with the principals of the research claiming that it had nothing to do with Tesla’s papers. That’s exactly the same sort of wave-off of Tesla’s research that was offered up by Dr. Trump.

The FBI stated for years that it had not been the first to enter Tesla’s hotel room after his death but it was the Office of Alien Property, the latter for which Dr. Trump was taking his marching orders. One of many FBI denial letters below:

Successive FBI directors and acting directors from Hoover and L. Patrick Gray III to William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, all denied that the FBI was ever in possession of Tesla’s papers. Yet, questions remain about the ultimate recipients of the valuable research. Was it Nazi nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg or rocket scientist Werner Von Braun via Dr. Trump and/or his brother Fred? The Soviets? Or the Japanese, who remain very interested in Tesla’s work to this very day. In addition, did Elon Musk’s Tesla Corporation capitalize on any of Tesla’s research, especially considering the fact that Musk has never “invented” anything but has made his fortune on the research conducted by others.

During the 1930s, Tesla claimed to have developed the theoretical basis for a defensive weapon capable of projecting concentrated streams of electrically charged particles.

He suggested that such a weapon could destroy approaching bomber formations, defend national borders against aerial attack, deliver destructive energy over considerable distances, and potentially make conventional aerial warfare obsolete. During the 1930s, this research would have been relevant to Nazi Germany's military improvements, particularly as Germany developed advanced antiaircraft defenses and experimental weapons.

A nagging question remains. Why did Dr. Trump substantially diminish the government's immediate interest in Tesla’s proposed death ray when the record suggests that this research was pursued by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, the Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, a period when Donald Trump was sidling up to the Soviet Union and communist Czechoslovakia while also denouncing NATO. The Trump family has not been known to value the national security of the United States since the Woodrow Wilson administration and, now, with Donald Trump in charge of everything, how much of Tesla’s research and that of others has flown out of U.S. security vaults into the hands of Moscow, Beijing, or Elon Musk?

Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.

The Daily Beast noted the other day that Truth Social’s daily traffic has cratered, losing over 30% of daily traffic since last June.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social is hemorrhaging users, with daily traffic plunging more than 30 percent in a year despite the president’s relentless stream of posts.

The social media platform averaged roughly 260,000 daily users last month, a steep drop from its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.

It’s an astonishingly small number. Heather Cox Richardson has upwards of 2.8 million subscribers on Substack, plus a bunch on other platforms. Meidas Touch has 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. On the other side of the spectrum, Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners. Benny Johnson has 6.1 million YouTube subscribers.

Just 260,000 users use Truth Social as if it were a social media website.

Of course, Trump’s own posts don’t, primarily, circulate on Truth Social. They are disseminated by Trump loyalists, self-described journalists, and haters far and wide, achieving a total dissemination that no doubt rivals those other outlets for viewers. But that dissemination happens only via a largely unexamined faith about what Trump Truth Social posts are. For MAGAts, sharing them announces tribal loyalty to the performed power in them. For journalists, it’s a lazy relationship with newsworthiness. For haters, it is often, equally, a tribal statement, triggering the same kind of emotional — and therefore irrational — response.

And while the MAGAts need only the performance of power, for the latter two, there is a conceit that the Truth Social posts in some way provide a transparent view on Trump’s “true” views … even though they are routinely riddled with lies.The Diesel Tweet promising diesel that doesn’t exist

That’s how it happened that Trump’s Diesel Tweet came to be read not just as a statement of his reason for betraying Ukraine — he needed diesel to bring prices down before the election — but also of a momentous call with Vladimir Putin on October 9.

Even Chris Wright couldn’t paper over how absurd that interpretation is (I had been wondering whether Wright was lying to Trump to allow him to sustain this claim). He confessed that Russia didn’t have diesel to export, amid word salad attempting to explain how Trump stating that Russia might export diesel if they chose to stop invading Ukraine would induce them to make peace.

WRIGHT: They’re very different. Russia wants to and can export oil, as a — as was true when I said that, and as is true today. We have not removed the sanctions on Russian oil. We are removing sanctions on a product that Russia currently does not and cannot export.

The way forward for Russia to be able to export diesel is to reduce their war effort, make progress towards peace.

[Martha] RADDATZ: President Trump said that there was a deal, a ceasefire, an energy ceasefire a week ago. Russia and Ukraine said there was no such thing. Were you involved in that? Was there anything?

WRIGHT: This is President Trump encouraging Russia if they want to export diesel, if they want to get the benefits you believe that are about to be showered upon them, the only way they can do that is with an energy ceasefire or reduction of war effort. [my emphasis]

Because there is so much faith among data mules who treat these posts as some form of truth, there was little consideration of other possibilities, such as that the last person in the room — the FSB officer whom JD Vance lauded for being “soft-spoken,” the guy who has always played Trumps narcissism like a maestro — suggested he write the tweet like that, either told him to or leveraged his grievance to get him to scapegoat Ukraine for Trump’s own failures.Both Putin and Trump acknowledged the Diesel Tweet was (also) about Iran

And in fact, both Putin and Trump acknowledged that their October 9 conversations were about — were also about — Iran.

In his post scapegoating Ukraine for the diesel shortage Trump’s own invasion of Iran caused, he included the non sequitur, “it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”

Wright’s word salad with Martha Raddatz also included that rhetorical dodge. When Raddatz pointed out what everyone should about the Diesel Tweet — that Trump, not Ukraine, caused the diesel shortages, Wright suggested she was dismissing attempts to deprive Iran of nukes.

RADDATZ: I just — the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran War, you would admit, caused a lot of these problems.

WRIGHT: Absolutely. To prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons, absolutely comes at a cost. The Iranian regime killed 30,000 to 40,000 of their own citizens in January. Since then, they’ve bombed every neighbor they have. Are you comfortable —

RADDATZ: I understand that.

WRIGHT: Are you comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iranian regime?

RADDATZ: I understand the point of stopping a nuclear weapon. That has not happened yet, and there’s no end in sight at this point.

In Putin’s readout of the October 9 conversation, he listed Ukraine, Iran, and various aspects of a strictly bilateral relationship with the US “were touched upon.”

During the October 9 telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump, considerable focus was on prospects for settling the Ukraine crisis, while the situation surrounding Iran and various aspects of bilateral relations were touched upon as well.

I’ve been arguing since March we need to understand that this is a world war and one possible outcome — made more likely so long as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were Trump’s “negotiators” on both Ukraine and Iran — would be that Russia uses it to get Trump to flip sides, as he has now apparently done.

Trump lies, again, about Iran

And here’s where Trump betrayed his weakness and here’s where his betrayal remains vulnerable to a concerted response.

His and Wright’s pathetic explanation about the Diesel Tweet are bad enough.

But his subsequent tweet explaining why he refuses to sanction Russia is even more pathetic.

Amid the repeated scapegoating of Ukraine and more spin about Russia giving the US something that would recognizably benefit the country (hostage negotiations) rather than Trump personally, Trump claimed that Russia was not doing “what they could be doing” to help Iran, a claim Trump has attempted to repeat in his babbling public statements.

As numerous people point out, though, US intelligence knows (and Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reminding) Russia is helping Iran kill Americans.

What Trump said in this tweet and has babbled publicly, of course, is that Russia could be doing more.

And that’s why, Trump says, he refuses to sanction Russia: For fear his best friend Putin will help Iran do worse to America and its partners than they’re already doing in Iran. For fear Russia will help Iran deal Trump an even more humiliating loss.

If that’s not already proof that Putin threatened Trump even as he offered him carrots in the form of oil contracts, Sergei Lavrov met with Abbas Araghchi and made it clear they are, in fact, doing quite a bit to support Iran, including feeding them so they can outlast the US in this current standoff.

Trump said Moscow and Beijing had the capacity to provide Tehran with far greater assistance but had so far refrained from doing so.

“Russia could have done a lot more to help Iran. Russia’s done very little for Iran,” Trump told reporters on Monday. He said China could also have provided much more assistance and described the limited help from both countries as “a very positive thing.”

Trump’s remarks came as Lavrov held talks with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, where Moscow reaffirmed its commitment to its strategic partnership with Iran while calling for a diplomatic solution to the regional conflict.

At a joint press conference with Araghchi, Lavrov said Russia had no intention of abandoning economic and investment agreements with Iran despite the war.

He said Russian specialists were gradually returning to work at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant and pointed to continued cooperation on energy and transport projects, including the planned Rasht-Astara railway.

Lavrov also said Moscow had provided humanitarian assistance during the war and would continue supplying food to Iran.

And even though Putin is flaunting his support for Iran (and has, at similar moments in the past) Trump is nevertheless allowing Putin to convince him that his own failures in Iran are all due to betrayal from America’s allies and not his own failures and the incompetent blowhard he put in charge of DOD.

Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. As a narcissist, he needs scapegoats to blame for his own historic failure, and Russia’s dictator has scripted convenient scapegoats for him: Ukraine for attacking Russia’s diesel refineries, Europe, for failing to join Trump’s rudderless attack.

And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia. 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: NEWS: Trump Lashes Out as Early Voting Shatters Records, Says Russia “Has Been Fine” as Drone Kills Baby, Musk Becomes Top Target, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is furious. He was heckled six times at his own rally in Kansas last night, a state he won three times, and he lashed out, calling protesters “idiots” and telling his crowd, “It never ends.”

He’s rattled for a reason: early voting is shattering records in Texas, and in North Carolina, Democrats have cast 70% of the major-party ballots so far. Meanwhile, Democrats are making it clear that if they win the House, Elon Musk, the GOP’s $276 million megadonor, will be at the top of their list.

But the story I can’t stop thinking about today is in Ukraine. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone struck a park in the Kharkiv region and killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller. Her mother died in the hospital. And while this is happening, the Trump administration is holding up the Patriot missiles Ukraine needs to defend itself.

For me, this isn’t abstract. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs right now. That’s why I’ve decided to do a deep dive outlining all of Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials. It’ll be out soon, and it’s one you won’t want to miss.

Let’s get into it.

Furious Trump Lashes Out at Protesters as Early Voting Surges Against Republicans

Trump lashed out at protesters who interrupted his Kansas rally four times, as early voting numbers show Democrats surging across the country. Minutes into his speech in Park City, the president was heckled again and again, a now-common scene as he campaigns in red states that should be safe for Republicans. Trump called the protesters “idiots,” claimed they were paid $250 to disrupt him, and told the crowd to vote “so we can get rid of idiots like that,” adding, “It never ends.” He was in Kansas to rescue Sen. Roger Marshall, who trails Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton 48% to 45% in a recent YouGov poll in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Trump also defended Marshall against a New York Times report that the former OB-GYN sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills, 81 of whom were arrested, claiming critics made him look like “some kind of a Shylock-type guy.” The outburst came as voters in Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia turned out in record numbers, with Democrats leading the early surge.

Texas’s two largest Democratic strongholds smashed first-day early voting records, a warning sign for Republicans in a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in 32 years. Dallas County recorded 76,069 voters on the first day, the most for any election in its history and a nearly 26% jump over the 2020 record. Harris County, home to Houston, processed more than 70,000 voters by mid-afternoon, beating its 2018 midterm record of 63,188 with hours still to go. That increase is partly driven by growth, since Harris County has about 15% more registered voters than it did in 2018. El Paso County, a Democratic stronghold that has often struggled with turnout, posted its second-highest midterm first day on record. Trump carried Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024, but Republican leaders have now poured more than $158 million in outside spending into the state.

Democrats are competitive at the top of the Texas ticket, with Talarico leading in most recent polls. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton by 2.2 points in the RealClearPolitics average, and Paxton has led in only one of the six most recent public polls. In the governor’s race, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott holds a 3.4-point edge over Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a far thinner margin than he’s used to. The Dallas Morning News, which backed Republican John Cornyn in every one of his Senate races, endorsed Talarico, calling Paxton unfit for office because of his long history of scandals. Talarico has also won endorsements from the Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, and San Antonio Express-News. Worried Republicans are pleading for turnout, with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saying “it’s up to rural America to save the country” and warning that too many conservatives aren’t taking the threat seriously.

Democrats are dominating North Carolina’s early vote at a level not seen in at least two decades. Through Sunday, North Carolinians had cast about 526,000 early ballots, 37% more than at this point in 2022, according to analysis by G. Elliott Morris. Among ballots from the two major parties, 70% came from Democrats, even though they make up just 49% of registered Democrats and Republicans. Democratic ballots are up 53% compared with 2022, while Republican ballots are down 8%. Georgia is also running well above its normal Democratic lean. Morris cautions that early leads can be misleading, noting that in 2016 Democrats had a big early edge in North Carolina that evaporated before Trump carried the state, but if Republicans are truly staying home, Democrats could have a real turnout advantage.

Polling shows Trump deeply unpopular even in the red states that put him back in office. Navigator Research, a progressive polling group, found Trump with a net approval of negative 14 across Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas, four states he won by double digits and that now host competitive Senate races. In Iowa, 60% disapprove of his handling of the economy, including 50% who strongly disapprove. The group’s focus groups with mostly Republican Iowa farmers found deep frustration over tariffs and diesel prices that have climbed more than $3 a gallon in a year. Navigator also found that about one in five 2024 Trump voters now regret their vote, citing broken promises, the Iran war, and high prices, with regret highest among young voters, voters of color, and mothers. Even among Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, one in four say they regret supporting Trump.

Trump Says Russia “Has Been Fine on Ukraine” as His Administration Holds Up Patriot Missiles

The Trump administration is holding up the transfer of Patriot interceptor missiles that Ukraine desperately needs to defend against Russian attacks, The Washington Post reports. At least some of the missiles are coming from friendly countries that need Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sign-off to send U.S.-made weapons to Ukraine, according to a U.S. official and three others familiar with the situation. Officials said Hegseth hasn’t formally rejected the transfers, but he also hasn’t completed the steps needed to approve them. A Ukrainian official told the Post last week that “only a couple” of interceptors remain in Ukraine’s stockpile, and Poland’s foreign minister said his country has none left to give. Zelenskyy told U.S. senators the Pentagon is delaying missiles that European countries have already paid for, saying, “All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us.” A senior Pentagon official insisted there has been no change in policy and that the program for allies to provide U.S.-built weapons to Ukraine “continues unaltered.”

Trump claimed “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine” at almost the same moment a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller. “They haven’t been doing much,” Trump told reporters Monday. Around the same time, a Russian drone struck a park in Nova Vodolaha in the Kharkiv region, killing six people, including a baby girl named Anhelina, who died instantly in her stroller, and her mother, who died later in the hospital. Images of the child’s body sparked outrage across Ukraine, and Zelenskyy called the attack an “absolute atrocity.” At least 16 people were killed and 69 injured across Ukraine over the past day, including three killed when a Russian drone hit rush-hour traffic in Kyiv. Russian strikes on the power grid have left 12 regions without electricity as winter approaches.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “scandalous” to suggest Ukrainians are dying because the U.S. is pulling support. Rubio said he told Zelenskyy during a 45-minute call that nothing had changed in U.S. support and that “there’s nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine.” He called the accusations “outrageous” and “simply not true,” and has blamed missed missile warnings on a “software problem.” But Kyiv says it received no early warning before Russian ballistic missiles struck the capital on Sunday, the third time in recent days, and that restrictions on its military satellite network remain in place. Zelenskyy described his call with Rubio as “substantive” and “constructive,” saying Starshield “needs to be restored” and interceptors “are needed to protect lives.” Trump, meanwhile, insisted “we share a lot,” adding, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us.”

Zelenskyy is meeting with Trump envoys in Norway as fears grow that Ukraine is being sidelined. Special envoy Steve Witkoff is meeting Zelenskyy in Oslo on Tuesday, with Jared Kushner joining by video and Norway’s prime minister and Finland’s president also taking part. Axios reports Witkoff will then travel to Russia to meet Putin. Trump said Monday he is ready to meet Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in China next month, and that the talks could cover the war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s foreign minister warned that such a meeting would “only encourage Putin to continue this war.” Trump also repeated that it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” saying Zelenskyy “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Pressure is mounting on Trump from Republicans and allies, while Zelenskyy’s support at home is surging. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, a Republican, said after meeting Zelenskyy in Kyiv that Ukraine would stop hitting Russian refineries if Russia stopped attacking Ukrainian infrastructure, urging Trump in all caps: “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE TAKE THIS WIN!” Rep. Michael McCaul and 20 House colleagues also wrote to the White House warning that lifting sanctions on Russian oil “will only fuel the Kremlin’s violence and destruction.” Oil analysts say Trump’s diesel deal is unlikely to meaningfully lower U.S. prices, which are driven mainly by the Iran war, but it has given Trump a direct stake in stopping Ukraine’s refinery strikes. A new poll found Zelenskyy’s trust rating has surged amid Trump’s pressure campaign. Meanwhile, Hungary blocked the next step in Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union without offering any explanation.

Elon Musk Will Be a Top Target for Democrats in 2027 If They Win the House

House Democrats are preparing to make Elon Musk one of their top investigative targets if they win control of the chamber next month, according to Politico. The world’s richest man and the GOP’s single biggest known midterm donor, with $276 million and counting given to Republican committees and candidates, has drawn interest from several potential committee chairs and scores of rank-and-file lawmakers. Democrats are eyeing multiple fronts, including his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ multibillion-dollar federal contracts, and his possible role in throttling the Ukrainian military’s satellite internet access. Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, an Oversight Committee member, said Democrats should “absolutely” probe how Musk is “trying to buy his way into billions of dollars more in federal government money.” “It takes two to tango,” Casar added. Spokespeople for Musk did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.

Democrats say Musk’s DOGE tenure, which cut an estimated 250,000 federal jobs, is the “original sin” they plan to investigate. A spokesperson for Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the panel has “a lot of questions” about Musk’s role in DOGE and plans to investigate it. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the Science Committee, said Musk “helped orchestrate the systematic destruction of government programs and services” and that “the sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding.” Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “a full accounting” of the damage, saying the dismantling of USAID “saved no taxpayer money, balanced no budget, and made America no safer.” Some Democrats aren’t waiting, with Homeland Security Committee members already demanding Musk testify under oath about a report finding DOGE overstated its savings. Lawmakers have also called for investigating alleged DOGE-related data theft from Social Security.

The Ukraine satellite controversy has added a new and urgent front to Democrats’ scrutiny of Musk. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington asked what happens “when one guy gets a giant contract from the government and then uses it to do something that shuts down communication in a war” that the U.S. has worked to support. Ukraine says restrictions on its military satellite network have hampered its defenses, and while Musk has suggested the decision came from the government, The Telegraph reported he proposed the limits himself. Democrats are also eyeing SpaceX’s billions in NASA contracts and the clean-energy subsidies Tesla has received. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has kept the party’s midterm message focused on affordability, but has vowed to crack down on the “wealthy, the well-off and the well-connected.” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California summed up the sentiment of many Democrats on hauling Musk before Congress: “Bring it all on.”

Judge in Trump Golf Course Case Says She’s Receiving Death Threats as Trump Calls Her a “Crazed Lunatic”

Federal Judge Ana Reyes revealed that she has been receiving threats over her handling of the East Potomac Park golf course case. At the close of a seven-hour hearing Monday, Reyes said family members had been texting her about reports that she was receiving death threats, and she described the emails and voicemails flooding in. “A federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course,” she said, adding, “I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned.” The threats come as the president has repeatedly attacked her by name on social media. Reyes has been overseeing a lawsuit brought by a preservation group and local golfers challenging the administration’s plan to transform the public course. She ended the hearing simply by saying, “We’re dismissed.”

Trump escalated his personal attacks on Reyes before and after the hearing. In an early-morning Truth Social post Monday, he called the judge “a crazed lunatic” who “may be insane,” insisted the Interior Department doesn’t need approval, and declared that work would begin “IMMEDIATELY.” Later, he dismissed the case as “frivolous litigation” before a judge who “seems not to want greatness for our capital or our nation.” Late Monday night, he posted nearly 30 photos of debris and damaged structures around the course, writing, “Here are pictures of Trash Island for the judge to study.” The administration has also asked Reyes to step aside, accusing her of bias, a request she denied. The barrage marks an extraordinary campaign by a sitting president against a judge actively presiding over a case involving his own administration.

Reyes pressed administration officials on why their story keeps contradicting Trump’s. Government lawyers and witnesses have insisted there is no final plan for the course and that the felling of more than 400 trees was routine cleanup tied to a 2019 maintenance plan. But Trump has now publicly announced a final design by architect Tom Fazio and a November 15 closure date. “I have, on the one hand, the president of the United States saying to the American public three times now... there is a final plan,” Reyes said. “Then I have you all telling me... that there’s no final plan. Which is it?” The acting director of the National Park Service testified she wasn’t even aware of the November 15 date, and Reyes said there is “no universe” in which the tree removal and Trump’s plans coincidentally happened at the same time.

Reyes did not order a halt to the project from the bench, but a temporary block on tree removal remains in place. The judge said she plans to make a factual finding, based on Monday’s testimony, that the trees were cut down as part of the plan to renovate the golf course. Her temporary order barring further tree removal remains in effect for another week, and a decision on whether to stop the project is expected by Monday. East Potomac Park was created by Congress in 1897 to be “forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people,” and its course is believed to be one of the first public courses in the country to be desegregated. Regulars fear an expensive championship course will replace one of the few affordable places to play in the capital. They also warn that the trees already lost could take decades to replace.

Other news:

New details have emerged about the Mississippi police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, which the state attorney general ruled “justified.” Officers in Senatobia were responding to a call alleging that Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, and her friend Latoya Ferrell had stolen a pack of diapers, but neither woman has been charged and officials have released no evidence of shoplifting. As the women tried to leave the Walmart parking lot, officers drew their weapons, and Wiley lifted her baby to show there was a child in the car. An officer identified in records as Sgt. Hunter Foster then fired into the vehicle, killing Kohen and wounding Ferrell. Foster is white, and both Wileys and Ferrell are Black. The town’s police force has a troubled history, including the firing last month of a police chief who reportedly used racial slurs and the 2023 arrest of a 10-year-old Black boy for urinating in public.

Mississippi attorney general rules fatal police shooting of one-year-old as 'justified' | Mississippi | The Guardian

Nearly half of active-duty military families struggled to afford enough food last year, forcing soldiers to rely on food pantries around bases like Fort Hood in Texas. Food insecurity among military families more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, hitting enlisted troops hardest, with nearly 57% reporting it compared with 14% of officers. The Armed Services YMCA pantry near Fort Hood served more than 19,000 families last year and often runs out of food by early afternoon, with its director calling it “the most heartbreaking thing” to turn away a soldier in uniform. Congress approved a historic 14.5% raise for junior enlisted troops, but soaring costs for rent, childcare, and gas, which is up about 40% since the Iran war began, have wiped out much of the gains. Republican Rep. Don Bacon also says Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon took $2.9 billion Congress set aside to fix troops’ housing allowances and instead used it to pay a one-time $1,776 “warrior dividend” bonus. Experts warn the strain threatens national security, as financial stress drives troops to leave the military and distracts those who stay from the mission.

Texas households are receiving unsolicited mailers addressed to students that offer guidance on unsupportive parents, legal emancipation, and seeking transgender-related medical care outside the state, and no one knows who sent them. The envelopes list the sender as the “Texas Transgender Student Union,” and the enclosed guide directs students to trusted adults and advocacy groups, including the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT. TENT says it did not author, authorize, or distribute the mailers, or a similar text message campaign that circulated earlier this month, and it has sent cease-and-desist demands to the messaging companies involved to identify who is behind it. The mailers surfaced just as early voting began in Texas, prompting Republican State Rep. Jeff Leach to call on Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is also the GOP Senate nominee, to investigate. The Dallas Express, which first reported the mailers, said no evidence it reviewed establishes that any campaign, party, or advocacy group orchestrated the effort. The timing and the anonymous sender have raised questions about whether the mailers are a genuine outreach effort or a political stunt designed to stir controversy ahead of the election.

A Guardian investigation found that Louisiana’s justice of the peace courts are churning out thousands of evictions while some judges earn more than the chief justice of the United States. The state’s 390 part-time justices of the peace need only a high school diploma, aren’t required to keep detailed records, and are paid directly from the fees their courts charge, including eviction filings. One justice in suburban New Orleans earned more than $400,000 last year, while a single landlord accounted for over 60% of his eviction docket and tenants won less than 1% of cases. Reporters watched him hear 86 cases in 36 minutes, with all but one ending in eviction. A former Justice Department official called the system “blatantly unconstitutional,” citing a century-old Supreme Court ruling barring judges from having a financial stake in their cases. The justice is retiring this year, and his son is running unopposed to replace him.

Voters in Alberta overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to begin the process of separating from Canada. With more than 1.5 million votes counted, 76% chose to remain in Canada while about 24% backed starting a path toward independence. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, said Albertans “chose unity” and “above all, Albertans chose Canada.” Carney had warned in the final days of the campaign that a vote for separation was a “dangerous bluff,” and previously accused outside forces of trying to break up Canada to gain control of the oil-rich province. Separatist leaders said the result still shows at least a quarter of Albertans want better treatment and vowed to keep pushing. The referendum exposed deep divisions within Premier Danielle Smith’s governing party, whose support has slipped in recent months.

Italy is sending 500 soldiers to Milan after cost-of-living protests turned into looting and clashes with police. Police detained 271 young people over the weekend after hooded groups set fires, smashed windows, and ransacked stores near the city’s famous cathedral. Luxury brands including Chanel, Tiffany, and Dior pulled merchandise from their windows, and many stores in the fashion district stayed closed. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government is moving to approve tough new security measures, including allowing police to hold minors for 12 hours even if they haven’t committed a crime. A new movement called “17 October” has vowed to protest every Saturday “until this government of thieves collapses.” Opposition leaders accuse the government of using security as a distraction from real problems like housing, education, and the soaring cost of living.

France says targeted curfews helped bring calm after last weekend’s riots, as the first rioters head to court. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said curfews in parts of Paris and other cities “contributed to calm overnight,” with a police helicopter sweeping a searchlight over Place de la République, a center of the unrest. Curfews in Bordeaux and Nice will stay in place for several days. Authorities arrested a 40-year-old man described as a far-left activist on suspicion of setting the fire that destroyed Limoges’s historic town hall, and 149 people have already been jailed or detained. The government is offering businesses interest-free loans of up to €50,000 to recover from the looting. Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron secured an extra 200,000 tons of diesel a month from Gulf nations in an effort to bring down fuel prices.

The FBI is investigating whether a Louisiana hospital counselor illegally shared the medical records of a preschooler who was allegedly sexually abused by a classmate. Court filings show that a counselor at Manning Family Children’s Hospital in New Orleans accessed the young girl’s records and shared information with the preschool’s principal, who was her sister-in-law. The counselor, who was not part of the girl’s treatment team, was fired after the hospital found an impermissible disclosure of information, and the principal left the school shortly afterward. The girl’s parents, who are suing the school, say they were contacted by FBI agents seeking documents related to potential violations of federal health privacy law. An attorney for the former principal said she has not been accused of wrongdoing and called the disclosure of the FBI’s involvement an attempt to sway public opinion days before trial. The case is set to go to trial the week of October 26.

A Serbian prosecutor who helped investigate an allegedly illegal scheme to help the Trump family build a tower in Belgrade was apparently targeted with spyware. Rade Bajić received a warning from Apple in August that his iPhone had been targeted in a “mercenary attack,” and researchers at Citizen Lab said it was likely sophisticated spyware such as Pegasus. Bajić said he believes his work on the case was “the sole reason” he was targeted. Prosecutors had indicted senior officials in the Serbian regime last year for allegedly stripping a historic Belgrade site of its legal protection so it could be handed over for a $500 million Trump hotel project led by Jared Kushner. The Guardian recently reported that then-President Aleksandar Vučić personally ordered the move, and Kushner called off the project after the charges became public. Representatives of the Trumps and Kushner deny any “pay to play” arrangement or involvement in the decision.

Critics say Myanmar’s release of rare photos of detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi is a stunt to help the military regime escape international isolation. Officials delivered two gardening books and a sealed letter from King Charles to the 81-year-old Nobel Peace laureate, who is serving multiple sentences under house arrest at an undisclosed location. Her son, Kim Aris, welcomed the gifts but warned the regime should not be allowed to use such moments “to create an illusion of normality or gain international legitimacy.” Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing became president in April after elections widely condemned as a sham, and has been rebuilding ties with Southeast Asian neighbors. He has also reached out to the Trump administration, and Reuters reported U.S. and Myanmar officials have held talks that could expand to Myanmar’s mineral resources. The civil war that followed the 2021 coup has killed more than 100,000 people.

Special Report: Another Trump Threat To White House Press Corps 

New York Times, Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Oct. 20, 2026. President Trump has talked about replacing the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with an indoor swimming pool.

In late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office, he pitched her on an idea in front of several senior aides. He told her to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which would effectively remove news organizations from the White House. It would be, he told her, her “last legacy.”

But the proposal never moved forward while she was there. The president had put the request to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. Ms. Leavitt officially stepped down as White House press secretary on Aug. 27.

Mr. Trump has told aides he would prefer to bring back the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt added in 1933 as therapy for his polio-afflicted legs; President Richard Nixon later covered it over to make room for the news media. Journalists who are credentialed to cover the White House work out of a small office space connected to the press briefing room.

While moving the media out of the White House may be a relatively small debate considering Mr. Trump’s attacks on journalists more broadly, it would be highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.

It would also be a decision that would be difficult to undo by future presidents.

Mr. Trump has brought up the press-eviction idea before, dating to his first term, and he has never quite dropped it. A growing number of people around him favor the idea. Several close to him believe that moving the news media, most likely to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street, may be the latest escalation in a remarkable series of moves against the news media that have already gone further than most of them expected.

As recently as Sept. 27, Mr. Trump shared a pair of images on Truth Social showing the briefing room as it is now, captioned “Fake News,” alongside another that shows the space reimagined as a gilded swimming pool, captioned “FDR Pool.”

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Mr. Trump had repeatedly discussed moving the press corps out of the White House, and that his advisers had so far either offered pushback or waited for him to move on.

What has changed since Mr. Trump’s first term or even earlier this term is the staff around him. The president’s core team has shrunk from the already-tight unit that he brought into the White House last year. During earlier discussions, most of Mr. Trump’s senior aides agreed it served him better to keep the media nearby. But Mr. Trump has grown more enraged about his press coverage, and other advisers of growing influence have encouraged him to take drastic measures to punish journalists.

“America is rightly distrustful of the fake news media because they fabricate stories based off lies and sources who are not even privy to any type of information,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. “All options remain on the table, and we will make an announcement when appropriate.”

What you should know about anonymous sources. The Times makes a careful decision any time it shields the identity of a source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy, credible and give readers genuine insight.

During the 2016 Trump transition, Stephen K. Bannon, then the incoming chief strategist, suggested moving the press corps out of the West Wing, to a townhouse near Lafayette Square. Senior officials rejected the idea out of hand. Mr. Bannon proposed the Eisenhower building as a fallback option.

In January 2017, the incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, publicly confirmed that the team was weighing a move of press briefings to that location, framing it as a way to accommodate more reporters. But he and others dropped the idea, ultimately viewing it as too disruptive and impractical.

“From the moment I arrived in the White House I believed it was a national security threat to have the press literally surround the Oval Office — and devised a plan to either move them off campus next to the Blair House or at least to E.O.B.,” Mr. Bannon recalled in a statement to The New York Times this month. “But definitely physically remove them from the West Wing. That plan landed with a thud among all the other senior advisers to the president.”

The idea came up again during the summer of 2017, when the West Wing was undergoing renovations. A former administration official recalled that it was less a formal plan than an impulse tied to the renovations: With the space torn up anyway, why let the reporters back in? The official said that Sean Spicer, the departing press secretary, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his successor, questioned the logistical complexities. It soon died again.

The idea came up yet again during the presidential transition in late 2024. Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought it was better to leave the news media inside the White House. They knew Mr. Trump liked to call the cameras into the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. And several of his more seasoned advisers suspected that if they followed his direction to evict the press — and his coverage got worse — Mr. Trump would blame them for the inevitable results of his own idea.

But even without physically moving the news media to a building outside the White House main gates, the administration has for months been building up a buffer against the press. Last fall, Mr. Trump’s team barred reporters from entering “Upper Press,” the area near the press secretary’s office, without an appointment.

It has been more than 30 years since another president seriously considered removing the news media from the White House. President Bill Clinton’s first communications director, George Stephanopoulos, recounted in his memoir that in 1993 the first lady, Hillary Clinton, wanted to convert the press quarters back into a swimming pool. When word of her plan leaked, the blowback quickly ended it.

But Mr. Trump currently faces no comparable pressure to accommodate a news media that is despised by so many of his supporters. He has received relatively little backlash so far — even from Democrats — against his anti-media moves.Attacks on the News MediaImageKaroline Leavitt, the former press secretary, delivering a briefing last year. The president put the request to move out the news media to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Trump entered his second term emboldened by his victory, and he quickly went on offense against media companies that had covered him critically. He filed lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register. His aides made clear that the president intended these suits to have a chilling effect on negative coverage.

One of the instigators of the swimming pool discussion has been Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Pulte has no formal role in White House operations. But he created a foam board rendering of the briefing room restored as an in-ground pool, the people said.

Mr. Pulte often spends his weekends with Mr. Trump at his golf clubs. The president has only a tiny staff around him on the weekends, which means Mr. Pulte often enjoys freewheeling access to Mr. Trump, which he uses to pitch the president on his latest ideas. Senior White House officials say that Mr. Pulte brings along foam boards that highlight potential targets for revenge prosecutions.

Mr. Pulte did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.

Another top adviser feeding into Mr. Trump’s anti-media tendencies is Boris Epshteyn, the president’s longtime lawyer and outside adviser, who pushed several of the lawsuits the president has filed against news outlets or individual journalists. Mr. Epshteyn’s influence has grown in recent months, according to current officials and people close to the president. Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment.

In September, Mr. Trump startled some of his own advisers by declaring on social media that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over coverage he called “fiction and lies.” The administration swiftly revoked the credentials of more than 70 journalists.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Natalie Harp, the aide who controls much of the media and messages from supporters that reach the president’s desk, and the majority of his social media feed, had played Mr. Trump clips of MS NOW anchors criticizing his administration shortly before he announced the ban on the three outlets.

Ms. Harp did not respond to a request for comment.

White House officials say the group that provides Mr. Trump updates about news coverage is wider than just Ms. Harp, and that she didn’t intend to prompt the media ban by showing him clips. He made a decision after months of his own anger over coverage, they said. Mr. Cheung singled out Ms. Harp for praise.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly, whom Mr. Trump appointed in his first term, had put a hold on the president’s media ban, saying officials there had violated standard process. But the White House continued for a short period to bar those outlets from the grounds. Judge Kelly last week ruled that the president had violated the outlets’ First Amendment rights and ordered their passes restored. The administration is appealing his ruling.

The campaign against the news media has not stopped there. On Oct. 9, the Justice Department sent letters demanding information from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News after the five networks temporarily halted their pooled White House TV coverage in solidarity with CNN. People with knowledge of the effort said it was an antitrust investigation.

That Justice Department effort came just a few months after F.B.I. agents showed up at the homes of Times reporters to serve them grand jury subpoenas. Earlier that week, they had reported on security concerns about Mr. Trump while he traveled to Turkey for the NATO summit, as well as the lack of some defensive equipment on the luxury jet, donated by Qatar, that Mr. Trump was using as his new Air Force One.

The president was livid about the reporting and demanded his aides find the leaks, multiple people familiar with the matter said.

The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas within a few weeks, after the judge in the case admonished federal lawyers for violations of process in appearing to use subpoenas as a first option instead of a last resort to obtain information.

With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, other government departments have taken draconian measures against the press as well. Earlier this year, the Defense Department required credentialed reporters to sign a pledge that included not soliciting unauthorized information. Nearly every major news organization, including Fox News, refused to do so, and instead chose to give up work space in the building.

Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting

New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal,Tyler Pager, Oct. 20, 2026. Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.

Julio Herrera Velutini really wanted a pardon.

A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Mr. Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record.

So Mr. Herrera deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.

Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.ImageAlina Habba in the Oval Office last March. A former personal lawyer for President Trump, she went on to work in his Justice Department.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.

Ms. Habba denied any role in the pardon.

“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a statement.

Ms. Habba was a special government employee at the time, which allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.Editors’ Picks

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She declined to discuss her work for Concord.

Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.

A White House official said that Ms. Habba had nothing to do with the pardon and that the administration follows a pardon review process that includes the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.

Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.

For Ms. Habba, the job from the Herrera family came at a pivotal point in her life and career.

She resigned in December 2025 as U.S. attorney in New Jersey after a panel of federal judges ruled that her appointment by Mr. Trump had been carried out unlawfully. Her second marriage was also falling apart.

The arrangement with the Herreras provided her with a new level of financial security. She also found new love. Shortly after the pardon was issued, Ms. Habba started dating Turhan Mildon, a Turkish investor.

They were married last month in a lavish ceremony in New York. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel.

The couple is now engaged in high-profile feud with Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump ally. Ms. Habba has accused Mr. Grenell of misallocating a donation from her husband to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Grenell was running at the time. Mr. Grenell has denied her accusations, calling them absurd.

Ms. Habba brought those accusations directly to Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Scharf to investigate them. The Times has previously reported that the investigation centers on a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company.

Mr. Herrera, who also has Italian citizenship, is a member of the Herrera family, a banking, real estate and fashion dynasty that dates back to the 14th century. The family owns estates and castles in Caracas, Venezuela; the Canary Islands; Spain; and Germany.

Mr. Herrera founded a bank based in Puerto Rico in 2008.

In August 2022, he was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera all pleaded not guilty to felony charges.

Mr. Kise, Mr. Herrera’s lawyer, helped negotiate a deal with the Justice Department under which Mr. Herrera pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Ms. Vázquez and the former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for harsher sentences.

All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.

In July, Banvelca, the Herreras’ family office since 1781, announced that Ms. Herrera, a member of the eighth generation and the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, was assuming leadership of the company. Neither the news release nor her bio on the company’s website makes any mention of Concord Partners, the vehicle employing Ms. Habba, who now goes by Mrs. Mildon.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Taunting Trump Over Gas Prices, Iran Braces for Aftermath of U.S. Vote, Michael Crowley, Oct. 20, 2026. The midterm elections appear to be a factor for both sides in the war as President Trump weighs his next steps.

In the run-up to the midterm elections, Iranian state media is gleefully chronicling high prices at American gas pumps — and their impact on President Trump’s political standing.

Outlets like Tehran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency cite polls reflecting voter anger at Mr. Trump over his conflict with Iran.

Iranian officials are piling on. In an open letter to Americans last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps wrote that Mr. Trump “keeps on telling Americans that the economy is booming and the prices will soon start coming down,” adding: “This is, perhaps, his biggest lie.”

A few days earlier, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, mocked a spike in U.S. Treasury bond rates. “We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” he wrote.

Iran’s leaders clearly relish the political damage Mr. Trump has suffered from the conflict he launched in late February, even as their own economy suffers extreme stress from U.S. sanctions and an American naval blockade.

There are signs that political and economic pressure has pulled Mr. Trump back from the brink of military escalation, and the election result could determine what steps the United States takes next.

“They’re desperate to try and affect the election, so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there, and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon,” Mr. Trump told reporters last month.

It is not the first time Iran has been suspected of maximizing political pain against an American president. After Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage in November 1979, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran was drawing out the crisis “to bring about President Carter’s defeat” in the 1980 election, as a declassified C.I.A. analysis put it that year.

Mr. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan that November, an outcome he publicly attributed, in part, to the hostage ordeal.

For years, Iranian leaders have threatened to kill Mr. Trump, and in March a federal jury convicted a Pakistani national working as an Iranian intelligence agent of entering the United States in 2024 to arrange Mr. Trump’s assassination. Humiliating Mr. Trump in the elections is a way for Iran to get “satisfaction without doing something more drastic,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Iran’s ability to menace the Strait of Hormuz and attack the energy infrastructure of its neighbors has given Iran valuable insights into how it can exert pressure over the United States and the global economy.

That has also probably bought Iran at least some relief from further attacks in recent months by a president wary of military escalation that could drive oil prices even higher and anger voters who already mostly oppose the Iran conflict.

But any satisfaction in Tehran could evaporate quickly. Iranian leaders have grown more concerned lately about what might come after the U.S. elections, analysts said. With two years left in his last constitutionally allowed term as president, Mr. Trump may feel freer after Nov. 3 to take drastic action that could include a major new round of attacks on Iran.

“Once the elections are done, he may be free to do whatever he wants,” said Mr. Nasr, the author of the recent book “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.”

Iran hawks close to the Trump administration are hopeful that Mr. Trump will carry out new attacks, including on Iran’s already-battered nuclear facilities. The military has developed plans for heavy strikes and has concentrated more forces in the region, and will soon have three aircraft carrier groups positioned there.

“While Trump is unpredictable, there are certainly signs that he might hit Iran hard” after the midterm vote, said Michael Makovsky, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a hawkish think tank in Washington.

Mr. Trump may hold out “slim” hope for striking a deal before Election Day, Mr. Makovsky added. “But he doesn’t seem to think it’s likely.”

Mr. Trump has both accepted and rejected the idea that electoral politics influence his war plans. Speaking at the United Nations on Sept. 22, he claimed that Iran was the party focused on the U.S. vote, and that it was stalling peace talks.

More Global News

New York Times, News Analysis: It’s Not Just France. Europe’s Political Center Is Crumbling, Steven Erlanger, Oct. 20, 2026. Europe's centrist parties are losing ground among young people and workers, who are increasingly tempted by populist promises of radical change.

Centrist parties are in trouble in Europe’s largest and most important nations. Anger over low economic growth, high inflation, sizable government debt and poor prospects for the young are feeding protest and populist parties of the far right and far left.

The mass riots in France, which started as protests over underfunded schools, are a shocking example. But the phenomenon has been building for years, with the perceived failure of liberal democracy to make good on its promises of a better future, especially for the young and the salaried working class.

There is a growing perception among many Europeans that traditional parties of the center-left and center-right do not offer real alternatives and are led by an educated elite that has lost its connection to the poor, the workers and the young. Facing rising deficits, expenses and interest rates, governments feel constrained in what they can do to respond.

Instead, many people are supporting parties like the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, leading the polls for the French presidency on the far right, and France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the far-left, running second. In Germany, they are turning to the far-right Alternative for Germany and the far-left Die Linke party.

With major elections coming in the next year in four of Europe’s most populous states — Spain, France, Italy and Poland — there are significant challenges coming from more extremist parties. Even in Italy, where protests erupted over the weekend, the right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, faces a former general, Roberto Vannacci, who is running even further to the right.ImageAn elegant building being gutted by fire at night, with flames rising high through the roof.City Hall in Limoges was burned on Saturday.Credit...Pascal Lachenaud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Hard-right parties also sit in the governments of the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Croatia, while Slovenia’s government relies on outside support from one, Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Law at HEC Paris, recently noted. And competition from even farther to the right is already pushing some of them to harden their positions.

Satisfaction with how democracy is working has been declining dramatically, according to regular opinion polling from the Pew Research Center. In France, Pew found this year, 69 percent of the population is dissatisfied with democracy. In Spain, it is 68 percent. In Italy, 62 percent. In Poland, the newest democracy after years of Soviet occupation, it is 47 percent. In the United States, it is 69 percent.

There are many reasons put forward for the decline in optimism and faith in centrist politics. But Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics, puts it simply. “We started taking democracy for granted,” he said.

Liberal democracy has failed to keep faith with ordinary citizens, and especially with the larger working class. “If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” he said.Shared Prosperity

The rapid nationwide spread of the French protests to include workers and pensioners angry at inflation and high interest rates, especially given rising prices for energy and for borrowing costs, points to a larger failure of President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right government and of liberal democracy writ large.

The violence of what became riots in many cities is expected only to help Ms. Le Pen and her anti-liberal complaints about immigration and lawlessness.

Mr. Acemoglu, a professor at M.I.T., has tried to provide both an analysis and some prescriptions in a recent book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” In it, he outlines “two broad lines of failure” over the last half-century, which have led to widespread alienation and anti-establishment sentiment.

The first is what he calls the failure to deliver on shared prosperity, especially for a salaried working class hit by automation, globalization and sharply increased inequality, and which now feels deep anxiety about artificial intelligence.

Leaders have forgotten that a key part of their pact with voters is to “take care of the drains,” he said, to ensure the good functioning of the infrastructure of daily life, from roads to education to health care.ImageA red skull and crossbones painted on the drained floor of a public fountain with a statue of a team of horses. A worker in an orange vest aims a hose at the graffiti.A city hall employee removing graffiti from the Bartholdi Fountain in Place des Terreaux, Lyon, on Monday.Credit...Olivier Chassignole/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The second, Mr. Acemoglu said in an interview, is “the rise of top-down cultural politics,” whereby a college-educated elite now dominates even traditional Socialist and working-class parties throughout the Western world and in his view patronizes or dismisses the concerns of those who traditionally supported them.

As a result, working-class voters are moving toward populist parties on the far left and especially the far right, as in France and Germany, threatening traditional values, shrinking historically “large church” parties of the center and threatening the working of parliamentary democracy.

In Britain’s 2024 election, the two long-dominant parties, Labour and Conservative, won their lowest combined vote share in more than a century. The far-right Reform UK party surged in the polls last year, though it has since fallen somewhat.

Centrist parties need to regain the trust of voters that they not only hear them but empathize with them, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “A constant in all these countries are the people who feel left behind, who feel they are no part of the prosperity and security they see all around them,” he said.The Center Under Stress

Germany offers another example of the exhaustion and splintering of the center.

The Volksparteien, or “people’s parties” of the center-right and center-left — the Christian Democratic Union (and its partner, the Christian Social Union), and the Social Democratic Party — alternated running democratic Germany since World War II. But they are being hollowed out, said Mr. Sokol, with workers and the young moving to more extreme parties, like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Die Linke.

Given the difficulty of forming coherent coalitions now, the two Volksparteien are locked together in a squabbling coalition that is increasingly unpopular and perceived as failing to deliver economic growth and security.

Under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the C.D.U. moved to the center, but it was cautious, “risking nothing, even in the face of obvious challenges,” said Norbert Röttgen, a prominent legislator in the party.

Those challenges included increased migration, a declining export market with China, sharpened tensions with Russia and slow economic growth. The move to the center and Ms. Merkel’s embrace of large-scale immigration, he said, alienated many of the party’s traditional conservative voters.

That gave space to the right, filled by the AfD, which is now attracting traditional C.D.U. voters among the working class, Mr. Röttgen said. “But to seriously deliver on our problems requires majorities, and this,” he said, “is our paradox.”ImageA crowd of people, some of them holding black, red and yellow German flags.Attendees at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany party last month in central Schwerin, Germany.Credit...Lisi Niesner/Reuters

As for the Social Democrats, they took the path Mr. Acemoglu described of many left-wing parties, where intellectual elites and left-wing academics “conquered the party and disconnected it from its traditional voters,” Mr. Röttgen said.

An average of current opinion polls in Germany shows how hard it is to construct a workable centrist coalition.

The AfD is the most popular party, with some 28 percent support, followed by the C.D.U./C.S.U., with 19.8 percent. The Greens have 15 percent, and the Social Democrats only 13.1 percent, barely ahead of Die Linke, with 11.3 percent.

Both mainstream parties are divided internally about how to proceed — for the Christian Democrats, to move closer to the AfD and not just copy some of its policies; for the Social Democrats, to move farther to the left to defend itself against both the Greens and Die Linke.A Splintered Europe

With these four important elections and the pull of the far right in each of them “we’re going to have a major transformation,” with fragmented governments, said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

Right-wing coalitions will likely contain small far-right parties “which will keep the mainstream far-right parties hostage and may prevent them from moving to the center.”

If they do well, “then very quickly you’re trying to normalize them, because otherwise the European Union cannot function, and this is not making people feel more secure,” he said.

The French presidential election next spring will be key. A victory by Ms. Le Pen could have major implications for Brussels, for the euro, for NATO and for European support for Ukraine.ImageMarine Le Pen, seated and speaking in front of a microphone.Marine Le Pen, above, leader of the far-right National Rally, is leading the polls for the French presidency, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed, is running second.Credit...Nicolas Tucat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Acemoglu argues for “a big-tent populism,” that channels the anger of voters in the name of inclusivity.

“The centerpiece has to be creating jobs and wage growth and career paths for people without college degrees and diverse skills,” he said. “There must be an agenda for shared prosperity, which is why artificial intelligence and how it is used is critical.”

New York Times, Voters in Oil-Rich Alberta Reject Leaving Canada, Ian Austen, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. Residents of the province were asked if they wish to remain in Canada or to hold another vote on breaking away, in a referendum that left both sides unhappy.

Residents of Alberta voted on Monday to remain part of Canada, rejecting a campaign to try to separate the oil-rich western province from the rest of the country.

Voters in a referendum endorsed remaining in Canada over the option of holding a second vote on whether to secede, the public broadcaster CBC News projected late Monday evening local time.

With just over a third of votes counted, 76 percent of voters chose to remain part of Canada with 23 percent seeking another vote.

The referendum reflected the province’s long history of resentment toward the central government but also more recent discontents. Many of the separatist leaders became politically prominent by organizing large protests against restrictions during the Covid pandemic.

Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the result. “Albertans chose Canada,” he said in a statement. “All Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose and high ambition.”

In a speech to supporters in Edmonton, the provincial capital, Thomas Lukaszuk, a former provincial lawmaker whose Forever Canadian organization led the campaign to oppose secession, addressed President Trump. The vote, he said, “will send a very strong message to the rest of the world: Don’t mess with Canada.”

Unlike in Quebec, a province that held two unsuccessful votes on leaving Canada, secessionist sentiments have always been a minority viewpoint in Alberta. Still, opponents of separatism worried before the vote that voters might support holding a second referendum to show their unhappiness with the province’s relationship with Canada, even if they did not want to secede.

The vote was the work of Danielle Smith, the conservative premier of Alberta, who managed to provoke the ire of people on both sides.

Ms. Smith assumed the leadership of the United Conservative Party largely through the support of separatists who were responsible for ousting the previous premier, Jason Kenney, from party leadership.

Supporters of a united Canada were angry at Ms. Smith for adding the secession vote to a previously planned referendum with nine other questions, mostly about provincial powers and immigration.

Her move came after a court blocked an attempt by separatists to force a vote to leave Canada through a petition. Many of those favoring unity said Ms. Smith’s decision was an effort to circumvent the courts and was unconstitutional.

Supporters of leaving Canada were dismayed for a different reason, questioning why Ms. Smith had asked residents to vote on whether to hold a second vote on secession — and not the more direct question of whether they wanted to stay in Canada or leave.

Ms. Smith said she would vote to remain in Canada. However, opponents of secession viewed her support as anemic, leading many to doubt her sincerity. Last month in an online forum, Ms. Smith, expressed support for keeping Alberta within Canada but also laid out what she described as Albertans’ grievances with the federal government.

Business groups, former premiers and local politicians were all firmly on the side of remaining in Canada. Economic studies, including one commissioned by the provincial government, forecast that leaving the country would come with enormous costs.

Looming over the vote was the trade war President Trump launched against Canada, as well as his musings about taking over the country as the 51st state. Some prominent separatists leaders traveled to Washington three times last year seeking support during meetings with low-level State Department officials.

Mr. Carney, who was raised in Edmonton, called the referendum a “dangerous bluff.” Mr. Carney was governor of the Bank of England when Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, above, died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune, which asked the agency about his status.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: MAGA Death Cult Strikes Again as Lawful Resident Dies in ICE Custody, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 20, 2026. The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. A lawful permanent resident who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody.

A Mexican man who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody. He was a lawful permanent resident. He is the seventh person to die in ICE custody in Texas this year, while at least 29* people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year.

On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune, which asked the agency about his status.

Andrade-Covarrubias had been in detention since June. His cause of death is still unknown. ICE claims he received proper medical care, but his daughter says he was not given the medication he needed for diabetes, a heart condition and high blood pressure.

“He had medicine with him when he was detained, but she said staff at the center wouldn’t ‘give him his medications.’”

His daughter said he developed a cough and felt sick, but he was still ignored. His family were concerned because after he had COVID-19 in 2021, his health had declined.

The Daily is journalism that fights for democracy and freedom. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed

In 2021, a large swath of MAGA were pretending COVID-19 wasn’t real, was just the “flu”, as they actively fear-mongered about the vaccine.

In 2020, it was suggested that the MAGA Death Cult of Donald Trump took out at least 100,000 Americans due to mismanagement. The NIH concluded that failed leadership was at fault, attributing the high death toll to the Trump “Administration's failure to proactively address the threat and effectively manage the pandemic…”

Trump was busy copying China’s gaslighting about the pandemic, and surprise, it failed to such an extent that even the fascist-washing New York Times noted that “one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.”Lies, Lies, Lies

Inhumane Treatment: The Trump administration was trying to deport Andrade-Covarrubias, claiming he was detained “because officers believed he obtained his legal status in the U.S. fraudulently because he failed to disclose a 2004 arrest for theft during the review process.”

But his daughter told the Tribune that her father brought up his criminal record during the application process “and that immigration officials approved his green card application.”

In case the lies aren’t clear, the Trump administration got blocked by a judge when they tried to deport a witness to the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas.

Criminals: Republicans repeat the Trump administration’s claims that they are only deporting criminals, but the CATO Institute reported via data leaked from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that “73 percent of individuals booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities since October 1, 2025, had no criminal convictions of any kind—only 5 percent had violent criminal convictions.”

Only 5% had violent criminal convictions. Of booked detainees, 47% had not even been charged with a crime.

The Trump administration’s DHS accused CATO’s chart of being “made up” with “no legitimate data behind it.” CATO pushed back, explaining, “DHS inflates the number of “criminal” arrests by including people with pending criminal charges, because many criminal charges do not end in convictions, and an ICE arrest denies them due process and their day in court.”

They went back and forth unwinding the administration’s moved goal posts, but the bottom line is “ICE arrest data confirm that ICE is overwhelmingly arresting people without criminal convictions.”Death Cult

The first detainee to die in Texas ICE custody this year was Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso Medical Examiner’s office.

He “died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday that ruled the death a homicide.”

*The Death Cult numbers for 2026 gathered by the National Immigration Project, as of October 19, 2026, include those who have been recently released from ICE, because ICE was accused of releasing the deathly ill as a way to avoid accountability for the death.

ICE stopped reporting those deaths in June, “rescinding a rule that existed to keep the agency from releasing someone who was dying and recording no death at all—a policy change we strongly opposed when it was announced.”

In the dead of night in June, every Republican - save Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) - voted to fund ICE through 2029 without oversight. Republicans gave ICE $70 billion through the reconciliation process, without adding accountability guardrails demanded by Democrats. Every single Democrat voted no.

Republicans gave ICE this unchecked power after the highly publicized ICE shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Republicans claim that ICE is only detaining people who are criminals, but of course focusing on deporting violent criminals was the immigration policy of :: checks notes:: Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. The point is to create a pathway of cutting off empathy and sympathy for other human beings to the point that their death is cheered.

Once the administration has achieved that, they can further divide the country and weaken freedoms. The problem for Trump is that some Americans care. 

The New Republic, Trump Tries to Ban Jack Smith Testimony as BBC Lawsuit Implodes, Hafiz Rashid, Oct. 19, 2026. The BBC has subpoenaed Jack Smith as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the media company.

Former special counsel Jack Smith stands up with his right hand raised as if he is swearing.Former special counsel Jack Smith is sworn in to testify during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on September 29.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.

The BBC has subpoenaed Smith to defend itself from Trump’s accusations that the network defamed him with deceptive editing in a 2024 documentary about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. In a court filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers tried to fight the subpoena by claiming that “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.

“He was not present when President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech (the ‘Speech’) was made, nor did he participate in its preparation. Smith does not have any personal knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind at the time the Speech was given. Any evidence that Smith gathered during his investigation consists of secondhand knowledge based on materials that he and other third parties collected from various sources,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

In response, the BBC’s attorneys wrote, “None of [Trump]’s arguments for blocking the deposition of Mr. Smith can withstand scrutiny,” pointing out that Smith himself doesn’t object to testifying in the deposition and that Trump still has to prove that “he did not foment or incite the January 6 Capitol riot,” as he claims the BBC’s documentary falsely implied.

“No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim, including Plaintiff’s burden to prove falsity,” the BBC’s lawyers wrote.

This is only Trump’s latest attempt to dodge actually having to prove that the BBC defamed him. His attorneys are also fighting attempts to have Trump himself testify, to subpoena his children to testify, and to dive into his finances. Trump can’t force the BBC to pay a hefty settlement or back off of the coverage, as it is funded by the British taxpayer. Now he either has to give in to the BBC’s lawyers and drop the case or actually try to prove his point and deal with the consequences.

U.S. High Tech, Media, Culture

President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Beware of AI billionaires bearing gifts, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 20, 2026. On Monday morning, Elon Musk announced in a post on his social media platform X that he plans to give American children one share of SpaceX, his rocket, satellite, and AI company. “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk wrote. “This will be the first of many.”

One share of SpaceX stock would be worth around $146 for each child, based on Friday’s closing price. According to 2025 census data, there are around 72 million children in the United States. If Musk donated one share to every child, the giveaway would be valued at around $10.5 billion today.

Musk did not provide any details on the giveaway, including whether shares would be given to every person under 18 or the exact timing of the giveaway. It is also not immediately clear how Musk would distribute the SpaceX shares to American children. On X, Musk responded “Yes” to a post about the shares potentially being distributed via Trump Accounts. A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Musk has “agreed in principle to distribute the stock through the Trump Accounts initiative.”

On Monday, President Trump celebrated Musk’s announcement, writing in a post on Truth Social that the shares would be going to Trump Accounts. “A BIG THANK YOU to our legendary friend, Elon Musk, for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX Stock to millions of American children through TRUMP ACCOUNTS!” Trump wrote.

Trump Accounts are savings accounts for children that were launched on July 4. This summer, Trump said in an interview that he believed that Musk would donate SpaceX stock to Trump Accounts. “Well, I think that he will do that,” Trump told CNBC. In July, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell separately announced that she and her husband would be donating a share of SpaceX to around two million children with Trump Accounts.

While, at first blush, it seems like an act of charity, there are reasons to be skeptical of Musk’s motivations.

A Quinnipiac poll conducted last month found that 74% of Americans have little to no trust in the leaders of AI companies. This is a major problem when AI companies are seeking approval from communities to build massive data centers, trying to convince millions of Americans to buy their products, and lobbying for legal protection from liability risks.

Is Musk motivated by a sincere desire to help American children? Or is this just a public relations gimmick? Influential figures in Musk’s orbit have suggested rehabilitating the image of the AI industry is at least part of the motivation.

David Sacks, Musk’s longtime friend and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has been advocating for AI companies to donate stock as a way to change the perceptions of the public. In a post on X, Sacks wrote, “I hope every AI company will follow the lead of [Shotwell] and give American kids a vested interest in their success. This would do much to improve the public’s image of AI.”

A memo from the Treasury Department on Trump Accounts says, “Donors are attracted by the hope that a stock contribution with a five-year holding period may lead recipients and their families to feel that they have a stake in the fate of the corporation to a greater extent than if the child’s holdings of the corporation were only through an index fund.” Any child who has a Trump Account will not be able to sell their donated SpaceX stock for at least five years.

There is considerable potential for Musk and other AI executives to use stock donations to sway the interests of an entire generation of children and their parents. While Musk announced donating one share to all children, future gifts could be targeted to specific geographic areas. For example, if a company wanted to construct a data center in a particular area but was facing pushback, it could donate stock to all of the children in the area.

For Musk, all of this comes at a small cost. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a current net worth of around $904 billion, according to Bloomberg. A donation of $10.5 billion is just over 1% of his net worth.

Musk also may have been seeking to keep up with one of his rivals in the AI industry. On Sunday, Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, which it described as “a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.” Overall, about 20% of Anthropic’s shares have been dedicated to the public good. The co-founders have personally pledged 80% of their equity to charity.

Under Anthropic’s announcement on X, Musk replied, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.” The next morning, Musk declared his own donations.

Tax benefits

The donation of SpaceX stock would provide huge tax benefits to Musk personally.

As the founder, Musk paid essentially nothing for his SpaceX stock. Giving the shares away allows Musk to avoid about $2.5 billion in federal capital gains tax.

Because stock donations must be routed to Trump Accounts through a non-profit charity, the donations also count as a tax-deductible charitable donation and can generally be written off at their full market value for up to 20% of the donor’s adjusted gross income.

Musk has not said which private foundation he would make the donation through, but it seems likely that he would use his own Musk Foundation. Not only would this help Musk secure a tax deduction, it would also help the Musk Foundation meet its minimum annual giving requirements — which it has a history of violating.

Private foundations, including the Musk Foundation, are required to give away 5% of their assets each year. According to the New York Times, the Musk Foundation fell short of this 5% requirement in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The current value of the Musk Foundation is unknown, but its assets were worth over $14 billion in 2024.The uncertain future

The pledge to donate billions of dollars in stock is just one in a long line of grand promises made by Musk. In several previous cases, he has reneged or not fully fulfilled his promises.

For example, in 2021, Musk told the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) that if they could come up with a $6 billion plan to solve world hunger, he would sell Tesla stock to fund it. WFP quickly sent Musk a plan, but he did not donate the $6 billion.

Musk later donated $5.7 billion in Tesla stock — to his own foundation. 

The New Republic, Meta Weakly Defends Blocking No Kings Instagram in the Middle of Event, Edith Olmsted, Oct. 19, 2026. Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.

During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hourslong suspension: There was a high volume of activity on the page.

“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote on X Sunday.

“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline.

“An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he continued. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”

The No Kings coalition claimed that Meta’s explanation still didn’t make sense.

“In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands. Meta’s ‘high frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up,” the group wrote on Bluesky Sunday.

“Beyond shutting down our Instagram, we’ve received reports that #NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms,” the group wrote in a separate post.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded to Stone’s statement, calling on X for an investigation into the No Kings account’s sudden suspension. “Let’s assume this is true. It’s still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics,” he wrote.

“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he added.

By cozying up to the Trump administration, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts. Now it appears that the company may be doubling down on its allegiances by outright silencing the president’s critics. 

More On Trump Corruption, Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Same rally, different day, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Oct. 20, 2026. It’s all so eternally exhausting.

Monday was no different. It checked every single box. Buckle in, and let us document the atrocities.

Yesterday’s event featured Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife, making one of her contractually-obligated appearances with the husband for whom she has such open, burning contempt.

Shouldn’t Donny have figured out by now that any attempt at affection is going to result with him being on the wrong end of a public humiliation?

Melania was there to introduce who --- even knows what she there to introduce. We keep hearing about how this woman speaks five languages, but English is apparently not one of them.

Fortunately, Donny was on hand to translate Melly’s word-adjacent mouth-sounds.

“…also establishes the The White House Women’s— Health Task Force, which will— mobilize the entire federal government to coordinate action focused on improving women’s health. And this task force will be led by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, that’s a big one. And, uh, he’s been fantastic.”

Fact check: has Bobby Brainworms indeed been ‘fantastic’?

I have no idea what this so-called ‘women’s health task’ force is supposed to achieve, but I do know that every time Cokesnort McToiletseat rears his head, some long-ago-conquered, easily-preventable malady makes a roaring comeback.

You’re welcome, women! Enjoy the who-knows-what-delights that are in store for you. Probably dying during childbirth.

After the dog-and-pony show: ,

New Mexico should immediately change its name to New America. We are not Mexico, we are the United States of America! The name would add great value and prestige to the State! Home Values and Incomes would rise, and you would be even prouder while saluting our beautiful American Flag! Maybe even the Crooked Elections, that New Mexico is known for, would become honest again!

President DONALD J. TRUMP

Does our Slumlord-in-Chief actually believe that property values in Albuquerque are suppressed because the word ‘Mexico’ is in the state’s name? Apparently he does. Racist much?

Every day, this idiot out-stupids himself -- and we’re all expected to pretend it never happened. 

Trump: “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much.”

Fact check: has Russia been ‘fine on Ukraine’?

Today, Russian drones and missiles hit the capital without warning, leaving walls slashed by shrapnel, blowing out residences, a shopping mall, and a school, part of Russia's attempt to make Kyiv unlivable.

No matter what atrocities Russia commits, Donny’s assignment is to insist that it’s all a no-biggie. As I speculated yesterday, the kompromat that Putin has on Donny must really and truly be horrific.

Did Donny then jet off to another hate-rally in who even cares where, they’re all exactly the same? Check!

These rallies really are interchangeable. Once again, Dear Leader bragged about having accomplished the superhuman task of pointing at a giraffe.

Trump: “The first one is they show you a lion, a bear, a snake, and a giraffe. And they say, ‘Which one is the giraffe?’ I got a perfect score.”

He also congratulated himself for almost winning the war that he’s already claimed to have won three hundred times since February.

Trump on Iran: “We’re knocking the shit out of them ... we could leave right now”

As usual, Donny tried to bribe the cultists into voting for Republicans — or else.

Trump: “With Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not going it. That’s it. I’m only doing it for him. That’s a big deal for Kansas.”

And he boasted about how he knows more about Christianity than all the Christians.

Trump on Christianity: “I know more than anybody…A certain pastor said…’He's going to lead us to a period of time in Christianity that nobody else can do — that nobody else can do.’ And he turned out to be right.”

Big, strong Christians with tears in their eyes, going ‘Sir! Sir! How do you do it? No one religions like you do! Sir!”

And, as always, there were random acts of incoherence.

Trump refers to President Xi as “China.”

Wut?

Okay, but did Donny do a racism? Check, check, and chec .

There was the obligatory smearing of Somalis in Michigan as low-IQ, expensive-car-buying fraudsters, and the ritual mocking of Abdul El-Sayed’s perfect normal name. But we also got this.

“Trump says the press smeared Roger Marshall as ‘a Shylock type guy’”

Shylock! Now there’s an antisemitic deep cut.

Shylock, of course, is the Jewish moneylender invented by William Shakespeare in 1596 — which we all know was an awesome time to be a Jew in Europe.

By the early 20th century in America, to call someone a ‘Shylock’ was to imply that they were as greedy and dishonest as one of them-there Jewish types. No doubt, it’s a slur that Donny learned from his tyrant Klansman father. Thing is, nobody’s hurled that term as in insult in probably forty or fifty years. It’s gone out of fashion — but Donny’s too decrepit to remember that we don’t say that any more, in polite company.

I’m still waiting for Donny to blurt the n-word into an open microphone. You know it’s only a matter of time.

Finally, at any point during the day, did Donny commit a dementia? 

While Dear Leader was waddling across his beloved Epstein Helipad toward Helicopter Force One, he stopped to acknowledge and wave at—

well, we have no idea what was going on inside Donny’s collapsed cortex. At the 21-second mark, as the camera pulls back, we learn that he was waving at absolutely nothing.

Now, I want you to cast your mind back to June of 2024, when Joe Biden was in Italy for a G7 meeting.

Joe — who, you’ll remember, was alleged to be old and icky and smelled bad and was probably already dead but too demented to realize it — appeared to wander off aimlessly, right smack in the middle of an event. The right-wing noise machine had a f____ field day with it.

No doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that the wingnut screech-monkeys had deceptively cropped the video. The reality was that Joe had simply turned to acknowledge the skydivers who had just put on a show for the G7 leaders.

Fast forward two and a half years. We have actual, recorded, not-fake evidence of Dear Leader waving at an imaginary crowd that exists only inside his rat-infested head, and not worthless scribbler of the corporate-controlled press can be roused from their slumbers to mention it.

Oct. 19

Top Headlines

Presidents Trump and Putin, United As One

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 18, 2026 [Trump, Russian, Chinese Summit To Carve Up The World?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine. 

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

• Lance’s Substack, Opinion: If Trump Accepts Putin Proposal For Summit To Dismember Ukraine, He Is Outing Himself As A Russian Agent, Not Just Their "Asset," Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 19, 2026. This proposed summit is what most of us following the global strategic crisis expected he might do along these lines. Our column assessed this threat extensively in our coverage over many years. For example, our analysis of the Alaska summit meeting in 2025 was explicit that the purpose for it was to start the process of dividing up the world into new spheres of influence, which meant ending the post-World War II order.

The new arrangement that Putin and Trump were negotiating in Alaska is exactly that which is described in Professor HCR's letter today [Dr. Heather Cox Richardson]. Europe would be conceded to the Russian sphere. The US under such a new power sharing arrangement would have total hegemony over the western hemisphere, and China over all of Asia.

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Alarm as Trump Ordered Voting Machine Hack, Vance Mocks Epstein Files Protester, Trump Completely Turns on Ukraine, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Two weeks before the midterms, we just learned that Trump appointees asked the nation’s top election security agency to secretly get their hands on a voting machine and hack it, and told staff not to alert the manufacturer if they found any flaws. At the same time, the agency meant to protect our elections has been gutted, and election officials from both parties, including a Republican in deep-red Utah, are now being targeted by their own federal government.

And on Ukraine, it keeps getting worse. Trump said today it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” his Treasury secretary refused three times to say whether Ukraine is even an ally, and Zelenskyy told senators that Ukraine still doesn’t have full access to U.S. intelligence or its military satellite network.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion:  Ten Years Later: Right Wingers Finally Admit Hillary Was Right, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Oct. 19, 2026. A bunch of right wingers are speaking up against Trump’s capitulation to Russia. The WSJ — the news side of which describes that Vladimir Putin is dangling a conference at which Russia, China, and the US (I imagine they would carve up the world) — posted an op-ed demanding that, “When the election is over there needs to be a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests.”

PPR GLOBAL, MOSCOW IN FLAMES as Trump Pushes to "Peace"—Ukraine HITS Russia's Capitals with Surprising STRIKE, Staff Report, Oct. 19, 2026.. Video report on Ukraine's massive and remarkably effective drone attacks on Russian assets in Moscow and St. Petersburg, hitting data centers, warehouses, oil refining and a key bridge in defiance of Putin and Trump -- but with the support of major European nations that fear Russian aggression.

• The Contrarian, Opinion: The MAGA crackup has begun, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 19, 2026.  🚨 15 Days to the Midterms 🚨 Donald Trump’s lawlessness, incoherence, cruelty, and desperation are increasing as we approach a blue wave election that appears increasingly likely to sweep out Republican majorities in the House and Senate, flip numerous governorships, and deliver significant blows to Republicans in state races. In the latest Washington Post-ABC poll, his approval hit a new low of 33 percent, with a dismal 22 percent among independents. 
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Donald Trump is Politically Bankrupt. Be Very Afraid, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 19, 2026. What will he do when he has nothing left to lose? According to CNN, all-out war with Iran may be about to resume. You see, it’s a well-understood proposition that the owners of businesses that are on the verge of going bust often engage in destructive behavior. And Trump is about to go bankrupt — not financially (he’s made billions through corruption) but politically. So he, like a failing businessman, has strong incentives to wreak havoc.
• New York Times, Trump Is Pushing Ukraine to Surrender to Russia, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Oct. 19, 2026. President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t want to believe that Washington wanted an end to the war at Ukraine’s expense. “But that’s how it looks,” he added. President Trump is trying to force Ukraine to surrender in the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an interview published on Sunday, as a deepening feud between the two leaders drives their relations to new lows.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Happy Birthday, Vlad. Yours, Always.’ - DJT, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 19, 2026. In Donald Trump’s telling, he wins everywhere, from Florida to California, when the votes are counted properly, and his campaign rallies do nothing but juice the Republicans he deigns to share the stage with. “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!” he wrote this month.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Prominent Rs Call For An Investigation Into Trump’s Putin Ties, Another Calls His Closing Campaign Performance “Insane,” Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Lots of states turning on early in-person voting this week. With 15 days to go Trump is fighting for his political life as he frenetically campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Florida, and Georgia this week. As Punchbowl News notes this morning when Trump campaigns he often travels to the reddest parts of the state -- not the swing, contested areas. That way he isn’t harming House Republicans in competitive races.

High Tech Trump Allies Shutting Off Facebook, TikTok To Trump Critics?

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Meta shuts down "No Kings" account during major anti-Trump protest,Judd Legum, right, Oct. 19, 2026. On Saturday, thousands of “No Kings” events were held around the country. It was a critical day for the anti-Trump protest group, which has attracted millions of participants since 2025. Saturday’s events focused on early voter activation ahead of the midterm elections. Then, at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern, No Kings’ Instagram account was taken offline. It left the organization without its biggest megaphone during the height of the protests. Another social network with close ties to the Trump administration, TikTok, is censoring ads promoting "Musk," the critical documentary. After briefly feuding with Trump, Musk has once again emerged as a key ally.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Early Voting Shatters Records, Trump Labeled ‘Traitor’ and Increases Aid to Putin, Trump Increases Election Interference Effort, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 19, 2026.  Early voting is shattering records across the country, and that is the best news I’ve had to share in a long time. Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia: turnout is surging. At the same time, the federal government is ramping up pressure on the very officials who run our elections, to the point that a Republican election chief in deep-red Utah says she’s now under federal investigation for refusing to hand over your private data.

And overnight, Ukraine was hit again. Sixteen ballistic missiles struck Kyiv, more than half a million homes lost power, and Ukraine says it once again got no warning from the United States before the first wave hit. Meanwhile, Putin is floating a summit with Trump and Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s future, without Ukraine in the room.

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Russia Declares ‘Checkmate’ as Trump Pushes Ukraine to Capitulate, Vance Confronted by Grieving Husband, GOP in Free Fall, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Today may go down as one of the most alarming days yet for Ukraine. Hours after Zelenskyy said the Trump administration is pushing his country to capitulate, Trump went on Truth Social to attack him, claiming Zelenskyy doesn’t care about ending the war and mocking Ukraine as a country “in shambles.” All of this while Russia has spent the past week launching nearly 2,700 drones at Ukraine’s power grid, Washington paused the intelligence Ukraine relies on to spot incoming ballistic missiles, and Putin’s own envoy is bragging that the “ice has begun to break” with the United States. Tonight, the Russians are celebrating.

Special Report: Huge Riots In France. How Much Russian Influence Aimed To Disrupt West? 

• Wayne Madsen Report, Mapping and Analysis: Déjà vu: Moscow’s links to street violence, arson, and larceny in France, neighboring nations, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Far-right and far-left protesters encouraged by Russian influence. We’ve seen this before with Moscow, as street mobs encouraged by Kremlin-directed influence operations ravage Paris, Toulouse, Limoges, and other cities.
• New York Times, News Analysis: France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country, Catherine Porter, Oct. 19, 2026. The National Rally, already ahead in the polls, presented itself as the party best placed to restore law and order.
• New York Times, France to Impose Curfews After Nationwide Rioting, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 19, 2026. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended police efforts and pledged to restore order as government ministers acknowledged failures.
• New York Times, ‘A Failure’: French Officials Issue Mea Culpa Over Weekend Riots, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 19, 2026. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, acknowledged that the police had been underprepared and said he had offered to resign.

More On Trump Sellout To Putin, Backstabbing Ukraine, Europe, NATO

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Speedrunning Abandoning Ukraine, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Almost two weeks ago, on October 7, Donald Trump mentioned offhand that it was Vladimir Putin’s birthday and the two of them had a call set up. The call went ahead two days later, and Trump has been snuggling closer to Russia and taking a sledgehammer to Ukraine ever since. You could tell the birthday chat was trouble from the jump. Russian media cheerfully reported on the “substance” and “warmth” of the phone call, with Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov reporting that “nobody wanted to hang up first.”
• New York Times, Under Siege, Ukraine Uses F-16s to Shoot Down Russia’s Jet-Powered Drones, Lara Jakes, Oct. 19, 2026. The fighters are a key tool against Moscow’s latest weapon of choice. But deploying the multimillion-dollar planes to counter drones is an imperfect fix.
• Hope for America, Opinion: The President of the United States is being played, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 19, 2026. After spending most of today at his private club in West Palm Beach, Florida, the president of the United States posted on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, at 4:36 this afternoon to share his perverted reasoning for refusing to implement sanctions on Russia.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Power of Negative Thinking, William Kristol, right, Oct. 19, 2026. A note on two findings in the new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll that came out yesterday. First, the generic congressional ballot has moved decisively in the Democrats’ direction. In July, Democrats had a 3-point advantage when voters were asked whom they intended to vote for in November. They now hold a 50 to 42 percent lead among registered voters—and one should probably add another point or two for a likely disproportionate Democratic turnout. But there’s another finding in the poll that suggests they could end up in even better shape.
• New York Times, Republicans in Ohio Are Worried About Turnout. Here’s What They’re Doing About it, Emily Davies, Oct. 19, 2026. To boost Senator Jon Husted, who is in a tight race to keep his seat, some Republicans who were making a jobs pitch have pivoted to focus on socialism.
• New York Times, That Huge Republican Cash Edge? It’s in Senate Races, Not House Races, Shane Goldmacher, Oct. 19, 2026. With Republicans seen as less likely to hold their majority in the House, the party is focusing more on the battle for the Senate, where it is vastly outspending Democrats on ads.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Republicans Are Crumbling And Pointing Fingers At Trump For Midterm Failure, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 19, 2026. It s never a good sign when the election is two weeks away, but the blame game is already starting, but that is what is happening as Republicans are already blaming Trump.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of Washington DC and East Potomac Golf Links Map.

• New York Times, Judge Grills Witnesses About Decisions Behind Trump’s Golf Course Plan, Zach Montague, Oct. 19, 2026. The Justice Department clashed with Judge Ana C. Reyes over testimony by several government witnesses about the chain of decisions surrounding East Potomac Golf Links. 
• All Rise News, Judge rejects recusal motion in East Potomac case, Adam Klasfeld, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Hours before an evidentiary hearing in the East Potomac Golf Course case, Judge Ana Reyes emphatically rejected the Trump Justice Department’s demand that she recuse herself.

Israel, Middle East Wars 

• New York Times, Houthi Strikes Kill Dozens in Yemeni Desert Military Camp, Officials Say, Saeed Al-Batati and Ismaeel Naar, Oct. 19, 2026. The Iranian-backed militia struck with ballistic missiles deep in government-held central Yemen, in what appeared to be among the deadliest attacks of the renewed war.
• Drop Site New, Israel-Backed Palestinian Militias Terrorize Displaced Families in Gaza, Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Oct. 19, 2026. Over the past year, attacks by Israel-backed Palestinian militias have become increasingly frequent in Gaza, particularly targeting Palestinians living close to the ever expanding “yellow line.” 

Special Report: Child Abuses In African Gold Mining

• New York Times, The Coverup: How a Trillion-Dollar Industry Launders Illegal Gold, Justin Scheck, Visuals by Lynsey Addario, Oct. 19, 2026. The line between dirty and clean gold is an industry fiction. Wall Street and governments profit off gold from criminals, gangsters and those who exploit children. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Rambles Like A Loon About Cushions At Women’s Health Event, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 19, 2026. At an event that was supposed to be about the creation of a new women’s health division at NIH, Trump could not stay on topic and showed that he doesn’t care about women by ranting about cushions.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

• New York Times, Black Unemployment Hints at a Job Market in Worse Shape Than It Seems, Talmon Joseph Smith, Oct. 19, 2026. The Black unemployment rate climbed a percentage point to 7 percent in September, almost double the rate for white workers.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Tom Cruise's Digger Exposes the Climate Fools, the Billionaires, and the Biggest Lie of All, Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 19, 2026. The explosive new film reveals how fossil fuel billionaires concealed the truth, bought political protection, and then blamed ordinary Americans for the destruction they helped create…
• New York Times, Larry David Mocks the D.S.A. Some Are Not Amused, Lisa Lerer and Evan Gorelick, Updated Oct. 19, 2026. The comedian satirized the Democratic Socialists of America, its platform and its opposition to Israel in an essay that some did not LOL at.

Top Stories

Presidents Trump and Putin, United As One 

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 18, 2026 [Trump, Russian, Chinese Summit To Carve Up The World?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Tonight Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war. And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect.

Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate” (as shown below).

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy, right, wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine. He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader’s abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.

But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

Lance’s Substack, Opinion: If Trump Accepts Putin Proposal For Summit To Dismember Ukraine, He Is Outing Himself As A Russian Agent, Not Just Their "Asset," Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 19, 2026. This proposed summit is what most of us following the global strategic crisis expected he might do along these lines. Our column assessed this threat extensively in our coverage over many years. For example, our analysis of the Alaska summit meeting in 2025 was explicit that the purpose for it was to start the process of dividing up the world into new spheres of influence, which meant ending the post-World War II order.

The new arrangement that Putin and Trump were negotiating in Alaska is exactly that which is described in Professor HCR's letter today [Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, left]. Europe would be conceded to the Russian sphere. The US under such a new power sharing arrangement would have total hegemony over the western hemisphere, and China over all of Asia.

There is no law per se which makes it illegal for a US President to attend a summit meeting with two heads of state, Putin and Xi, each of whom he has already met with in the last two years. That is unless an unresolved state of war exists among them. There is no officially declared state of war between the United States and the Russian Federation which would be a legal tripwire for treason charges. However Russia is arming and giving logistical support to Iran with whom we are currently engaged in military conflict, and Ukraine has security guarantees from NATO, for which the US has been the leading guarantor.

Most certainly, treason it would be if Trump accepts the invitation. And in reality, Putin would not have made the proposal public had not the meeting already been agreed to, either through personal discussions between them or diplomatic channels. And this insanity does have all the indications of coming out of a Trump-Putin phone call. So unless we derail it, this will happen.

Russia has acted as our strategic enemy and Trump is giving them "aid and comfort." If the Trump Cabinet does not immediately act to block his actions they are also complicit in treason, therefore every single one of them must be removed from office with him and be put on trial.

It would mean that the US has for all intents and purposes walked out of the NATO military alliance.

It means he is in effect conceding Europe and its economic resources to the Russian geopolitical sphere of influence, repudiating the Article Five mutual defense provision which is the backbone of our strategic defense alliances.

It means unilaterally voiding the NATO Treaty which served to keep the peace in Europe for 80 years.

While only the Senate has the expressed powers of "advise and consent" to pass ratification resolutions for treaties negotiated by the President, there is no constitutional provision for repudiation of treaties. It has in fact been done by a President before and upheld as lawful in the case of Taiwan. (Goldwater vs. Carter) Therefore, were Trump to end the US membership in NATO, it would not be technically unconstitutional or a high crime. "Technically."

As Professor HCR noted in today's summary of Trump's actions over the recent weeks, he voided the Lindsey O. Graham sanctions Act by purchasing approximately two billion dollars worth of Russian diesel fuel, clearly intended as an attempted pre-election market rigging stunt. (Which of course fizzled within minutes.) He issued an executive order exempting Russia from US sanctions laws. He has called for the removal of Ukraine's president Zelenskyy, and if they go ahead with this summit without Zelenskyy's presence and participation, Trump is giving Putin a green light to remove his government from power through any means necessary. He has acted to restrict Ukraine's access to the military grade Starlink comms vital to their defense.

For many years intelligence professionals have characterized Trump as a "Russian asset" based upon his personal history of shady dealings with Russian government leaders, crime syndicates, and oligarchs. Trump has done nothing but lie and deflect, by droning on about "Russia, Russia, Russia," mainly for the purpose of gaslighting his own supporters and fueling Fox's damage control propaganda. Now he is exposing himself as their full-fledged agent.

Meaning there can be no doubt (as if there ever was) that he is willfully serving Russian interests in violation of US national interests. An "asset" of a foreign intelligence service is someone who is used by them, whether consciously or not, but might have other loyalties and is not necessarily always bound to follow their orders. An asset can be profiled and played without their realizing it. Whereas a conscious agent is a full time deployable asset operating with cover.

He is not just helping Putin. He is working for him. This is not news to most people here. However if he goes to this meeting he is making it official that he is a Russian-controlled actor if not an actual spy, and is acting in a way harmful to US national security interests on their behalf.

This all means the end of virtually every existing collective security agreement between the US and its allies and economic partners.

It means the likely dismantling of the United Nations and all of its vital global functions, including the mediation of international agreements on human rights, peacekeeping, climate, and various kinds of international disputes.

It also means that Trump is asserting his "new Monroe Doctrine" to be able to install and remove governments in Central and South America as he sees fit. Which only a deluded idiot would not recognize will mean the US is planning for a horrific bloody long war with Mexico.

Here is an excerpt from my coverage days prior to the Alaska meeting:

["So we have an illegal summit between and indicted war criminal and a convicted felon who happen to control the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. Their plan is to divide up the world in the fashion of mafia kingpins carving up turf, under terms which are, in effect, agreements to leave each other's criminal syndicates alone to conduct business within redrawn boundaries or spheres of influence.

...Let's get real. Trump's perfidy is not just about Ukraine. He is giving Putin a green light to seize geopolitical and economic control of all of Europe. What do people think Russia will grow into once they have possesion of Ukraine's industrial heartland, agricultural sector, strategically vital ports, and a part of their labor force? What will happen when Putin has taken Odessa, through which a significant chunk of the world's food supply is shipped? And how long before he moves against Poland or the Baltic states? Will Europe go against both Russia and the US in order to defend Ukraine and the rest? Will European democracies go the way of ours in the aftermath of these crises." August 9, 2025]

And this quote from a week later, right after the summit, which failed to consolidate the secret Trump-Putin protocols due to a unified European opposition;

["On one hand the Europeans are stepping up and that is good. But someone needs to state that the main thing which has kept Russia at bay for decades has been Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Which means that the ultimate guarantor of peace in Europe has been the US nuclear triad. Trump, Vance, and Hegseth all but made clear at the Munich meetings earlier this year that Article 5 is a dead letter, and that the US no longer sees Europe's defense as its primary strategic role, because Trump is "tired of paying for it," and as he said during the campaign, "Putin can do whatever the hell he wants" in Europe." August 15, 2025]

In addition, a quote from our coverage of that year's Munich security conference where Rubio and Hegseth unveiled their new racialist security doctrine of reversing the "white blight" in Europe;

["Trump’s handlers are in fact pushing something entirely different, which is a redivision of the world between two nuclear armed mafia kingpins into new imperial “spheres of influence.” (This still takes into account China having autonomy within their sphere, which mostly consists of their internal market, but is centered on the “one belt-one road” transportation corridor, the “New Silk Road” project.)

...I feel that I need to elaborate on just what such a world order would look like. The criteria for the proposed realignment of US global alliances is to throw out the entire rules based post-war order, and replace it with a business deal in effect, between two oligarchs who are mapping out a series of agreements for looting rights of the world’s dwindling raw material wealth. This pertains mostly to access to non-renewable energy such as fossil fuels, precious metals, and rare earth minerals. This division of the world into hemispheric looting grounds by these two fascist would-be Emperors, is rooted in the twisted ideologies of oligarchical “gangster capitalism,” religious fundamentalism, and white supremacy. Racially-driven culture war and wars fought militarily are two flip sides of the same coin. We have been writing about precisely this policy agenda, which we used to term “Fortress America,” since Trump was first elected in 2016." December 6, 2025]

According to multiple sources, there is massive pushback against Trump's perfidy coming from all across the political spectrum because most Americans support Ukraine, so the meeting itself is not yet set in stone. Many in fact see this as a desperate act of self-preservation by Trump on the eve of the midterm elections.

There are three things which Trump cares about, each of which are symptomatic of his malignant narcissism. His money, the market indexes, and his approval rating, each of which are all about him.

His response to his poll ratings cratering is simply to say they are fake, which he knows they aren't and is consciously lying about them, not just delusional. His explanation for all economic problems is to blame Joe Biden for them. His solutions? Deploy the military someplace, whether it means bombing Venezuela or Iran, or occupying Washington DC, then declaring victory in a lame attempt to hype both the polls and the markets

If somehow GOP blowback against this Putin proposed summit prevents it from happening, my assessment is that Trump will lash out like the madman that he is by hitting Iran with either a nuclear weapon or a "MOAB" conventional WMD before the election. I agree in principle with the statement by Marjorie Taylor-Greene yesterday warning about this as a likely scenario. I don't trust her personally given that she is just a sock-puppet for her new guru Tucker Carlson, but she is known to be "wired in" to various networks from her days on the Homeland Security committee where she had access to classified material and briefings. If she is putting out this warning, it is coming from someone who is right smack in the middle of it.

So, what can we do about it? I'll tell you, but most of you won't like it and probably are too cynical to even try it. But I'll say it anyway.

Call, text, email, and even visit Republican Congressmen and Senators, or intervene at their town meetings if any, and deliver a very loud and clear simple message. They have to tell Trump to not go, and that if he does he will be impeached. That's it. Now is the time they actually might listen, because Trump is sinking the careers of most of them.

Don't worry about what they say. It means nothing. Remember that every German officer during the Nazi period greeted each other and signed their letters with the salutation "H__l H____r," yet it was the same German officers who in the end plotted to overthrow him when it was clear he intended to take his whole country down with him. Let your message register, what they say is not what they are thinking, and that is a default setting of theirs.

Or, you can disregard all of this, go with the flow, and just post a meme about Susan Dell's face like so many others on social media are doing. At least we'll get an "lol" out of it.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Alarm as Trump Ordered Voting Machine Hack, Vance Mocks Epstein Files Protester, Trump Completely Turns on Ukraine, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Two weeks before the midterms, we just learned that Trump appointees asked the nation’s top election security agency to secretly get their hands on a voting machine and hack it, and told staff not to alert the manufacturer if they found any flaws. At the same time, the agency meant to protect our elections has been gutted, and election officials from both parties, including a Republican in deep-red Utah, are now being targeted by their own federal government.

And on Ukraine, it keeps getting worse. Trump said today it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” his Treasury secretary refused three times to say whether Ukraine is even an ally, and Zelenskyy told senators that Ukraine still doesn’t have full access to U.S. intelligence or its military satellite network.

I have some news of my own. On election night, I’m going live from 6 PM to 12 AM EST on all platforms, including right here. I’m still working out the details and should have final information within the next week, but get ready, because big guests are coming. You won’t want to miss it.

Between now and then, I’ll be working around the clock to bring you everything you need to know, from what this administration is doing to our elections to real-time updates from people on the ground in Ukraine. I’ve faced attacks for doing this work, and I’m not going to stop.

But I can only do it because of you. There’s no corporation, no billionaire, and no politician behind this newsletter.

Let’s get into it.

Trump Appointees Asked Federal Cybersecurity Agency to Secretly Hack a Voting Machine as Pressure on Elections Mounts

Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security asked the nation’s top election security agency to secretly obtain a voting machine and hack it, according to a new ProPublica investigation. Two former administration officials told ProPublica that a few months into Trump’s second term, appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, to acquire a machine, examine it, and report the findings so they could be passed to the White House. CISA staff were also told not to alert the voting machine company if they found any flaws, which goes against the agency’s standard practice. Career staffers were shocked, and one former official said they feared the results would be kept “in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like.” Staff told the appointees the request was impossible, partly because the agents capable of it had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the appointees eventually stopped pushing. The White House said Trump has done more than any president to ensure free and fair elections, while DHS and CISA did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

The administration has gutted the very agency responsible for protecting elections, leaving states to fend for themselves heading into the midterms. More than 1,000 CISA employees have been laid off or pushed out, shrinking the agency by about a third, and Trump’s 2027 budget would cut another $700 million. State officials told ProPublica that CISA was “literally nonexistent” during the critical planning period for the midterms, offering no help and no explanation. Trust was further shattered when the administration released confidential information states had shared with CISA about the 2020 election to support Trump’s debunked fraud claims. When CISA’s new acting director, a former Trump White House adviser who is also a Virginia GOP district representative, finally reached out in August, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told him directly that he didn’t trust him. CISA released a last-minute election security plan in late September, which Maine’s secretary of state called “too little, too late.”

A White House task force created to find election fraud hasn’t found any, and has instead turned to releasing records targeting people who investigated Trump. The task force, led by pro-Trump journalist John Solomon, has published 113 documents from probes including Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and Jack Smith’s classified documents case. Trump allies see the releases as helpful to a Florida-based “grand conspiracy” case aimed at indicting former officials, though that probe has produced no indictments and its lead prosecutor recently resigned amid reported pressure to move faster. One release showed the FBI used a routine, court-approved technique to track phone numbers from calls by Susie Wiles, now Trump’s chief of staff, during the documents investigation. Legal experts say the records show investigators following normal procedures. Solomon openly acknowledged the goal is to serve “the court of public opinion,” even though the documents are posted on the White House website under the heading “election integrity.”

Pro-democracy groups are racing to prepare for possible federal interference before, during, and after Election Day. Before the vote, the administration has pushed to restrict mail voting, demanded states’ voter rolls, and pressed for tougher voting laws, though it has lost every one of the more than 25 lawsuits it filed seeking voter rolls. On Election Day, FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin have refused to rule out sending federal agents to polling places, despite a 150-year-old federal law barring armed agents at the polls. After the election, groups are preparing for scenarios ranging from ballot seizures to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act or declaring a national emergency, which he has not ruled out. Advocates have recruited volunteers to serve as “election first responders” at polling sites nationwide and say they will sue immediately over any attempt to seize ballots. Trump has cast doubt on U.S. elections on more than 70% of the days of his second term, according to one analysis.

Election officials from both parties are now facing direct pressure from the federal government, 60 Minutes reports. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, said threats to elections now come “from within our own government” after the Justice Department told her in writing she is under investigation for refusing to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers and other private data. Officials in 29 other states also refused, and DOJ has sued all of them, while just last week it threatened to prosecute California officials who count ballots from 20,000 people it labels “likely noncitizens.” The administration claims without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered, but Henderson found just 52 questionable voters out of more than 2 million in Utah. In Georgia, the FBI seized more than 600 boxes of 2020 election records and reassigned 260 analysts to the probe without any result. DOJ civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon called concerns that Trump might challenge the midterm results “paranoia,” as surveys show only about half of Americans expect the elections to be free and fair.

“It’s Time for Somebody Else to Negotiate on Behalf of Ukraine”: Trump Slams Zelenskyy and Defends Lifting Russian Sanctions

Trump escalated his attacks on Zelenskyy Monday, suggesting someone else should negotiate on Ukraine’s behalf. Responding to Zelenskyy’s warning that he is on the “wrong side of history,” Trump told reporters that if the Ukrainian leader had listened to him, he would have made a much better deal long ago and saved a million lives. “I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” Trump said, adding that very little land has changed hands while a tremendous number of people have died. He again rejected the idea that waiving sanctions on Russia handed Moscow a win, insisting he is supporting an end to the war. Trump claimed Zelenskyy “is not helping matters much” and doesn’t want the war to stop, while saying he simply wants to see people stop dying. In a TV interview Friday, he went further, saying Zelenskyy “is not a good guy for us to deal with” and that he is “not a big fan.”

Zelenskyy told a bipartisan group of senators that Ukraine still lacks full access to U.S. intelligence and its military satellite network. On a call hosted by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, Zelenskyy said intelligence sharing and access to Starshield, the military version of Starlink, remain partially degraded, according to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who called the update “highly alarming.” That contradicts claims from the administration that service has been restored and intelligence sharing was never paused. Blumenthal said senators from both parties are preparing to take immediate action to show their displeasure. Four Republican senators have already joined a bipartisan letter asking the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or other senior officials ordered or knew in advance about the Starshield restrictions. The senators also warned that cutting Ukraine’s intelligence access may have put American personnel on the ground in danger.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused three times to say whether the United States considers Ukraine an ally. Asked repeatedly on “Meet the Press,” Bessent first pointed to the intelligence, satellite support, and weapons sales the U.S. provides, and then said, “I’m not the secretary of state. I’m not the president.” He called it “very reckless” for Zelenskyy to accuse the U.S. government of restricting Ukraine’s satellite internet, insisting no one in the administration did that. Bessent also claimed Trump had not lifted Russia sanctions, describing the move as a 60-day pause, while acknowledging the diesel embargo had been lifted. He accused Zelenskyy of presenting a “false binary” that Ukraine must win, saying the war must end through a negotiated settlement. Bessent also blamed European NATO members for not supplying more Patriot missile systems to Ukraine.

Rolling Stone reports the White House pressured Ukraine with an ultimatum to stop striking Russian oil refineries or lose U.S. intelligence. Multiple officials described hours of heated phone calls after the White House ordered its people to ramp up pressure on Kyiv, according to the outlet. The piece argues Trump is turning the U.S. into an enemy of Ukraine and an ally of Russia, noting he has repeatedly blamed Zelenskyy rather than Putin for the war continuing. It points out that most Americans still support Ukraine, and that the Graham Act sanctions Trump waived passed the Senate 86-11. Rolling Stone also reported the administration worked with Elon Musk to throttle Ukraine’s satellite access, though both the White House and Musk deny responsibility. The author warns that removing Zelenskyy would not end the war, because Ukrainians are fighting for their national identity, not for any one leader.

Ukraine says it carried out the world’s first drone evacuation of a wounded soldier from the front lines. Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Assault Brigade shared a video showing an injured infantryman strapping himself into a large drone and being flown to safety at low altitude. The brigade said heavy Russian drone activity and landmines made evacuation by ground vehicle impossible, so its specialists tried something that had never been done before. The aircraft was a heavy-lift hexacopter originally designed as a bomber, and engineers had to ensure it could carry a person without flipping or swaying. The soldier is now receiving treatment, and the unit’s squad leader called him a hero for agreeing to the mission. The breakthrough comes days after Ukraine’s government approved a pilot program to use drones to transport medicines, blood samples, and donor organs between hospitals.

Trump Wants to Rename New Mexico, Vance Mocks Epstein Files Protester, and More

Trump called on New Mexico to change its name to “New America.” In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump wrote that “We are not Mexico, we are the United States of America!” and claimed the new name would raise the state’s prestige, home values, and incomes. He also took a swipe at the state’s elections, suggesting the name change might make its “Crooked Elections” honest again, without offering any evidence of fraud. New Mexico has voted Democratic in eight of the last nine presidential elections, and Democrats hold every statewide office and its entire congressional delegation. The post follows Trump’s executive orders renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario “Lake America.” It came just two weeks before the midterms, as Republicans face a difficult political landscape.

JD Vance suggested a protester demanding the release of the Epstein files was an undocumented immigrant. During a rally in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a man standing directly behind Vance shouted “God bless our children! Release the Epstein files!” before being removed by security as the crowd chanted “USA.” Vance then joked that he had to amend his earlier claim of zero illegal border crossings, adding with a smile, “But one isn’t bad, right?” Critics noted that releasing the Epstein files was a promise Trump himself campaigned on and that supporters have demanded for years. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office called it insulting to suggest only undocumented immigrants care about justice for victims. The administration has faced continued criticism from survivors over its handling of the files.

Trump ally Ric Grenell is facing accusations that a nearly $6 million donation meant for the Kennedy Center never arrived. Alina Habba, Trump’s former attorney, reportedly stormed into the Oval Office earlier this month to tell the president that a donation her husband, Turkish businessman Turhan Mildon, made in 2025 never reached the center. According to documents from Mildon’s lawyers, he transferred $17.6 million to an account Grenell supplied for a separate business deal, with the understanding that $5.6 million would go to the Kennedy Center. Kennedy Center staff told Axios they never found the donation and that Mildon actually owed a $270,000 pledge. Grenell, who has served as acting head of the Kennedy Center and special envoy to Venezuela, vehemently denied the allegations, saying he never asked for money and never received any payment. White House counsel Will Scharf is now reviewing the matter, including texts allegedly sent by Grenell.

A Black conservative influencer says she was kicked out of a Ken Paxton rally in Texas without explanation. Thelma Louise, a pro-Trump TikTok creator with more than 200,000 followers, said she drove two hours to the Senate candidate’s San Antonio event on Sunday before being told Paxton’s campaign manager wanted her to leave. Her videos show no disturbance before her removal, and she says she still has no idea why it happened. A visibly emotional Louise said she left the Democratic Party two years ago, volunteered for Trump’s campaign, and has worked hard promoting Republicans. She showed press credentials from past GOP events, including the party’s midterm convention in Dallas. She said she does not blame the Republican Party, but holds Paxton’s campaign manager responsible for what she called disrespectful treatment.

Trump’s border czar hinted that the FBI may be investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar. Asked on Fox News whether the administration was investigating any other alleged misconduct by the Minnesota Democrat, Tom Homan declined to elaborate, saying, “I know things, but that’s a question for the FBI.” It was not clear what the FBI would be investigating or whether it was connected to the existing Homeland Security case. Federal agents searched Omar’s Washington home last week in a probe reportedly focused on whether her father listed an incorrect age on her citizenship paperwork when she was a child. Omar’s attorneys have demanded the return of her seized belongings, arguing there is no legitimate basis to claim she violated any citizenship law. Justice Department guidelines prohibit timing investigative steps to influence an election, and early voting in Minnesota began last week.

MeidasTouch reports that Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s records list two different home addresses. According to the report, Ramaswamy’s New York attorney registration, renewed this year, lists a home address in West Chester, Ohio, while his Ohio voter registration lists a residence in Columbus. New York requires attorneys to list their home address and update it within 30 days of a change, and Ohio law requires voters to register where they actually live. MeidasTouch argues that one of the two records appears to be inaccurate, which could raise issues under either state’s rules. The report notes the discrepancy is striking given Ramaswamy’s vocal campaigning against voter fraud and his push to add voter ID to Ohio’s constitution. Ramaswamy, who has lived in Ohio since 2019, has never registered for the Ohio bar.

Other news:

Myanmar’s military government released rare photos of detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi, shown at left in a 2011 photo, receiving books sent by King Charles III. Officials from Myanmar’s Home Affairs Ministry delivered two books, a sealed envelope, and diplomatic correspondence to the 81-year-old Nobel laureate in the capital, Naypyitaw. The books focus on soil health and environmental issues, reflecting the king’s longtime advocacy for sustainable agriculture, and the two met in London in 2017. Suu Kyi has been detained since the military seized power in February 2021 and is serving her sentence under house arrest on charges her supporters and rights groups call politically motivated. Her whereabouts and condition have been largely hidden from public view, making the photos a rare glimpse of her. The release comes as Myanmar’s military-backed government tries to end its international isolation, though it continues to reject calls from neighboring countries to free her.

Trump signed an executive order creating a new women’s health division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force on the issue. Joined by first lady Melania Trump in the Rose Garden, the president said the effort aims to close research gaps and modernize care for women. The task force will be led by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Melania Trump spoke about using artificial intelligence to speed up women’s health discoveries and improve access and affordability. The initiative comes after the administration pushed for cuts at NIH, sought to slash grants for diversity-related research, and downsized the federal health workforce. It has also launched a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone that medical groups call politically motivated, and moved to require family planning grant applicants to align with Trump’s political priorities.

Christiane Amanpour is leaving CNN after more than 43 years. CNN chief executive Mark Thompson announced in a memo that the network’s chief international anchor will scale her show back to once a week early next year before it ends in May, with her final day at the end of June. Amanpour, 68, has covered nearly every major global conflict of the past four decades, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Bosnian War to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza. She also confirmed she is leaving PBS, where she hosts “Amanpour & Company.” In a statement, she thanked her colleagues for working to report “the truth about the world and to the world, without fear nor favor.” Her departure comes just weeks after David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance formally took over CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is likely out for the season after doctors found blood clots in his leg and lungs. The team said Hurts was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis in his calf along with clots in both lungs, though he is clinically stable and is expected to have no long-term effects. He was first diagnosed with a less serious superficial clot before the team’s game in London, where he still played the full game after doctors cleared him. A follow-up scan in Philadelphia showed the clot had moved, prompting the team to sit him Sunday and order more tests. Hurts is now on blood thinners, which typically last three to six months and bar athletes from contact sports because of the risk of dangerous bleeding. The Super Bowl MVP will be replaced by backup Tanner McKee, as Eagles fans hope for a repeat of Nick Foles’s backup-led Super Bowl run in 2018.

Elon Musk and Anthropic are both promising to give the public a stake in their companies as concerns about AI’s economic impact grow. Musk posted that next year he will give one SpaceX share to every child in America, a pledge currently worth about $10.8 billion, though he provided no details. His announcement came a day after Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund to address the labor market impacts of AI. Anthropic, which is preparing for a public offering that analysts say could value it at over $1 trillion, said the fund could make charitable donations or direct money to specific populations. The pledges come as public opinion sours on AI, with 64% of Americans telling an AP poll it is developing too fast and 70% telling NBC News they are more worried than excited. Musk has a history of bold announcements that never materialized, including his 2018 claim that he had secured funding to take Tesla private.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a new case challenging school admissions policies aimed at boosting diversity, this time in Maryland. The case targets the lottery-based admissions process for magnet middle schools in Montgomery County, a large, diverse suburb of Washington, D.C. Challengers argue the policy unfairly elevates Black and Latino students and disadvantages Asian students in high-performing schools, in violation of the 14th Amendment. The court is not expected to rule directly on the constitutional question, but rather on what evidence challengers must show to bring such a claim. Since the court struck down race-conscious college admissions in 2023, conservatives have accused schools of trying to achieve the same goals through race-neutral policies. Lower courts ruled in favor of the school district.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike down a 150-year-old federal ban on distilling liquor at home. The law, passed in 1868 to fight tax evasion, bars distilling spirits in any home or surrounding structure, with penalties of up to $10,000 in fines and five years in prison. Challengers, including the Hobby Distillers Association, argue Congress exceeded its taxing power because the ban doesn’t actually raise any revenue. People have long been able to make beer and wine at home legally, and some states, including West Virginia, have legalized home distilling. Federal appeals courts reached conflicting rulings in cases from Texas and Ohio, so both sides asked the Supreme Court to settle the issue nationwide. Even if challengers win, home distillers would still have to register their stills and pay excise taxes.

The Supreme Court rejected an attempt by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, left, to revive a plea deal that would have spared him the death penalty. Mohammed and two other alleged plotters had reached an agreement with military prosecutors in 2024 that would have given them life sentences, and a military judge approved it. Days later, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin withdrew the deal, saying he had the authority to override it. Military courts disagreed, but a federal appeals court sided with the government in August. The Supreme Court’s decision clears the way for the men to stand trial before a military commission in 2028, where they could face the death penalty. The case has been delayed for years, partly because of concerns over evidence obtained through CIA torture.

. 

Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton is shown denouncing her Republican rival Donald Trump as a Putin "puppet" in a presidential debate in 2016, as Trump denied the allegation and instead claimed that Clinton was the "puppet."

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion:  Ten Years Later: Right Wingers Finally Admit Hillary Was Right, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Oct. 19, 2026. A bunch of right wingers are speaking up against Trump’s capitulation to Russia. The WSJ — the news side of which describes that Vladimir Putin is dangling a conference at which Russia, China, and the US (I imagine they would carve up the world) — posted an op-ed demanding that, “When the election is over there needs to be a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests.”

At NRO [National Review Online], Andrew McCarthy was even more shrill.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, it has been excruciating to watch America’s president blame the victim, our ally Ukraine, for Putin’s war of aggression. Reagan and Poland this is not. As Ukraine fights for its survival against Moscow’s would-be hegemon, today’s president of the United States hectors it to surrender territory that Putin has been unable to take on the battlefield after four years of barbarism.

[snip]

Now, we have what Congress — Republicans and Democrats, together — should regard as the last straw.

I’m not as sanguine as WSJ and McCarthy that Republicans in Congress will act. Don Bacon has promised that Ukraine supporters will scotch any effort to push through reconciliation or confirm judges (the latter of which he can’t control, but John Cornyn could).

Six Republicans have signed a letter calling for more pressure on Putin — again, enough to halt any Trump agenda in the lame duck — but people like Katie Britt and Roger Wicker are still playing coy.

The Republican signatories included Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas and Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma

[snip]

The letter also highlighted divisions among Republicans over how aggressively to confront Moscow. Notably absent from the signatories was Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina, who championed the Russia and Iran sanctions legislation that Mr. Trump signed into law last month. Her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, had been the leading proponent of the legislation before his death in July.

Also missing were Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, who has sought to play a more forceful role on national security issues, including Ukraine and Russia policy; and Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a staunch supporter of Ukraine. Mr. Wicker was meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv around the time Mr. Trump announced the agreement on Friday.

In a statement to Alabama Daily News on Monday, Ms. Britt expressed support for continuing to “apply maximum pressure on Russia to end its unlawful war against Ukraine.” But she has not gone as far as some of her G.O.P. colleagues in denouncing the president’s move.

The absence of Ms. Britt, Ms. Graham and Mr. Wicker from the letter was particularly notable given its explicit appeal to the sanctions law, which the senators said was intended to strengthen Mr. Trump’s negotiating position by increasing economic pressure on Russia and countries helping sustain Moscow’s war.

I’m a bit at a loss by all this: people are finally admitting that Trump is in the tank for Russia but cannot go back and see that the current attempt to bribe Trump to betray Ukraine — and the United States — is a seamless continuation of the quid quo pro started 10 years ago.

The Contrarian, Opinion: The MAGA crackup has begun, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 19, 2026.  🚨 15 Days to the Midterms 🚨 Donald Trump’s lawlessness, incoherence, cruelty, and desperation are increasing as we approach a blue wave election that appears increasingly likely to sweep out Republican majorities in the House and Senate, flip numerous governorships, and deliver significant blows to Republicans in state races.

Trump has tried everything in his playbook: attempting to sabotage mail-in voting, effectively bribing voters with a ludicrous promise of a $5,000 check if they keep Republicans in power, and traveling to red states to deliver rants intended to pump up his base. And yet, his own conduct further undercuts Republicans’ already-dismal election prospects, with Republican candidates straining to run from policies in which they have been complicit (e.g. tariffs, the war, ICE’s reckless blitz).

In the latest Washington Post-ABC poll, his approval hit a new low of 33 percent, with a dismal 22 percent among independents. His handling of the economy has plunged to 28 percent and all the way to 21 percent on affordability (which he says is a hoax). Under Trump, “the Republican Party is worse at 28 points underwater (35% favorable and 63% unfavorable),” while large majorities “call Trump and the Republican Party ‘too extreme’ — 66% and 55%, respectively” (vs. just 36 percent for the Democratic Party). And a key finding: “By a wide margin, Americans prefer that the next Congress be controlled by Democrats, to act as a check on Trump (59%) than by Republicans, to support Trump’s agenda (35%).”Demonstrators at an Oct. 1. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Democrats, understandably, are therefore thrilled Trump keeps insisting voters pretend he is on the ballot. In just the past week, his total capitulation to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on sanctions relief and his psychotic ramblings out on the stump might instead convince voters Democratic majorities are urgently needed to keep him on a short leash. (His treacherous betrayal of Ukraine and unabashed cheerleading for Putin triggered an unusual bipartisan backlash, demands for investigation, proposals to countermand the diesel bailout, and further questions about his personal and financial motives.)

Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail has only intensified the sense that the country is rudderless, careening from one disaster to another without a sentient leader. “Trump, 80, has used his appearances to muse about animals’ opposition to the second amendment, to call one Republican candidate ‘nerdy,’ and to demonstrate a hitherto unexpressed fascination with ‘asses’ — men’s and babies’, in particular,” The Guardian reported. “Along the way Trump has repeated his lie that 2020 was a rigged election, claimed, falsely, that he has secured $21T in foreign investment in the US, and issued dark warnings about Democrats.”

As happens when a regime is hurtling toward defeat and popular support plummets, the wheels seem to be coming off the already-rickety Trump regime bus. The forced resignation of grifter Kimberly Guilfoyle, revelations about the donors who forked over $330 million for the East Wing destruction/ballroom monstrosity, the firing of disastrously incompetent Katie Zacharia (replete with leaks from insiders disparaging her), and the possible ouster of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles mean the knives are out as Trump flunkies search for scapegoats. (“Staff upheaval is expected as officials brace for a blame game over Republican performance, with some distancing themselves from what they see as a fading political movement,” the Los Angeles Times confirmed.)

Most disastrous for Republicans, Trump’s policies have created the perfect storm. On the economic front, consumer and producer numbers released last week confirm that prices have soared, reminding voters that Trump’s toxic brew of tariffs and soaring energy costs resulting from his calamitous war have made ordinary life unaffordable for millions. (His fiscal trainwreck has contributed to soaring interest rates, raising the potential for stagflation like we saw in the 1970s and ’80s.) Trump’s illegal, reckless war continues to drag down Republican candidates who are forced to defend their acquiescence in this strategic, military, moral, and economic debacle.

Trump can no longer rely on his go-to issue: immigrant fearmongering. His violent, lawless assaults on immigrants have killed scores of people on the streets and in detention, separated families, inflicted economic hardship, and undermined the rule of law, alienating even Republicans. His latest, outrageous effort to deport a political opponent, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), laced with racism and devoid of any legal basis for violating the 60-day pre-election moratorium on political-related prosecutions, reflects white nationalists’ desperation and political tone-deafness as they make a single controversial congresswoman into a national political martyr.

While lashing about like a wounded animal, he is also getting slapped down by courts in a wide array of cases (e.g., dismissal with prejudice of the Reflecting Pool prosecution, rejecting demands for state voting roll data, stopping the Kennedy Center threatened shutdown/teardown, complete defeat in the effort to exclude certain news outlets from the White House, the vindication of smeared FEMA employee Mary Comans) as they recognize his lawlessness and express outright fury, as Judge Ana Reyes put it in the East Potomac golf course case, over the Justice Department’s frivolous filings, gamesmanship, and outright defiance of court orders.

The paranoia on the left runs deep, with many insisting Trump is “more dangerous than ever.” But they should not confuse desperation with danger, nor impulsiveness with potency. Though Trump’s nutty rhetoric may intensify and his executive edicts may multiply, democracy forces should refrain from treating him as a political colossus. Swinging and missing does not make Trump more powerful; it convinces his congressional allies to distance themselves, judges to forcefully rebuke him, and his former supporters to turn the page. More frequent retreats (e.g., halting public financing for ads, calling off the live-streaming of the Fort Hood murderer’s execution, resuming Starlink connection for Ukraine, firing his spokeswoman) suggest criticism is eroding his resolve.

As Trump’s losses mount and his power drains away, and as both congressional allies and courts deny him deference, Democrats must not let up. Once in power, Democrats must not only seek to reverse policy debacles (e.g., take back tariff authority, reverse Medicaid and SNAP cuts, reinstate Affordable Care Act subsidies, defund ICE) but also pursue every avenue of accountability.

In sum, we are seeing the political death spiral of a regime under the tutelage of a mentally decrepit narcissist. Decisive, overwhelming Democratic wins up and down the ballot can disabuse Republicans of the notion there is any benefit or future in continuing to align themselves with a fascist movement that has done extraordinary damage to our economy, democracy, and social fabric.

The full impact of an election loss of the magnitude we expect will play out over months as regime figures get thrown overboard or run for the hills and surviving Republicans in Congress race to create space between themselves and a failed presidency. For Democrats and all pro-democracy forces, it will be vital to take advantage of the disarray in MAGA ranks to begin reversing policy blunders, holding wrongdoers responsible, and erecting reforms to restore democratic institutions and place our constitutional system on firmer footing.

Meanwhile, Democrats would be wise to echo Trump’s call for voters to pretend Trump is on the ballot. He certainly is — and the country is in desperate need of protection from the mad wannabe king.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Donald Trump is Politically Bankrupt. Be Very Afraid, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 19, 2026. What will he do when he has nothing left to lose?

According to CNN, all-out war with Iran may be about to resume:

The US military has developed new strike plans that include potentially using the so-called “mother of all bombs” to target Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites should President Donald Trump give the order to resume combat operations either before or after the midterm elections, according to multiple US officials familiar with the matter.

Trump says that he won’t order a strike before the midterms. But Robert Pape, author of the Substack Escalation Trap, argues that we shouldn’t believe him — that the bombs may well drop before the midterms. And while I am not a strategic expert, I believe that Pape may well be right, because his analysis of Trump’s political position is something I recognize from financial economics.

You see, it’s a well-understood proposition that the owners of businesses that are on the verge of going bust often engage in destructive behavior. And Trump is about to go bankrupt — not financially (he’s made billions through corruption) but politically. So he, like a failing businessman, has strong incentives to wreak havoc.

Pape’s argument is basically a version of the phenomenon — a particular form of moral hazard — often called “gambling for resurrection.” When a company is on the edge of failure, it makes sense for the company’s owner to make highly speculative, even crazy investments that are highly likely to fail but might, just might, make enough money to pull the company back from the brink. After all, for the owner it’s heads he wins, tails his creditors lose.

In Trump’s case, all indications are that his party is heading for defeat in the midterms. And while a normal president might be able to live with a Congress controlled by the opposing party, there has been so much corruption and malfeasance over the past two years that Democratic control of Congress, and the subpoena and investigative power that will bring, will have catastrophic consequences for Trump and everyone around him.

So Trump has an incentive to do something, anything, that might shake up this election. Attacking Iran would probably lead to an even bigger Republican defeat, but it might, just might, rally Trump’s base enough to change the outcome. True, a president who cared at all about what is good for America wouldn’t pursue disastrous policies for the slim chance of saving his own political skin. But this is, after all, Trump we’re talking about.

Pape’s argument, then, makes a lot of sense. But I suspect that Trump’s impending political bankruptcy will have even worse consequences than Pape suggests — and that these consequences will continue and intensify after the midterms.

When I read Pape’s analysis, I found myself thinking about a classic 1993 paper by George Akerlof and Paul Romer, “Looting: The economic underworld of bankruptcy for profit.” Akerlof and Romer were inspired by several historical episodes of widespread bankruptcy, including the U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. In these episodes, they argued, owners of banks and other companies on the verge of failure didn’t gamble for resurrection. Instead, they simply took the money and ran, transferring as much of their companies’ assets as possible into their own pockets before the hammer came down.

So what would looting by a politically bankrupt Trump administration look like? I don’t mean financial looting — Trump has been doing that all along, on an epic scale. What may be about to happen — indeed, is already happening — is what we might call policy looting: Trump using his remaining power to take actions that are both deeply unpatriotic and deeply unpopular but fit his own preferences and prejudices.

Freedom, wrote Kris Kristofferson, is just another word for nothing left to lose. Once the midterms are over, Trump, with nothing left to lose, will be free to be his worst self — a malignant narcissist who instinctively supports authoritarians and is preoccupied with revenge against anything and anyone that threatens his fragile grandiosity.

We can already see that happening in U.S. policy toward Ukraine. It has long been obvious that Trump loves dictators and despises democracy, and that he has special affection for Vladimir Putin and hatred for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. However, as long as there was some chance of limiting the damage in the midterm elections, Trump was cautious about explicitly taking Putin’s side. Over the past few weeks, however, Trump has grown ever more open about supporting Putin’s attempted war of conquest — buying Russian diesel, canceling sanctions, and most recently by attempting to sabotage Ukraine’s defenses by degrading its access to Starlink.

Something similar has been happening on domestic policy where, for example, Trump has increasingly stopped pretending that he cares about illegal immigration or immigrant crime, and is veering into flat, open racism — so far specially directed against Somalis, but it won’t stop there.

So will Trump resume the bombing of Iran before the midterms? Obviously I don’t know, but Pape is surely right that normal political logic, under which a deeply unpopular president would avoid resuming a deeply unpopular war, no longer applies. And anyone who believes that Trump will become more cautious, more moderate in the aftermath of midterm defeat just doesn’t understand the new political reality.

The truth is that political bankruptcy will free Trump to pursue his true desires. And those desires are horrifying.  

New York Times, Trump Is Pushing Ukraine to Surrender to Russia, Zelensky Says, Constant Méheut, Oct. 19, 2026. President Volodymyr Zelensky said he didn’t want to believe that Washington wanted an end to the war at Ukraine’s expense. “But that’s how it looks,” he added.

President Trump is trying to force Ukraine to surrender in the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an interview published on Sunday, as a deepening feud between the two leaders drives their relations to new lows.

“I believe steps have been taken to convince Ukraine to capitulate,” Mr. Zelensky told Bloomberg News. He was referring to a string of measures in recent days by the Trump administration that could bolster Russia’s war machine while squeezing Ukraine’s ability to fight.

Mr. Zelensky added that he did not want to believe that Washington was seeking a quicker end to the war at Ukraine’s expense. “But that’s how it looks,” he said.

His comments capped a week in which the leaders traded some of their harshest words yet. Mr. Zelensky said that Mr. Trump had an instinctive affinity for autocrats, a pointed allusion to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, while the U.S. leader urged Ukrainians to vote Mr. Zelensky out of office.

Mr. Zelensky on Sunday appeared to tell the NBC show “Meet the Press” that he would run in a wartime presidential election, if one took place. It was the first time he suggested this publicly, after leaving the question open for months.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Happy Birthday, Vlad. Yours, Always.’ - DJT, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 19, 2026. In Donald Trump’s telling, he wins everywhere, from Florida to California, when the votes are counted properly, and his campaign rallies do nothing but juice the Republicans he deigns to share the stage with. “MY RALLIES ARE SAVING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, AGAIN!!!” he wrote this month.

But Punchbowl News notes this morning that Trump’s actions tell a different story. Even though Trump said in September that he’d spend the last month before the midterms rallying the faithful in battleground districts, Trump has been steering well clear of competitive House races, preferring to play defense in parts of the country where voters are friendlier (and his crowds are larger).

This is worth remembering, ahead of whatever stolen-election nonsense Trump tries to pull next month: Deep down, even Trump knows he’s not as popular as he pretends to be. Happy Monday.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Prominent Rs Call For An Investigation Into Trump’s Putin Ties, Another Calls His Closing Campaign Performance “Insane,” Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Lots of states turning on early in-person voting this week:

• Monday, Oct. 19 - Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, South Carolina, Texas
• Tuesday, Oct. 20 - Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, Wisconsin
• Wednesday, Oct. 21 - West Virginia
• Thursday, Oct. 22 - Delaware, Maryland
• Saturday, Oct. 24 - Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York

With 15 days to go Trump is fighting for his political life as he frenetically campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Florida, and Georgia this week. As Punchbowl News notes this morning when Trump campaigns he often travels to the reddest parts of the state - not the swing, contested areas. That way he isn’t harming House Republicans in competitive races.Subscribed

Politico is featuring two stories this morning with wild reporting from freaking out Republicans:

Let’s check out a few excerpts from these two Politico stories (here, here):

Republicans are playing whack-a-mole with President Donald Trump in the final two weeks of the midterms.

GOP candidates are desperate to stick to tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump accounts for children and the president’s work to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Instead, in the midterms’ final stretch, Trump and his administration have forced Republicans on the trail to respond to live streaming the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter, his taxpayer-funded political ads promoting his achievements and an announced deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to bring down diesel costs. His latest move, exempting Russia from a new sanctions law sponsored by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, even provoked mild criticism on Saturday from South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham, the late senator’s sister who is running for re-election.

He’s also attacking Republicans: Rep. María Elvira Salazar for her ad targeting his immigration policies; Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for holding up a daylight saving time bill and, on Thursday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, whose political career Trump effectively ended, as well as veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove, for hurting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign.

The deluge has left many Republicans rudderless as they stare down the prospect of losing Senate seats in Republican strongholds like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, and feeling increasingly despondent about their chances of keeping the House……….

“He has constantly been distracted,” said one GOP operative working on multiple midterm races, “and not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”

A slew of troubling internal GOP polling in recent weeks set off a new level of panic across House GOP leadership, political operations and individual campaigns. It didn’t just reveal a harsh environment for the party in power on par with typical midterms, but potentially catastrophic scenarios in formerly safe red seats across the country. Even top House Republicans expect to lose the House majority at this point.

A growing group of Hill Republicans argue the blame rests with Trump, and his decisions to get the U.S. into an open-ended war with Iran that has driven up fuel prices, while enacting a slew of tariffs and other policy moves that have riled farmers………

“No one in the world expected that the Senate would need as much money as they did,” said one national GOP operative working on multiple competitive House races. “All of this money that was expected to go to the House, for the most part, is now being wasted on the Senate because they fucked up so bad.”

Additional Trumpian “distractions” in the home stretch of the campaign include savage internal regime infighting spilling out into the press, the firings of Kimberly Guilfoyle and his ridiculous Press Secretary, his unhinged attempt to turn a popular public park adjacent to The National Mall into a luxury golf course:

And a dramatic and dangerous escalation of his efforts to help Putin defeat Ukraine. Here’s a new editorial from the Wall Street Journal. 

Meanwhile, the evidence compounds that Mr. Trump wants Ukraine to surrender on Mr. Putin’s terms. He’s dropped sanctions on Russian sales of diesel oil, a $4.5 billion windfall for Russian energy companies. He’s threatened to cut off U.S. intelligence to Kyiv. And the Trump Administration still hasn’t come clean on who ordered speed limits on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite service that has compromised Ukraine air defenses and strikes on Russian positions in occupied Ukraine.

Reuters reported Friday that the order to throttle Starshield “came from inside the White House.” Mr. Trump said Friday “I don’t know if it was anybody because it wasn’t me and I don’t think it was Elon” Musk, the SpaceX CEO. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that some restrictions on Starshield were still in place, so someone is ordering it.

Congress is preoccupied with the Nov. 3 election, but Mr. Trump may not appreciate the anger he’s courting if he keeps aiding Mr. Putin. When the election is over there needs to be a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests.

The venerable conservative publication the National Review has called for Congress to launch a formal “investigation” into Trump’s relationship with Putin. Just read this passage from their editorial that implicitly accuses Trump of treason, Congress Must Investigate Trump’s Aid and Comfort to Putin.

Republicans and Democrats, together, should regard this week’s developments as the last straw.

There’s serious competition, but the Soviet Union could claim the title of modern history’s most monstrous regime. It killed tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions more. In the post–World War II era, it emerged as the mortal enemy of the United States in the Twilight Struggle that lasted four decades — during which nuclear war was barely averted in 1962 and the Kremlin sponsored proxy wars against our nation and our allies, killing thousands of Americans. As President Ronald Reagan declaimed, the Soviets were “the evil empire.” His Cold War solution was simple — “We win, they lose” — because peaceful coexistence with an enemy committed to our destruction was too precarious a prospect.

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent, is a born and bred devotee of the Soviet system. He solidified his despotic status by orchestrating a series of bombings inside Russia as a pretext to crushing Chechnya. We’re now well into his third decade as Russia’s murderous dictator. He openly regards the 1991 fall of the USSR — America’s foe in modernity’s greatest triumph for liberty — as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Putin’s war of aggression and hoped-for conquest against Ukraine, like his war of aggression and conquest in Georgia (swaths of which he has occupied for nearly two decades), is part of his quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy.

And President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.

The #2 Republican in the Senate agrees:

The other investigation we need is one that starts in the states. The vast election protection efforts we’ve set up in the states should challenge the large social media platforms to prove and commit under oath that they are not tipping the scales for Trump and the Rs right now (see here for my full Bluesky thread):

So if you are inclined there are two sets of calls you can make today:

• Call your Senators and House Member and demand they stop Trump from giving Ukraine to Putin
• If you have a Dem governor, AG, Secretary of State, or state legislature call them and demand they open up an immediate investigation into the social media platforms support of the global right, including here in America

Brent crude starts the day at $108 a barrel, up from $60 a barrel earlier this year:

In that Washington Post poll we reviewed yesterday only 61% of Republicans said they want their party leaders to follow Trump. 37% said they should seek a new direction. This is a very, very high number that is likely to grow if Rs get wiped out in the midterms. Through their terrible governance, unprecedented corruption, and ongoing betrayal of the West and our democracy, Trump and MAGA are losing their grip on the country, and the Republican Party too.

Which is why, my friends, it’s time to go…

Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight The Fuckery That Is Already Here

Two things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:

• Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations.
• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too. Our next trainings are Wednesday at 8pm ET and Saturday at 2pm.

High Tech Trump Allies Shutting Off Facebook, TikTok To Trump Critics?

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Meta shuts down "No Kings" account during major anti-Trump protest,Judd Legum, right, Oct. 19, 2026. On Saturday, thousands of “No Kings” events were held around the country. It was a critical day for the anti-Trump protest group, which has attracted millions of participants since 2025. Saturday’s events focused on early voter activation ahead of the midterm elections.

Then, at around 1:30 p.m. Eastern, No Kings’ Instagram account was taken offline. It left the organization without its biggest megaphone during the height of the protests.

The account remained offline for approximately 90 minutes. Even after the account was restored, it took until after 5 p.m. before No Kings could post new content to the account. Common Cause called Meta’s actions “an alarming act of corporate censorship,” accusing the company of deplatforming “grassroots voter mobilization efforts.”

Just after 6 p.m., Meta spokesperson Andy Stone released a statement, claiming the suspension was an “error”:

When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.

No Kings cast doubt on this explanation. “In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands,” the group said. “Meta’s ‘high-frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up.”

Meta’s action against No Kings is the latest in a series of “errors” impacting the accounts of Trump critics. On October 15, a Brazilian court ordered Meta to stop throttling the accounts of President Lula, a Trump critic who is facing Trump’s preferred candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, in a runoff election. Meta acknowledged that Lula’s accounts faced restrictions but, according to the Associated Press, blamed the issue on “unrelated global technical glitches.” In September, Instagram suspended the accounts of Albanian groups protesting Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is planning to develop a luxury resort in the country. A Meta spokesperson said the accounts were “disabled by mistake.” Meta also initially rejected ads for the film Musk, a critical documentary of Trump’s political ally, calling it “an error.”

In other cases, Meta has shut down accounts at the explicit request of the Trump administration. Last October, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice (DOJ) contacted Meta and asked it to shut down a Facebook page called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland.” Meta complied with the request. The Trump administration has been targeting anti-fascist and other left-wing groups through a controversial presidential memorandum, NSPM-7.

The censorship of Trump critics comes as Meta has sought to establish a close relationship with Trump and his administration. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration and $5 million to Trump’s White House ballroom, and paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over his suspension from Facebook after January 6, 2021. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appointed UFC CEO Dana White, a top Trump ally, to the Meta board and named Dina Powell McCormick, a deputy national security advisor during Trump’s first term, as Meta’s president.

Zuckerberg has visited the White House frequently and reportedly talks to Trump regularly on the phone. He has been influential in shaping the administration’s AI policy.

Popular Information contacted Meta for comment and asked a spokesperson if it had received any communications regarding No Kings from the Trump administration or allied groups.

The company did not answer that inquiry but referred us to another post on X from a Meta spokesperson which claimed that the No Kings Instagram account was suspended after “our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17.” This differs from the initial explanation by the same spokesperson which claimed the suspension was due to No Kings posting, sharing, or commenting at high volumes.

Another social network with close ties to the Trump administration, TikTok, is censoring ads promoting Musk, the critical documentary. After briefly feuding with Trump, Musk has once again emerged as a key ally. (Trump awarded Musk with the “National Medal of Science” earlier this month.) Musk has become the largest donor to groups supporting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms by a wide margin, contributing over $300 million so far.

Musk has called Alex Gibney, the filmmaker behind Musk, an “idiot,” a “horrible human,” and a “tinfoil hat crackpot.” X has banned all ads for Musk on the social network he owns, X.

On Friday, Bleecker Street, the company distributing Musk, revealed that TikTok has permanently banned it from advertising the film. TikTok’s policies prohibit ads “referencing, promoting, or opposing” any “current executive, legislative, or judicial public officials.” Musk, however, is a private CEO and has no current public position. The policy also prohibits “[a]dvocacy for or against” any “past, current, or proposed elections.” These ads, however, promote a film, not any candidate.

The executive chairman and co-founder of Oracle, which owns 15% of TikTok and controls a board seat, is Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison. Further, Ellison was a member of Tesla’s board, where Musk is the CEO, from 2018 to 2022. Oracle also provides some of the infrastructure to train Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok.

Special Reports: Huge Riots In France. How Much Russian Influence Aimed To Disrupt West? 

• Wayne Madsen Report, Mapping and Analysis: Déjà vu: Moscow’s links to street violence, arson, and larceny in France, neighboring nations, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Far-right and far-left protesters encouraged by Russian influence. We’ve seen this before with Moscow, as street mobs encouraged by Kremlin-directed influence operations ravage Paris, Toulouse, Limoges, and other cities. 

New York Times, News Analysis: France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country, Catherine Porter, Oct. 19, 2026. The National Rally, already ahead in the polls, presented itself as the party best placed to restore law and order.

After riots erupted this weekend in cities across France, its centrist government blamed the main far-left party, accusing its politicians of inciting the violence. That party blamed the government, accusing it of stirring public anger through years of bad governance and heavy-handed policing.

What did the main far-right party do? It blamed both, and launched into campaign mode.

“We are paying for decades of being soft on crime, of weak authority, of the moral, psychological, and material disarmament of our internal security forces,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said after emerging from a police station in central Paris on Sunday. He said had gone there to support police officers.

Then he addressed France’s “honest citizens” who were stunned on Sunday by the smashed storefronts and burned-out businesses destroyed by rioters the night before. He said they had a vital role to play in reinstating national stability. And that would be by voting in the coming election for his party.

“People need to wake up now,” Mr. Bardella said. “They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”

Sunday was a day of mourning, shock and finger pointing in France. The day before, huge peaceful protests for better school conditions and against rising living costs were overshadowed by black-clad and often masked agitators of unclear affiliation who attacked government buildings and shops across the country, sometimes stealing wine or electronics.

For the National Rally, which bills itself as the party of law and order as well as an advocate for expelling unauthorized immigrants, Sunday was also a day of political opportunity. It is six months before a presidential election that the party’s candidate, Marine Le Pen, is the favorite to win.

“The picture of France emerging this morning, in light of all the destruction, plays well into their hands,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. “We can clearly see that the National Rally is not a loser here.”

The party’s approach mirrors how far-right groups across Europe are presenting themselves as the solution to different kinds of social and governmental challenges. In July, Spain’s government briefly lost control of the borders of a Spanish territory in North Africa, allowing a surge of migrants and handing the country’s far-right party, Vox, a new issue to campaign on. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, is leading national polls, in part by channeling anxiety over the country’s identity.

In France this week, as Mr. Bardella criticized the government’s policing, Ms. Le Pen seized the moment to criticize Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the main far-left party, France Unbowed, and one of her main rivals for the presidency. She said “legitimate social demands” had been “hijacked by the far left and the rhetoric of Jean-Luc Mélenchon” and his colleagues, whom she accused of fostering chaos by “legitimizing violence” — an accusation that the party denies.

The riots arrived at a sensitive time in France, with the country already dealing with a daunting budget deficit and a deadlocked Parliament in which no party has a majority.

“The far right are sure to gain from this,” said Alexis Veller, 53, a filmmaker, who stopped his motorcycle on Sunday morning to take photos of broken storefront windows and tagged walls in central Paris. “We are a very fractured country,” he said. “The situation is very, very worrying.”

Political analysts cautioned that the six months until the election is a long time in politics, and that voters’ motivations are complex and rarely focused on a single issue.

Still, the violence perfectly aligned with the image the National Rally has long painted of a France divided into two and battling for survival, said Vincent Martigny, a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur.

The party has portrayed the country as split between the France of the city centers — filled with woke students and rioters, it says — and the “good France” in the quiet countryside, he said. 

New York Times, France to Impose Curfews After Nationwide Rioting, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 19, 2026. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended police efforts and pledged to restore order as government ministers acknowledged failures.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of France said he had ordered localized curfews for Monday night in some French towns and neighborhoods, as the government moved to reassert control after the worst riots in decades hit cities around the country.

While ministers in Mr. Lecornu’s government acknowledged failures in handling the weekend riots, the prime minister struck a different tone, saying that the police had done a good job against a “shadowy network” of far-left instigators who he said were seeking to orchestrate “a profound disorder in the country leading up to the presidential election.”

“While we witnessed very difficult scenes involving violence against property, no one was killed, and that is a miracle,” Mr. Lecornu said, emerging from an emergency meeting of ministers on Monday afternoon.

He told reporters that a massive police operation was underway — with “practically” 200 investigators in Paris alone working to track down the looters.

“My determination to restore order is absolute,” Mr. Lecornu said, vowing to use “whatever tools are at the government’s disposal.”

He did not provide specifics on where the curfews were expected, saying only they were for places that had been especially affected by unrest and that a map would be provided later on Monday.

Earlier in the day, France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered a mea culpa on national radio, saying that the police had been underprepared to deal with the scale of the riots that spun off from the mostly peaceful protests held across the country. Mr. Nuñez said he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron but that it had not been accepted.

New York Times, ‘A Failure’: French Officials Issue Mea Culpa Over Weekend Riots, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 19, 2026. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, acknowledged that the police had been underprepared and said he had offered to resign.

The French government acknowledged on Monday a failure in handling the rioters who attacked the police, ransacked public buildings and looted stores in cities across the country over the weekend.

France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, offered a mea culpa on national radio, saying that the police had been underprepared to deal with the scale of the riots that spun out from planned protests on Saturday night. He said he had offered his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron but that it had not been accepted.

The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, also acknowledged that the authorities had “undeniably failed” in the face of the violence — the biggest unrest to hit France in years — and said on French television that there had been “a failure in intelligence.”

With many people in France still stunned on Monday by the scale of the damage, mayors and councilors gathered outside their city halls to show that they were still standing and to demand answers from the national government.

Benoît Payan, the mayor of Marseille, has accused the government and the police of “delivering” that city — France’s second largest — to “looters and rioters.”

Speaking to French radio earlier on Monday, he accused the region’s prefect of inflating the number of rioters that had attacked city hall and local stores, and said that he was seeking “explanations” and “the guarantee that this will not happen again” from the government.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Early Voting Shatters Records, Trump Labeled ‘Traitor’ and Increases Aid to Putin, Trump Increases Election Interference Effort, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 19, 2026.  Early voting is shattering records across the country, and that is the best news I’ve had to share in a long time. Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia: turnout is surging. At the same time, the federal government is ramping up pressure on the very officials who run our elections, to the point that a Republican election chief in deep-red Utah says she’s now under federal investigation for refusing to hand over your private data.

And overnight, Ukraine was hit again. Sixteen ballistic missiles struck Kyiv, more than half a million homes lost power, and Ukraine says it once again got no warning from the United States before the first wave hit. Meanwhile, Putin is floating a summit with Trump and Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s future, without Ukraine in the room.

I have been talking with people on the ground in Ukraine throughout all of this, and I’m bringing you their updates in real time, as it happens, not filtered through press releases or White House talking points. I’ve faced attacks for doing this work. I’m not going to stop.

Let’s get into it.

Early voting is off to a record-breaking start across the country, with turnout up sharply in key battleground states compared with the last midterms. Georgia saw a 40% jump in first-day turnout over 2022 and more than double its 2018 opening-day numbers, while early ballots are up 38% in North Carolina and Maine and 61% in Iowa. In-person early voting has more than doubled in Ohio, and Virginia is seeing nearly twice the turnout of the previous midterms. Democrats currently hold an early voting edge in North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, though analysts caution that early trends don’t necessarily predict Election Day results. Mail voting is moving the other way, down 58% in Georgia and also falling in Florida, as polls show declining confidence in the Postal Service’s ability to deliver ballots on time. Early voting begins Monday in Texas, South Carolina, Colorado, and several other states, meaning most of the country will be voting by the end of the week.

A Republican election chief in deep-red Utah says she is now under federal investigation after refusing the Trump administration’s demand for voters’ private data, as 60 Minutes reports federal pressure on elections has reached an unprecedented level. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told 60 Minutes that threats to elections used to come from outside the country, but now they are “coming from within our own government.” She refused to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers, birthdates, and driver’s license numbers, as did officials in 29 other states from both parties, and the Justice Department has sued all of them. Henderson found just 52 questionable voters out of more than 2 million in Utah, and while the administration claims without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered, DOJ has charged just over 100 noncitizens with illegal voting during Trump’s second term. In Georgia, a Fulton County commissioner said she never imagined the FBI would raid her county, after agents seized more than 600 boxes of 2020 election records in January with Tulsi Gabbard watching, and the FBI later reassigned 260 analysts to the probe without any result. DOJ civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon dismissed concerns that Trump might challenge the midterm results as “paranoia,” as surveys show only about half of Americans expect the elections to be free and fair.

Trump Described as “Treasonous” as Putin Floats Ukraine Peace Summit With Trump and Xi, Without Zelenskyy; Kyiv Gets No Warning Before Missile Barrage

Putin has reportedly proposed a three-way summit with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the war, with Ukraine left out. The Wall Street Journal reported that Putin raised the idea during his October 9 phone call with Trump, the same call that produced the diesel deal, citing a former Russian intelligence officer briefed on the matter. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that the three leaders could meet next month in Shenzhen, China, which is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there have been “talks of a meeting” but that he didn’t know if it had been finalized, adding that Trump is open to anything that could end the war. Zelenskyy would not be at the table. The news has deepened fears in Kyiv that Trump and Putin could try to impose an unfavorable settlement on Ukraine.

Russia pounded Kyiv overnight with 16 ballistic missiles, and Ukraine says it once again got no warning from the United States. Russia also launched nearly 270 drones, with Ukraine’s Air Force saying it downed more than 240 of them. Zelenskyy said the strikes hit more than 10 energy facilities and left about 550,000 households without power, while a medical clinic, a school, a metro station, and residential buildings were also damaged. At least one person was killed. Ukraine’s Air Force confirmed no early warning came before the first salvo hit at 11 p.m., though warnings did arrive before a second wave around 3 a.m. Kyiv has stopped releasing interception rates for ballistic missiles as it runs low on Patriot interceptors, and residents say they now mostly hear missiles hitting their targets rather than air defenses firing back.

Washington and Kyiv are openly contradicting each other over whether U.S. intelligence sharing was cut off. Zelenskyy said Sunday that intelligence was blocked for three days before being restored, but Rubio flatly denied any pause, saying he doesn’t know where Zelenskyy is “getting these things.” Rubio attributed missed warnings last week to a software problem with Ukraine’s early warning system and said he could not speak to what happened Sunday night. He added that Zelenskyy should focus on ending the war instead. The dispute follows a separate fight over restrictions on Ukraine’s military satellite internet, which Elon Musk has blamed on the U.S. government, and which The Telegraph reported Musk proposed and Trump approved. Trump has denied ordering any restrictions.

The feud between Trump and Zelenskyy has reached new lows, with Zelenskyy saying Washington appears to want Ukraine to surrender. Zelenskyy told Bloomberg he didn’t want to believe the U.S. would end the war at Ukraine’s expense, “but that’s how it looks.” Over the past week, he suggested Trump has an instinctive affinity for autocrats, while Trump urged Ukrainians to vote Zelenskyy out and claimed he never wanted peace. Zelenskyy also indicated for the first time that he would run if a wartime election were held, though he downplayed the prospect since Russia refuses a ceasefire that would allow voting. A Ukrainian deputy minister told CNBC that Kyiv does not believe the U.S. is abandoning it, but hopes Washington will keep helping or at least stay in the middle. Ukraine’s Patriot shortage is being worsened by surging demand in the Middle East, and Zelenskyy says the U.S. is delaying deliveries Ukraine has already paid for.

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian data centers have left millions of ordinary Russians locked out of their money, taxis, and even their homes. Attacks earlier this month on facilities run by Yandex, Russia’s equivalent of Google, knocked out services deeply woven into daily life, including its digital payment system. One St. Petersburg blogger told NBC News she couldn’t access her money for four days, leaving her unable to pay rent or buy food for her child, while others said digital keys to their apartments stopped working. Taxi drivers couldn’t withdraw their earnings, and one said he stopped working entirely until it was fixed. Ukraine has also hit data centers belonging to Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, and tech giant VK. Analysts say the goal is to bring the war home to ordinary Russians, and that Russia’s data centers are easy targets because they are concentrated in a handful of large facilities.

Trump Calls Judge a “Crazed Lunatic,” Says Golf Course Work Will Begin “Immediately”

Trump attacked Judge Ana Reyes in an early-morning Truth Social post and declared that work on the D.C. golf course would start right away, despite her court order. Just after 6 a.m. Monday, Trump called the judge, without naming her, “a crazed lunatic” who “may be insane,” and claimed that courthouse tapes would prove it. He insisted the Interior Department has an “absolute right” to renovate East Potomac Golf Links, doesn’t need any approval, and that the golfer who brought the lawsuit has zero standing. Trump said work was scheduled to begin “IMMEDIATELY,” a sharp change from his Sunday post saying construction would start November 15. Reyes has already ordered the government to give at least three days’ notice before making any irreversible changes to the course and has barred further tree removal through October 26. Another hearing in the case is set for later Monday.

Reyes rejected the Justice Department’s demand that she step aside from the case. In a 13-page opinion issued late Sunday, she wrote that it is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion, but much harder to meet the legal standard against a full record. She concluded that by any objective measure, the government failed to meet that standard. The Justice Department had accused her of bias, pointing to her heated remarks at a hearing, including asking a government lawyer whether they were unable to use a phone or drive a car. It also objected to her ordering officials to testify on a federal holiday. Reyes responded that the government created an emergency situation and the court simply responded to it.

The clash traces back to a holiday weekend when the government cut down hundreds of trees before the judge could intervene. On a Friday evening earlier this month, the Justice Department notified the court it planned to remove 529 trees, and by Saturday morning, crews were already cutting, with the government later acknowledging more than 400 were felled in one weekend. At an emergency four-hour hearing, Reyes said the episode cost the government all of its credibility and that she needed to determine whether she had been lied to. She ordered a chain of officials to testify on the spot, and a National Park Service deputy director revealed he had formalized the renovation plans with Gregory Wischer, a Trump appointee at Interior, and had discussed Trump’s ideas for a championship course. Reyes warned that if her order to halt work was violated even by two seconds, there would be contempt proceedings. She said she felt betrayed after repeatedly giving the government the benefit of the doubt.

Critics fear Trump’s plan will take away one of the few affordable public golf courses in the nation’s capital. The lawsuit was filed in February by the D.C. Preservation League and two local golfers, who argue the redevelopment is unlawful. Trump was photographed touring the grounds in June with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and architect Tom Fazio, who has designed courses for the Trump Organization. The renovation could cost between $20 million and $49 million, according to CNN. Trump’s latest posts appear to undercut his own lawyers, who have argued in court that no final plan exists. Whether the administration actually moves ahead before Reyes rules could set up a direct confrontation over whether it is willing to defy a federal court order.

Semafor: Bari Weiss Has Pushed CBS News to Dig Into Abdul El-Sayed’s Alleged Muslim Brotherhood Ties

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, left, has personally pushed the network’s journalists to hunt for a link between Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an exclusive report from Semafor. The questions trace back to a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s younger half-sister describing a conversation with her mother about the mother’s activism in the Islamist movement in Egypt in the early 1970s. Semafor reports that Weiss has raised the topic on editorial calls, advocated for numerous story angles, and tasked CBS’s investigative unit with combing through El-Sayed’s background. That team is set to publish a story in the coming days, though two people familiar with the reporting told Semafor it was unclear as of Sunday whether it would include any new revelations. Weiss was also directly involved in an earlier CBS story about El-Sayed’s posts comparing the COVID-19 death toll to 9/11, which critics said falsely insinuated he had ties to the attacks. With control of the Senate potentially riding on Michigan, Semafor notes the media’s focus on the issue in the final weeks could matter enormously.

El-Sayed has strongly denied any ties to the group, and some CBS staffers say Weiss is chasing thin theories about progressive candidates. El-Sayed told Semafor it was “insane” to draw a connection, explaining that his parents divorced when he was 3, he didn’t see his mother for years, and to his knowledge no one in his family has been a member of the organization. His campaign and allies say the attacks are thinly veiled Islamophobia. Two CBS staffers told Semafor that the network pursues weak theories about progressives that originate on X or in right-leaning outlets but doesn’t treat conservatives the same way. Semafor reports Weiss also had staff chase a rumor that Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was in a mental health facility, when he was actually home with the flu, though CBS never gave the theory public credence. One staffer said Weiss’s ideas routinely come from social media influencers or opposition research placed in conservative outlets.

Semafor reports the El-Sayed coverage is part of a broader fight inside CBS over Middle East coverage. Staff have repeatedly clashed with editors Weiss installed, including foreign editor Shayndi Raice, and London bureau chief Claire Day was reportedly forced out over friction with Weiss on the region. Semafor notes that while CBS has not become a Trump mouthpiece and has aired critical reporting on the administration, its coverage of Israel and Gaza has shifted more dramatically. The report also points to CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford’s deleted post praising the town hall questioner who pressed El-Sayed, which she apologized for after internal and external complaints. A CBS spokesperson pushed back, telling Semafor its midterm and Middle East coverage has been rigorous and that it is reporting as aggressively on El-Sayed as on candidates in other competitive Senate races. Semafor also notes that NBC News journalists have pressed El-Sayed on alleged family connections as well.

Other news:

Trump’s approval has hit a record low of 33%, and two-thirds of Americans now believe he is using the presidency to enrich himself. The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found 66% disapprove of Trump’s performance, with 52% disapproving strongly, and 72% say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Among Republicans, 34% say Trump is enriching himself, a 12-point jump from last September. Nearly half of Americans, 48%, say they are financially worse off since he returned to office, the highest share for any president in the poll’s history dating back to 1986. Majorities also said Trump is not committed to protecting press freedom or free and fair elections. Despite the numbers, Trump told a Georgia rally Friday that voters should “pretend I’m on the ballot.”

The Trump administration is quietly preparing to impose financial penalties on millions of student loan borrowers in default, but plans to wait until after the midterms, according to The Washington Sun. Five sources told the outlet that the Treasury Department is moving ahead with hiring private debt collectors as soon as November, though the plans are unlikely to be announced before Election Day. Officials are also weighing seizing tax refunds, Social Security payments, and child tax credits, as well as garnishing wages, possibly starting with the April 2027 tax deadline. One source said it would be “politically insane” to do this before the midterms. Treasury officials previously blocked the effort, warning that many of the nearly 10 million borrowers in default are struggling Trump supporters, telling senior leaders the demographics “are not good for us.” Borrower advocates called the timing political opportunism and warned that seized refunds and garnished wages will be a catastrophe for families already struggling with high inflation.

A former Trump aide warned that Stephen Miller replacing Susie Wiles as chief of staff would be “a terrifying prospect.” Politico reported that Trump has been calling around to sound out possible replacements for Wiles following the Katie Zacharia debacle, with Miller, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Bill Pulte, Kevin McCarthy, and Yankees executive Randy Levine among the names floated. Trump reportedly hired Zacharia over Wiles’s head, undermining her effort to bring in CNN commentator Scott Jennings for the role. Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews told MeidasTouch’s Jack Cocchiarella that while Wiles is complicit in the administration’s actions, she doesn’t think Wiles is crazy, but called Miller dangerously extreme. Matthews warned that a lame-duck Trump could spiral and pardon everyone, making someone like Miller in charge especially scary. The White House insists Wiles is going nowhere, and Trump told Politico she has his “COMPLETE confidence.”

A National Guard member was shot in the leg in Washington, D.C., while trying to break up a street fight late Sunday. Police said seven or eight Guardsmen were monitoring a group near the Eastern Market Metro station when a fight broke out around 11:10 p.m. As the troops got out of their van, one man drew a gun and fired, and three Guardsmen returned fire after he refused to drop it. The suspect was hit in the abdomen, and both he and the injured Guardsman are expected to survive. Investigators are seeking others involved in the fight who fled the scene. The shooting comes nearly a year after two West Virginia Guardsmen were ambushed near the White House, killing Spc. Sarah Beckstrom.

Massachusetts’s Republican candidate for lieutenant governor dropped out of the race after being arrested in a suspected drunk driving crash. Shawn Oliver, a 42-year-old New Bedford city councilor and corrections officer, was arrested late Saturday after his vehicle struck parked cars and flipped over. He was hospitalized and arrested on suspicion of operating under the influence, negligent operation, a marked lanes violation, and speeding. His running mate, gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue, asked him to suspend his campaign and said there is no excuse for driving under the influence. Oliver withdrew Sunday, saying the election was too important to be overshadowed by personal matters. Minogue faces Democratic Gov. Maura Healey in November.

A Max Factor heir convicted of drugging and raping three women has been released after serving about 20 years, sparking outrage in California. Andrew Luster, 62, was convicted in 2003 on 86 counts after bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman captured him in Mexico. He was originally sentenced to 124 years, but a judge vacated that in 2013 and his sentence was reduced to 50 years. State prison officials say he served his full sentence after earning worktime and good conduct credits, insisting it was not an early release. The mayor of Glendora, where Luster is reportedly now living, said the city is outraged that someone sentenced to 124 years could walk free after 20. Advocates note California law still classified his crimes as nonviolent, and a 2024 fix came too late and did not cover rape of an unconscious person.

France is imposing curfews after authorities admitted they “lost control” of major cities during the weekend’s riots. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said about 3,000 businesses were looted or vandalized, nearly 2,400 people were arrested, and almost 1,000 police officers and firefighters were injured, calling it a miracle no one was killed. The Louvre closed after protesters announced a blockade, Marseille banned public gatherings, and the interior minister offered to resign, though Macron rejected it. Macron blamed far-left fringe groups but has faced criticism for attending a Celine Dion concert Friday and leaving Monday on a Gulf tour to secure oil supplies. Trump blamed immigration and demanded France “CLOSE THE BORDERS,” while Vance said the riots were the future Democrats want for America. French officials have not blamed immigrants, and the movement began with students protesting crumbling schools and has grown into anger over living costs and fuel prices driven partly by the Iran war.

The UN World Food Programme is cutting food aid to 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza because of funding shortages. The agency is reducing the number of people receiving monthly assistance from 1.6 million to 1.1 million, halving food rations, and cutting cash assistance for 75,000 families. Daily hot meals for those unable to cook are dropping from 250,000 to 150,000, with some families in hard-to-reach areas getting a hot meal only every other day. About 1.4 million people, two-thirds of Gaza’s population, face crisis levels of food insecurity or worse. A year after the U.S.-brokered ceasefire, the WFP’s acting director said life in Gaza remains brutal, with no proper shelter, basic services, or security as a fourth winter approaches. The agency says it urgently needs $450 million over the next six months.

Bangladesh is battling the world’s worst measles outbreak, with more than 1,100 deaths, mostly young children. The WHO says the country has reported 202,000 suspected cases since mid-March, and 94% of the 1,147 deaths have been children under 5. Bangladesh was once a vaccination success story, but political turmoil in 2024 disrupted its immunization program, and first-dose coverage fell to 90% in 2025, below the 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. A Reuters review found the government’s emergency vaccination campaign missed millions of children, relied on flawed data, and skipped standard readiness checks to move quickly. Families in hard-hit areas told Reuters that health workers arrived only after their children had died. Experts call it a real warning to every country as vaccine hesitancy rises globally, including in the U.S. under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Survivors of major U.S. disasters are still waiting on at least $10 billion in long-term federal recovery aid. The last time the government released long-term rebuilding funds through its main disaster recovery program was for Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida in October 2024. Survivors of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the St. Louis tornado, and the Texas Hill Country floods have received none, because Congress must approve the money disaster by disaster and hasn’t. The program was written into law for the first time in July 2026, but no new money has been appropriated. A St. Louis tornado survivor said his insurance covered almost nothing and FEMA only helped briefly, while an Altadena resident said it’s disheartening that her own country can’t do what it has historically done for disaster survivors. Survivors have made three trips to Washington to press lawmakers for the funding.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel called a settler attack on an American photojournalist in the West Bank a “despicable act of terror.” Mike Huckabee, a staunch pro-Israel ally of Trump, demanded the arrest and prosecution of the masked settlers who beat Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine. Levine, 63, was attacked last Friday while covering Palestinians harvesting olives, and said she was beaten for more than 10 minutes with clubs and other weapons. She is recovering in a hospital after surgery on her hand and suffering broken ribs, and the attackers also stole her camera, passport, and phone. Levine has said she is shocked and insulted that Netanyahu described the attack as only “alleged.” Huckabee’s unusually blunt condemnation comes as settler violence draws growing international scrutiny ahead of Israel’s October 27 election.

The British government publicly rebuked Pete Hegseth for claiming most non-American NATO troops didn’t fight in Afghanistan. In a speech at the University of Tennessee, Hegseth said only one or two of the roughly 50 countries in the coalition were actually involved in combat by the end, joking that the mission’s acronym stood for “I Saw Americans Fighting.” Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s spokesperson said Hegseth was “wrong,” noting that more than 450 British personnel never returned home and that thousands of allied families made huge sacrifices. The spokesperson said it is wrong to diminish their role. Public criticism of Trump officials is rare from the British government, but it has drawn a firm line when the service of its troops is questioned. Separately, Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said Trump was wrong to blame France’s riots on immigration, calling them a cost-of-living protest hijacked by malevolent forces.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Russia Declares ‘Checkmate’ as Trump Pushes Ukraine to Capitulate, Vance Confronted by Grieving Husband, GOP in Free Fall, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Today may go down as one of the most alarming days yet for Ukraine. Hours after Zelenskyy said the Trump administration is pushing his country to capitulate, Trump went on Truth Social to attack him, claiming Zelenskyy doesn’t care about ending the war and mocking Ukraine as a country “in shambles.” All of this while Russia has spent the past week launching nearly 2,700 drones at Ukraine’s power grid, Washington paused the intelligence Ukraine relies on to spot incoming ballistic missiles, and Putin’s own envoy is bragging that the “ice has begun to break” with the United States. Tonight, the Russians are celebrating.

Here at home, a grieving husband confronted JD Vance over his wife’s death in Trump’s Iran war, Trump’s approval just hit a record low two weeks before the midterms, and the president announced a plan for a D.C. golf course that his own lawyers have spent months telling a federal judge doesn’t exist.

I am working around the clock to get you news in real time from Ukraine and everywhere else it matters. The White House hates this. They would much rather you hear their version of events, filtered through friendly outlets and press secretaries who last five days. But no advertiser, corporation, or politician controls what I report. I answer only to you.

Let’s get into it.

Grieving Military Husband Confronts Vance Over “Fundamental Failures” in Trump’s Iran War

The husband of a soldier killed in the Iran war confronted JD Vance at a CBS News town hall, demanding accountability for “fundamental failures” by military leadership. Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, an Army Reservist from Minnesota, was one of six service members killed by an Iranian drone strike at Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba on March 1, just one day after Trump launched the war. It remains the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in the conflict, and CBS has reported the facility wasn’t adequately fortified, lacked drone defenses, and that the Army chose not to move troops farther from Iran or bulk up medical support. Her husband, Joey Amor, told Vance that while an Iranian drone killed his wife, a failure of leadership led up to it, adding that his wife had told him things before she died and that other soldiers know more but are staying quiet. Vance called Nicole a precious human being who served honorably, but said this was literally the first time he had heard of the failures, explaining that as vice president he lives in a bit of a bubble. He then acknowledged there were issues with where troops were located that were a huge mistake and have since been changed, and promised not to forget.

Vance faced tough questions throughout the town hall, including from voters who backed him and Trump in 2024. A Michigan man who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket said he now plans to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and pressed Vance on soaring gas prices caused by the war. Vance blamed the situation in the Middle East and former President Joe Biden, without acknowledging the crisis stemmed from the war Trump launched, and said it’s easy to criticize something that happened seven months ago. A Catholic nun challenged him on immigration raids that separate children from their parents, and Vance conceded that some agents have really screwed up and that striking the right balance is a work in progress. A naturalized citizen who voted for him accused him of scapegoating immigrants after he called H-1B visa holders “foreign indentured servants,” and Vance admitted his rhetoric had been imperfect. At least 21 U.S. service members have now died in the Iran war, which Trump launched without congressional approval and promised would last only weeks.

Vance defended Trump against corruption concerns while saying selling White House access would be “disgusting.” Moderator Tony Dokoupil pressed him on the nearly $1.2 billion Trump took in from his crypto businesses last year and the recent resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece over allegations she leveraged her position, which she denies. Vance said he had never seen anything from the president that made him squeamish and insisted claims he has looked into turned out to be untrue. He did say that anyone selling access to the White House should suffer consequences. The sharp questioning previewed the challenges Vance may face defending the administration’s record if he runs for president in 2028. He told the audience there is “of course” a chance he won’t run.

Ukraine Hits St. Petersburg With 1,000 Drones as Zelenskyy Warns Trump of a “Historic Mistake”

Zelenskyy told Bloomberg he believes the Trump administration is pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. He said the U.S. is threatening to cut off some support if Ukraine keeps striking Russian oil refineries, explaining that Washington just wants Ukraine to stop attacking diesel and will “disconnect us from something” if it doesn’t. Zelenskyy said he offered a compromise: Ukraine would stop targeting Russian diesel if the U.S. provided Patriot missiles to protect Ukraine’s own energy facilities. He also accused the U.S. of slowing deliveries of Patriots that Ukraine has already paid for through the PURL program, insisting the delay is “not a technical issue.” Despite the tensions, Zelenskyy said he expects things may calm down after the midterms, describing politics as very aggressive during election time. He said the current moment feels like agony, but believes life will continue more calmly once the elections are over. Meanwhile, Russia is declaring “checkmate.”

Trump lashed out at Zelenskyy on Truth Social, claiming the Ukrainian leader doesn’t want to end the war and probably never did. Hours after Ukraine’s massive drone attack on St. Petersburg, Trump said Zelenskyy could have gotten a better deal two years ago and accused him of being enriched by European aid and money from “Crooked Joe Biden.” He described Ukraine as being in “shambles,” claiming it has lost much of its land and access to its seas, and that its male population is low, wounded, or dead. Trump again condemned Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil facilities, saying they are seriously hurting world diesel markets as he tries to bring down fuel prices before the midterms. He said he is negotiating peace and doesn’t want to do anything that would drive Russia away from the bargaining table. The attack came the same day Zelenskyy accused Trump of pushing Ukraine to capitulate, and after he called Trump’s diesel deal with Putin a birthday present for the Russian leader. The Russians celebrated tonight:

Ukraine launched one of the largest drone attacks of the war overnight, setting a major oil terminal in St. Petersburg ablaze. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down about 1,015 drones over Moscow and several western regions, in what appeared to be the biggest attack St. Petersburg has seen. Drones struck the Petersburg Oil Terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, a data center belonging to tech giant VK, and a logistics center for retailer Ozon. The city’s governor said one person was killed and five were injured, while two substations were hit in the surrounding Leningrad region, leaving about 20,000 people without power. The strike came days after Zelenskyy ordered his military to resume attacks on Russian oil facilities, defying Trump, who called the renewed strikes “a disgrace.” Ukraine had briefly paused the attacks under Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” but says it got nothing in return.

Russia never stopped attacking Ukraine’s power grid, despite Trump’s claim that both sides agreed to an energy truce. Zelenskyy said Russia carried out at least 76 attacks on Ukrainian energy, oil, and gas facilities over the past week, leaving tens of thousands of families without electricity. Over that same week, he said, Russia fired nearly 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic. Overnight strikes hit substations in four regions, including Odesa, killing at least two people and injuring more than a dozen. A wiring plant in Lutsk that supplies BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche halted operations after being struck. Zelenskyy said the Russians are trying to cause a blackout, and that America should see Russia is taking no reciprocal steps in response to sanctions relief.

Zelenskyy warned on “Meet the Press” that Ukraine cannot survive if the United States sides with Russia. He called that prospect unbelievable, a tragedy, and a historic mistake, capping a week of rising tensions that began with Trump’s diesel deal with Putin and ended with his waiver of the Graham Act sanctions. Zelenskyy said Putin “feels victory” from the sanctions pause and expressed hope that Trump will change his attitude toward the Russian leader. He also revealed that the U.S. had paused intelligence sharing, leaving Ukraine blind to Russian ballistic missile attacks for three days. That sharing has since resumed, and Zelenskyy said he was very thankful. He also spoke with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and is reportedly seeking a new peace meeting next week.

A fight over Ukraine’s satellite internet has deepened the rift, with conflicting accounts from Washington. Ukraine says drones relying on SpaceX satellite service stopped working at speeds above 100 mph, disabling interceptors meant to shoot down Russian attack drones, and that terminals worked normally when tested across the border in the EU. Zelenskyy called it “a planned operation” and said the message came from the government. Trump denied ordering any restrictions, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said nobody ordered the slowdown and that it has been restored. But Elon Musk has suggested the restrictions came from the government, and The Telegraph, citing four sources, reported that Musk proposed the limits and Trump approved them. Ukrainian officials say they still can’t confirm full service has been restored, and a bipartisan group of senators is demanding an investigation.

The fallout is spreading across Europe. NATO jets were scrambled Sunday after an unidentified object entered Lithuania’s airspace, and residents in parts of the country were told to take shelter for about an hour. Officials later said it was likely a drone that came in from Poland, and Ukraine said it regretted the possible diversion of its drones, which it blamed on Russian electronic warfare. Arson attacks have also hit Starlink ground stations in Poland and Bulgaria, with Polish authorities blaming Russian intelligence. Meanwhile, the EU is reportedly rushing to prepare new sanctions on Russia before France’s 2027 presidential election. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, the current favorite, has vowed to end support for Ukraine within six months if elected.

A top Putin envoy says Russia and the U.S. are discussing new joint business deals, including nuclear-powered data centers, following Trump’s diesel agreement. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy and a key figure in U.S.-Russia talks on the Ukraine war, told an energy conference in Moscow that the two countries are exploring data center projects using small-scale nuclear power plants. He said “the ice has begun to break” and predicted several other significant initiatives will be announced soon, despite widespread resistance. Dmitriev revealed that the U.S. Treasury asked Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which he runs, to help sort out payment issues on the diesel deal, and said brainstorming sessions are already underway on how to lift sanctions. He called the Graham Act sanctions law “misguided” and said Russia will keep pursuing projects with the U.S. until the war ends. The Kremlin has long been frustrated that Washington tied such deals to a peace agreement, but Dmitriev’s remarks, made a day before Trump waived the Graham Act sanctions, suggest that link may be breaking.

Trump Hits Record Lows as Voters Sour on GOP Two Weeks Before the Midterms

Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low, giving Democrats a clear edge heading into Election Day. A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll puts Trump’s approval at just 33%, lower than at any point in his first term, with 66% disapproving and 52% disapproving strongly. Democrats now lead by eight points in the race for the House, up from three points in July. By 58% to 39%, registered voters said they would rather have a Democratic Congress acting as a check on Trump than a Republican one supporting his agenda, roughly double last year’s margin. For the first time since 2014, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy. Democrats are also more motivated, with 75% saying they are certain to vote or already have, compared with 67% of Republicans.

A separate NBC News poll finds Americans more pessimistic about the country than at any point in Trump’s second term. A record 71% of adults say the country is on the wrong track, and Trump’s approval has slipped to 34%, with a second-term high of 51% strongly disapproving. Registered voters prefer Democrats to control Congress by 55% to 45%. Trump’s support is eroding even within his own coalition, with approval at just 76% among Republicans, 28% among men under 30, and 31% among Latinos, groups that helped him win in 2024. A majority, 52%, say his administration is more corrupt than previous ones, and 58% say his policies are hurting the country. Americans are split almost evenly, 52% to 48%, on whether a Democratic House should pursue impeachment.

The Iran war and rising prices are driving voters’ anger. In February, before the war began, 71% of Americans said gasoline was affordable, but that has completely flipped, with 71% now saying it is not. Majorities also say groceries, health care, and home energy are unaffordable, and 48% say they are financially worse off than when Trump returned to office, the highest share for any president in Post-ABC polling since 1986. About 65% say going to war with Iran was a mistake, and Trump’s approval on handling the cost of living sits at just 27% in the NBC poll. Most Americans are also skeptical of his promise of $5,000 payments if Republicans hold Congress, with 71% saying they don’t expect to see a check. Even 47% of Republicans say they don’t believe they’ll receive one.

Instead of focusing on the economy, Trump has spent his final campaign rallies gushing over men’s bodies. At a rally in Kentucky on Saturday, he described closely examining the physique of Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, from his jawline to his backside, and claimed without evidence that the remarks boosted Husted’s poll numbers. In Georgia on Friday, he praised Senate candidate Mike Collins as “all man” while mocking Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff’s looks and comparing him to Pee-wee Herman. He also gushed about “big, strong, handsome soldiers” and said spending time with them was one of the reasons to be president. Even allies haven’t been spared, as Trump told a Dallas crowd last month that Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton may not be the best-looking guy he’s ever seen. The New York Times notes the pattern comes as Trump might otherwise be selling voters on ending the Iran war or bringing down prices.

More On Trump Sellout To Putin, Backstabbing Ukraine, Europe, NATO

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Speedrunning Abandoning Ukraine, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Almost two weeks ago, on October 7, Donald Trump mentioned offhand that it was Vladimir Putin’s birthday and the two of them had a call set up. The call went ahead two days later, and Trump has been snuggling closer to Russia and taking a sledgehammer to Ukraine ever since.

You could tell the birthday chat was trouble from the jump. Russian media cheerfully reported on the “substance” and “warmth” of the phone call, with Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov reporting that “nobody wanted to hang up first.” The same day, Trump abruptly announced a dramatic swerve in his own energy policy: Far from increasing sanctions pressure on Russia, Trump now said the United States would waive sanctions in order to start buying diesel fuel from Russia directly.

One day later, on Saturday, October 10, Trump still had Putin’s assessment of Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky top of mind. “[Zelensky] wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” Trump told reporters. He even called for Zelensky to be removed from office: “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals, and for some reason never does.” (Maybe it has something to do with Russia demanding he give it huge chunks of Ukraine as the price of peace. Hard to say, really.) The same day, Trump officials threatened that America might stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine if attacks on Russian energy infrastructure continued.

The next day, Trump placed Zelensky in an even greater bind by unilaterally announcing an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine. Neither side had agreed to any such thing. (“They agreed,” Trump added the next day, “because I said they agreed.”) Thanks to Trump’s renewed enthusiasm for Putin’s lies about the war, this announcement created immediate and massive diplomatic asymmetries. Ukraine, desperate to get back in Trump’s good books, immediately began trying to honor the energy ceasefire; Russia, eager to capitalize, kept right on pounding Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

Zelensky’s unilateral honoring of the energy ceasefire did little to change Trump’s mood. Instead, the United States spent last week handicapping Ukraine’s war efforts in big and small ways. On Tuesday, October 13, Russian missiles pounded Kyiv without the usual advance warning provided by U.S. intelligence. That same night, Ukraine discovered that new restrictions had been placed on its Starlink satellite internet service—crucial infrastructure without which it could not pilot its drones. This service would later be partially, but not entirely, restored; subsequent reporting from Reuters said that the order to slow Ukraine’s satellite internet came directly from the White House, although Trump denied that he ordered it personally. (Subsequent reporting suggested Starlink owner Elon Musk was the one who first proposed the slowdown.)

On Friday, October 16, Trump gave Russia even more sanctions relief—preventing new sanctions on Russia and tariffs on buyers of Russian oil from going into effect, although he himself signed those sanctions into law just last month.

Over and over again since the birthday call, Trump has made his new position on the war clear: Nothing but incentives and wheedling praise for Russia, the war’s imperial aggressor, and nothing but threats and insults for Ukraine, the war’s blameless defender. And yesterday, he gave us his clearest explanation of his thinking yet.

“My decision on Russia is a very simple one,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Why the kid gloves for Russia?

“I . . . don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” Trump said. After all, look how nicely Russia was behaving!

“Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.”

And anyway, what was so great about Zelensky and Ukraine?

“[Zelensky] is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including in the United States,” Trump went on. “Farmers, ranchers, and businesses of all kinds are suffering greatly from this, but Russia is, nevertheless, sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World.” Zelensky, Trump added, “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did. He could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now.”

It’s amazing how many of Trump’s psychological pathologies are here on display at once. There is, of course, his bewildering personal adulation of Putin himself, which makes it all too easy for the Russian dictator to feed him out-and-out lies about the state of the conflict and who is responsible. There’s his alpha-dog approach to geopolitics, which he believes shows great strength and in reality shows great weakness: The United States, Trump apparently believes, ought not lift a finger or offer a word of protest if the world’s other great powers decide to invade their neighbors. Instead, those great powers must be cherished and coddled, lest we “drive them away from the bargaining table” and they decide to intervene in our own imperial adventures.

Note how different this argument is from the old MAGA ones about how the whole conflict is an expensive boondoggle halfway around the world that we shouldn’t be involved with at all. Trump, fully in his own imperial era, has jettisoned such provincial “Donroe Doctrine” thinking. He just argues, openly and explicitly, that it’s better for the United States to be allied with Russia. All this is music to Putin’s ears: The Russian dictator, the Wall Street Journal reports, is now proposing a tripartite summit between the United States, Russia, and China to hash out the ultimate fate of Ukraine.

There’s another psychological need on display here, too. Over the last month, Trump has deliberately been trying to shift Americans’ focus away from his interminable boondoggle in Iran and back toward the conflict in Ukraine.

Part of the idea is to get them to blame high gas prices not on Trump, who attacked Iran, but on Zelensky and/or Putin. But it’s also a matter of presidential posture. In Iran, Trump looks feckless and weak. He doesn’t have the stomach to escalate the war further, and Iran keeps flatly ignoring his threats to do so: Remember his July ultimatum that he would blow up “ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” for every ship Iran attacked in the Strait of Hormuz?

In the Russia–Ukraine conflict, however, Trump thinks he looks strong. After all, Ukraine needs the United States—and how better to demonstrate that need than by withholding the things they need while lecturing them that it’s really their own fault? When the focus is on Iran, Trump looks like a wimp. When it’s on Ukraine, he thinks he looks cruel, but also strong. He knows which focus he prefers. 

New York Times, Under Siege, Ukraine Uses F-16s to Shoot Down Russia’s Jet-Powered Drones, Lara Jakes, Oct. 19, 2026. The fighters are a key tool against Moscow’s latest weapon of choice. But deploying the multimillion-dollar planes to counter drones is an imperfect fix.

The skies above Ukraine now roar with the sound of F-16s targeting jet-powered drones.

Under siege and short on interceptor missiles, Ukraine is using the American-made fighter planes as a first line of defense against Russia’s deadly new weapon of choice.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently described the F-16 as “one of the most effective tools for shooting down” the drones, which have been menacing Ukraine’s cities. But being on constant patrol for drones that cost Russia no more than $70,000 to build is taking a toll on the multimillion-dollar fighter planes.

Ukraine’s small fleet of F-16s — about 50 in all — are in the air so often that they risk breaking down, officials and experts say. About half of Ukraine’s F-16 fleet is grounded, undergoing maintenance elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Zelensky said this month.

Kyiv is still waiting for additional F-16s that Belgium promised to donate more than three years ago. Only a few dozen Ukrainian pilots at a time can be trained to fly the jets. And running out of ammunition is a top concern.ImageA mechanic works on a large engine with tools.Working on an F-16 engine at the Fetesti base. About half of Ukraine’s F-16 fleet is grounded, undergoing maintenance, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this month.Credit...Andreea Campeanu for The New York Times

David A. Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general who is now head of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a research group near Washington, said Ukraine was “forced to use a relatively small fighter fleet day after day as a substitute for an adequately resourced, layered air defense system.” He also noted that using the F-16s in that way meant Ukrainian forces were “consuming a finite resource faster than they should.”

“It’s not a sustainable long-term proposition,” he added.

Ukraine is rushing to develop other interceptors, but for now, the F-16s are among the few weapons Kyiv has that can keep up with the jet-powered drones and shoot them down without burning through costly Patriot missiles. The fighter jets have taken down as many as 90 percent of incoming cruise missiles in some attacks, said Col. Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force.

The reliance on F-16s has made them “critical for Ukraine,” said Lt. Gen. Krzysztof Krol, assistant to the chief of staff of Poland’s armed forces. But the fleet, he said, is “definitely insufficient.”Fighting for Fighter Jets

For Ukraine, getting F-16s was itself a battle.

The sophisticated fighter jets, made by the American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin, require U.S. government approval to be sold or transferred abroad.Mr. Zelensky began asking for them soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Some allies were willing to donate old F-16s. But the Biden administration resisted for more than a year, worried about escalating tensions between NATO and Russia and whether Ukraine could properly maintain the jets.

When Washington relented, in May 2023, it took months to begin training Ukrainian pilots to fly the jets. The first F-16s — donated by Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway — did not arrive in Ukraine until over a year later.

Since then, the planes have been airborne almost constantly, and five of them have been damaged or destroyed in battle, according to the weapons tracking site Oryx. One was shot down, killing its battle-tested pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, after being scrambled against a Russian air assault just weeks after the F-16s arrived in Ukraine.

The fighter planes have also racked up successes. F-16s shot down “a significant portion” of the 1,900 jet drones that Ukraine intercepted last month, out of the 3,500 that Russia launched, Colonel Ihnat said in an interview. He also said that one F-16 pilot recently shot down 10 jet-powered drones during a single flight. 

Hope for America, Opinion: The President of the United States is being played, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 19, 2026. After spending most of today at his private club in West Palm Beach, Florida, the president of the United States posted on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, at 4:36 this afternoon to share his perverted reasoning for refusing to implement sanctions on Russia.

In the long and drawn-out post, he declared that because “Russia is doing very little” to help Iran compared to what it could be doing, he had decided to waive the new sanctions against the country led by his good friend, Vladimir Putin, even over the objections of our allies around the world and overwhelming amounts of criticism back here at home. He added that he wanted to keep Russia from doing any more to help Iran, writing, “I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.”

Those “stupid people” he felt the need to put on notice are lawmakers from both parties in the Congress his party controls, who wrote the very law, in honor of their fallen colleague, that he is now refusing to enforce. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 was named after his own dead friend, the senator from South Carolina. Someone who spent the final months of his life fighting for Ukraine, and who died not even a day after returning from visiting the country, where he stood beside President Zelenskyy and secured the White House’s backing for new sanctions against Russia. Just one month after Congress passed the law and Trump himself signed it to impose new sanctions on Russia, Trump suddenly reversed course and waived the very sanctions Graham had worked so hard to secure.Then in today’s social media post, Donald Trump had the audacity to say that he is doing this because he wants peace and that this is the best strategy to get it. He may very well believe that he is some great peacemaker, that Putin respects him, and that he is the only one who can broker a deal to end this war. But all that he is proving is what the rest of the world can clearly see. That he is Putin’s pawn, and that the Russians are playing him like a violin. Donald Trump is the guy who truly believes that the stripper at the strip club likes him. He has such an inflated sense of self-importance that he cannot see that he is being used, because his ego will not allow him to see it.

In that same post, Donald Trump tried to weaponize the devastation that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, saying that Zelenskyy’s “country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead.” He included those details as some sort of proof of his argument that Zelenskyy and Ukraine have already lost and that Russia has won. He made no mention of the grave losses Russia has suffered and continues to sustain. He also didn’t add anything about how Putin, and only Putin, was responsible for starting this war and that he could end it right now by withdrawing from the country he has invaded and stopping the bloodshed. Instead, he accused Zelenskyy of having a financial interest in prolonging the war, writing that “with all of the money that Europe is famously giving him, and that Crooked Joe Biden gave him in the past, he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Everything Trump is doing is strategic to the extent Trump is able to think strategically, because Donald Trump knows that a significant number of his own supporters actually do care about Ukraine. They see right and wrong clearly on this one. His post today was just a desperate attempt to preemptively condition them to see the aggressor as the reasonable party and the country that was invaded, that did nothing wrong, that just wants to survive, as the problem. He is laying the groundwork now so that when he eventually abandons Ukraine entirely, or worse, helps Russia in an even more direct way, his base will see it as a necessary step toward peace and the right thing to do.

This wasn’t the only post where he cozied up to people standing on the wrong side of history. In another post, which he addressed “To the Great People of Israel,” he announced his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of Benjamin Netanyahu in his upcoming race for reelection as Prime Minister of Israel later this month. But this had nothing to do with caring about the people of Israel. He was doing a favor for another authoritarian leader, someone the International Criminal Court has an active arrest warrant for. He called Netanyahu a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” and declared that he has been “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition.” He wrote that if Israel had anyone other than Netanyahu as its leader, “America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so.” He used the people he had just called “great” as pawns, making American support for Israel conditional on Netanyahu staying in power. Netanyahu responded with his own message thanking Trump for his “extraordinary endorsement,” adding that “Israel has never had a greater friend in the White House.”

Knowing how hard so many of us oppose what Donald Trump is doing and has done, I would never blame an entire nation for the sins of their leader. The Israeli people deserve better than Bibi, just like we deserve better than Trump, and the Iranian people deserve better than the people controlling their government.

Just yesterday Donald Trump told us exactly why he keeps standing with evil people: “I like people that like me. I just like it, and I can’t help it. It’s a character flaw. I mean, I’ve had a couple of people, really horrible human beings, horrible, horrible, terrible people, but I heard through the grapevine they really liked me a lot. So, I like them too.”

In a single day, the president of the United States refused to impose sanctions on a country that invaded its neighbor and is bombing civilians, and publicly endorsed for reelection a leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Donald Trump continues to carry out his campaign to deliberately desensitize us to his worst impulses and dangerous plans. He wants us to feel comfortable when he aligns our country with the worst people and the cruelty they inflict. Donald Trump wants to destroy the idea of what America is supposed to stand for, so that he can turn it into anything he wants. He is normalizing the United States as a partner with evil. And he is making it so that one day we look around and we do not even flinch when our president sides with dictators, authoritarians, and fascists, because it has simply become what we are and we don’t remember it any other way. That is how it happens. Slowly, and then all at once.

Thankfully, right now, we still remember who we are and what this country was founded on. Earlier this week, students from North Carolina A&T State University, Bennett College, and UNC Greensboro marched together for 45 minutes to cast their ballots after polling sites were removed from their campuses by the Republican-controlled Board of Elections. The board chair, a Republican named Eugene Lester, said that “voting is a privilege,” and another leader said that the campus sites “disproportionately favor one political party.” State Board member Siobhan O’Duffy Millen called it “a war on students.” The College Democrats of North Carolina filed a lawsuit, and their attorneys wrote in the filing: “Contrary to the views of Defendant Eugene Lester, the Guilford County elections board chair, voting is a right of citizenship, not a privilege.” Their attempts to make voting harder and interfere in the election didn’t work. They still voted.

North Carolina A&T students have long been pioneers in moving this country forward while not taking any nonsense from anyone. Back in 1960, four freshmen sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and refused to leave. Their brave act helped launch the sit-in movement and expand the civil rights movement across the South. Here we are all these years later, and students at the same school are once again fighting the good fight to make this country better and more just. Young people have always been at the center of the moments that change the trajectory of this country, and they are doing it again.

I think back to when I was in college in the mid-1990s, and how different the world felt. I was not worried about my rights being taken away and I was not fighting to preserve anything. I was spending my time with friends and volunteering with organizations focused on the AIDS crisis and the foster care system, because I thought the country was moving forward, and I wanted to be part of it. I thought that peace in the Middle East was possible, that racism could be driven into silence even if it could not be erased entirely, and that homelessness was just a problem that we needed to find the right solutions for, not treat as a crime. When I look at college students today, they do not have the luxury of that idealism. They can’t live in a world that offered the same hope and possibility that so many of us got to experience because they are constantly faced with threats to their rights and uncertainty about their futures. They are treading water instead of swimming toward progress and possibility.

I know how lucky I was to be living during that time in history when a better future felt within reach, when so many other generations faced struggles that made the future feel far less certain. But this generation in particular has been hit by one compounding crisis after another, with none of them resolving before the next one arrived. Their parents were trying to survive the Great Recession while still carrying the wounds of September 11th. Then came a pandemic that stole many of their most formative years, the years when they were supposed to learn how to be people in the world and figure out who they are. Some of them lost grandparents and parents during Trump’s botched 2020 response. Then came George Floyd and the reckoning with racial injustice, which, for a very short time, actually felt like it might lead to a better world for everyone. Then Trump was elected again, and they, like all of us, are watching what feels like the slow-motion dismantling of our entire country while the president does all he can to make us see each other as enemies.

This is why our vote next month during the midterm elections matters so much. It may very well end up being the most important election in modern history. And even if it all goes exactly as our country’s survival needs it to, Donald Trump may still do everything in his power to undermine it. He may look for every loophole he can find to delay certifications and challenge the results. We need to be prepared for attempts to prevent the duly elected members of Congress from being seated. If there is one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he does not play by the rules because he does not believe the rules apply to him. But we cannot let any of that stop us. We have to make our voices heard at the ballot box and insist that every single one of our votes is counted and that the decision of “We the People” is upheld. Future generations are counting on us, and we can’t, and we won’t let them down.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Power of Negative Thinking, William Kristol, right, Oct. 19, 2026. A note on two findings in the new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll that came out yesterday.

First, the generic congressional ballot has moved decisively in the Democrats’ direction. In July, Democrats had a 3-point advantage when voters were asked whom they intended to vote for in November. They now hold a 50 to 42 percent lead among registered voters—and one should probably add another point or two for a likely disproportionate Democratic turnout.

So two weeks out, Democrats are in good shape.

But there’s another finding in the poll that suggests they could end up in even better shape. Respondents were asked if they would rather see the next Congress controlled by Democrats to act as a check on Trump, or see a Congress controlled by Republicans to support Trump’s agenda. Fifty-eight percent of registered voters preferred a Democratic Congress, while only 39 percent preferred a Republican one (up from a 53 percent to 42 percent margin a year ago).

So the same poll that shows an 8-point margin on the question of whom you intend to vote for has a 19-point margin on the question of whom you want to control of Congress.

Now, obviously there will always be some traditional Republicans who will say they’d like to see a check on Trump—but, being Republicans, will still vote for the Republican candidate in their state or district. Not every Trump-disapprover is going to turn against every Republican candidate running for the House or the Senate. There’ll always be a gap between the ballot choice and the broader question of the direction of Congress.

But closing that gap just a little would make a big difference. Getting just a few more of the 58 percent who want a Democratic Congress to act on that wish, and thus moving the generic ballot margin from high single digits to low double digits, would turn a wave into a tsunami on November 3.

It seems to me, then, that Democrats have just one job over these final two weeks: To remind voters, over and over again, that the only way to check Trump from driving the country further into a ditch is to vote blue.

Democratic candidates can at least implicitly acknowledge that voters don’t have to love everything about the Democratic party. They can even say explicitly that voters don’t have to decide to pledge their troth to the Democrats forevermore. But they can bring home to voters that they need, at least this once, to walk away from the Republican party in order to check Trump for the rest of his time in office. It’s what the voters want. It’s also what Democrats can actually do over the next two years.

A closing argument that focuses on the need to check Trump would have the advantage, always desirable but not always achievable in politics, of being both popular and true. Democrats just need to keep on making it.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• George Washington’s Legacy of Religious Freedom Is Under Threat in the Military… Pluralism is an important gift from our first commander in chief, observes MARK HERTLING, and it’s being squandered.
• The Pro-Ukraine Right Is Running Out of Excuses for Trump… The president’s latest embrace of Putin is making their already awkward position untenable, writes CATHY YOUNG.
• Live from Charlotte… The gang welcomes Pete Buttigieg for a night of politics among friends. 
• Dems See Trump’s Corruption as the Grift That Keeps on Giving… Their midterms closing argument connects the president’s enrichment to the squeeze on Americans’ wallets, reports LAUREN EGAN.
• Trump’s Own Energy Secretary Just Contradicted His Russia Story… Trump rewards Putin, Republicans squirm, and Lindsey Graham’s legacy lies in ruins. WILL SALETAN joins SAM STEIN on Bulwark Takes.

Quick Hits

FREEDOM FUEL REVISITED: Remember “FREEDOM FUEL”? In early July, with gas prices already soaring due to the war in Iran, Donald Trump and his allies began trumpeting something strange: a chain of star-spangled gas stations that had started selling below-cost gas at a number of Pennsylvania locations. White House press staffers traveled to the stations for photo ops and to credit “President Trump’s strong leadership” for “price relief at the pump.” It wasn’t until almost two months later that we learned one explanation for how the upstart chain could afford to sell the gas so cheaply: Per a lawsuit, they’d stiffed a supplier over payment for it.

Now, new reporting from Politico puts even more meat on the story’s bones: The “FREEDOM FUEL” project began in part as a political back-scratching effort from a small klatch of allies—including, bizarrely, Baltimore Ravens special teams coach Randy Brown—who were also pitching the White House on some far bigger projects, like a deal to reopen an oil refinery in the Virgin Islands. Here’s Politico:

It is . . . a high-octane metaphor for the president’s approach to governing, with all its corner-cutting and haste and disdain for regulation, its triumph of marketing over substance and consistent fights with the press. As in many such stories, the tale of Freedom Fuel features private business interests finding bizarre ways to pander to the White House. Despite the operators’ and the administration’s best efforts, and the seemingly innocent promise of cheaper gas, the tale of Freedom Fuel also shows how the administration’s free-wheeling approach to problems can create an even bigger mess.

Other than the corruption, the most notable thing about the wheeling and dealing so typical of this White House is how bizarre it all is. Read the whole thing.

FRANCE GONE WILD: We don’t spend a lot of time on French domestic politics around here, but it was hard not to notice the extraordinary riots that convulsed the country this weekend, as Emmanuel Macron’s government feebly called for order and calm. The New York Times checks in:

Mr. Macron said in an evening broadcast interview that he would seek to lower gas prices — a key complaint from some protesters — during a diplomatic trip to the Persian Gulf this week.

But he offered no concrete concessions, and appealed for “order, calm, not an escalation,” criticizing calls to “take to the streets, to protest, to create disorder.”

He also warned that “Those who looted will have to pay back, and those who sought to bring down the Republic will be held accountable.”

On Sunday, the violence and protests had largely subsided, apart from sporadic skirmishes and looting involving small numbers of rioters in Paris, as the unrest gave way to political finger pointing.

Politicians from the far left to the far right criticized the government for a police response deemed too weak or ill-prepared — with some calling for the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, to resign.

Mr. Nuñez told journalists on Saturday that the police had not been understaffed, but that it was hard to contain rioters “when they’re scattered in small groups.”

New York Times, Republicans in Ohio Are Worried About Turnout. Here’s What They’re Doing About it, Emily Davies, Oct. 19, 2026. To boost Senator Jon Husted, who is in a tight race to keep his seat, some Republicans who were making a jobs pitch have pivoted to focus on socialism.

Just two volunteers showed up on a recent weekday at a Republican Party campaign office near Cleveland that in 2024 was brimming with activity every night.

One of the two, Tanya Karabanovs, 54, sat among stacks of untouched yard signs and brainstormed new ways to convince her neighbors to vote for Republican candidates such as Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed in 2025 to finish the term of Vice President JD Vance. Her most recent idea: stuffing chocolate bars into goodie bags with leftover campaign literature.

“This is really a weird cycle,” said Ms. Karabanovs, who recalled at least 30 volunteers packing into the office each day in 2024. “There’s no way to feel confident about any of the races, honestly.”

Many of the Republican volunteers trying to keep Ohio’s Senate seat red started the summer making the case that, despite rising prices, Mr. Husted was better suited to fix the economy than his Democratic challenger, the former senator Sherrod Brown. But when it became clear that the message wasn’t landing, they began to pivot.

Some, like Ms. Karabanovs, got creative. The political PAC for Americans for Prosperity, a prominent conservative advocacy group that deploys thousands of door-knockers across the state, switched its script to the threat of socialism — and organizers quickly noticed a difference.

“I wouldn’t like that,” said Nikki Cvetkovic, 77, after opening her door in a working-class suburb of Youngstown and inspecting a pamphlet with a picture of Brown next to the words, “SOCIALISM THREATENS YOUR FREEDOM.” She said she would cast her ballot for Mr. Husted.

Polls have shown Mr. Brown running ahead of Mr. Husted in one of the most closely watched races of this cycle. But many conservatives across the state believe they can pull off in the final two weeks what Republicans have done better than Democrats for the last 10 years: defy expectations on Election Day.

The modern-day Republican Party is built on upsets. Twice, polls showed Mr. Trump losing the presidential election only for him to triumph, cementing the MAGA movement’s staying power and underdog status. The question now is whether the G.O.P. can do it again, at a time when Mr. Trump is not on the ballot and his popularity is historically low.

The answer lies on the ground in unexpected battlegrounds, including Iowa and Ohio, which have swung to the right over the last decade but this year have shown signs of shifting back. In these states, as the Republican Party has struggled to defend Mr. Trump’s handling of inflation, the war with Iran and tariff policies, local campaigns and committees have leaned into depicting Democrats as dangerously far to the left — a last-ditch gambit to persuade their voters not to stay home or break the other way.

New York Times, That Huge Republican Cash Edge? It’s in Senate Races, Not House Races, Shane Goldmacher, Oct. 19, 2026. With Republicans seen as less likely to hold their majority in the House, the party is focusing more on the battle for the Senate, where it is vastly outspending Democrats on ads.

Republicans have an enormous financial edge in this year’s midterms. But with two weeks until the election, it is now clear that their spending advantage is overwhelmingly playing out only in the advertising battle for the Senate — not the House.

In the seven Senate races that the Cook Political Report rated as tossups, Republicans are outspending Democrats on advertising by $947 million to $625 million. That is a breathtaking advantage of more than $320 million in the key races that could determine which party wins control of the Senate, according to a tally by AdImpact of ads that have been already been shown and future reservations.

It is a very different story in the House, though. Republicans still have an advertising advantage in the closest House races, but it is relatively narrow — just a $14 million edge across the 21 races rated as tossups.

There are a number of explanations for the discrepancy.

Senate races generally attract more money and attention than congressional contests. Elon Musk’s enormous spending on the Texas Senate race is also a factor: He gave nearly $170 million to super PACs backing Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee there — a huge injection of cash from one person.

But it is also appears to be an indication that both parties — and their donors — are viewing it as increasingly unlikely that Republicans will be able to hold onto their House majority.The battle to win control of the Senate, though, remains on a knife’s edge. Republican donors are accordingly spending big in key Senate races.

In six of the seven tossup Senate races, Republican ad spending is far outstripping Democrats’. The biggest gap is in Texas ($141 million), but there are chasms also in Ohio (nearly $90 million), Maine (nearly $32 million) and Michigan ($33 million).

Only in Kansas — where Republicans are engaged in a late rescue mission — is the spending even close. There, Democrats had an edge of less than $2 million.

In the House, there is not such a clear-cut edge for Republicans. Across the 21 tossup districts, Republicans are currently set to spend more on 10 seats while Democrats are set to spend more on 11.

It is worth noting that in recent years, Democrats have lapped Republicans in House spending. In President Trump’s first midterm election, in 2018, G.O.P. strategists spoke about being washed away in a “green wave” as much as a blue one.

“This cycle, that money won’t save them,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Republicans have the money, the map and the message.”

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Republicans Are Crumbling And Pointing Fingers At Trump For Midterm Failure, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 19, 2026. It s never a good sign when the election is two weeks away, but the blame game is already starting, but that is what is happening as Republicans are already blaming Trump.

Trump has been laying the groundwork for blaming Republicans if his party loses all or part of control of Congress in the midterm election. Before he changed his tune and told supporters to pretend he was on the ballot, Trump often said in public that the midterm election didn’t matter to him because he isn’t on the ballot. Trump repeated his claim that the midterm election doesn’t matter to him during his speech at the UN.

View in browserRepublicans Are Crumbling And Pointing Fingers At Trump For Midterm FailureIt s never a good sign when the election is two weeks away, but the blame game is already starting, but that is what is happening as Republicans are already blaming Trump.Jason EasleyOct 19READ IN APP

Trump has been laying the groundwork for blaming Republicans if his party loses all or part of control of Congress in the midterm election. Before he changed his tune and told supporters to pretend he was on the ballot, Trump often said in public that the midterm election didn’t matter to him because he isn’t on the ballot. Trump repeated his claim that the midterm election doesn’t matter to him during his speech at the UN.

Less than a month ago, Trump said about Iran:

But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to.

They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide, and I’ll be here for two and a half years.

The Republican Party is running and I’ll be helping them, but I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election. When it comes to Iran, it doesn’t even enter my mind.

Trump’s lack of concern or care about the midterm election reveals itself in every rally that he does for Republican candidates. 90% or more of Trump’s time at these rallies is spent rambling about whatever is on his mind. There is little promotion of the Republican Party or GOP candidates, and Republican operatives are already pointing the finger at Trump for what they view as an upcoming defeat.The Republican Blaming Has Begun

Here is a sampling of what Politico found when they talked to Republican operatives:

“He has constantly been distracted,” said one GOP operative working on multiple midterm races, “and not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”

These headaches are not responsible for voter dissatisfaction or tight races in states Trump won by double digits in 2024. Republicans concede that some of their candidates are genuinely bad, Democratic ones are genuinely good — and they’re facing a brutal midterm cycle where voters are angry at the war the president started and blaming him for the higher gas prices it’s caused.…

After Trump attacked Rove and Cornyn, a Texas-based GOP consultant called it “counterproductive.”

“Not only are they turning off our voters but they’re also pissing off all of us,” the person said.

Trump is responsible for the quality of candidates in some of the Senate races, like Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, and Georgia, where he handpicked the candidates who are losing to Democrats.

Trump is the reason why voters are so angry, and while his distractions, disinterest, and attacks on Republicans aren’t helping, the president created the hostile environment that Republicans are facing.

Republicans are frantically trying to save red states like Texas and Ohio. They aren’t even bothering with a swing state like Pennsylvania.

Trump will throw the Republicans who lose their races under the bus, but what is happening is that the MAGA coalition is crumbling, and Trump is going to be blamed for the Republican defeat.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Rambles Like A Loon About Cushions At Women’s Health Event, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 19, 2026. At an event that was supposed to be about the creation of a new women’s health division at NIH, Trump could not stay on topic and showed that he doesn’t care about women by ranting about cushions.

Even when this White House tries to do simple, normal political things, Donald Trump has to be weird. Republicans are complaining and finger-pointing at Trump over the midterms because he has no message and is showing up in red states and babbling about himself.

The White House held an event for Trump to sign an executive order that would create a Women’s Health Division at the National Institutes of Health. All Trump had to do was show up, sit beside his wife, sign the executive order, and say a few words.

The White House, which I suspect was Melania Trump’s press team, planted a story in USA Today about how this was all the first lady’s idea.

According to USA Today:

First lady Melania Trump pressed her husband’s administration to give women’s health greater priority in medical research, USA TODAY has learned — a push that culminated Oct. 19 in an executive order creating a new division at the National Institutes of Health.

…

The initiative comes amid a flurry of meetings set up by the first lady herself inside the East Wing including working sessions with physicians and other experts in the public and private sectors. She met with officials from Health and Human Services to establish the task force.

By the way, Trump put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the women’s health task force.Trump Uses His Remarks To Rant About Ballrooms And Cushions

All Trump had to do was sit there and be normal, and he just could not do it.

This is how Trump started his remarks:

 Thank you. Please. Please. And if I might, that stone is so beautiful. . I've been here when we had grass. This is built on a wetland, and the grass was always wet. If it didn't rain for two weeks, the grass was soaking wet, and many women have ruined their shoes, and they look at me. . And they've ruined many sets of shoes as we kept trying to have use that swamp, and it didn't work out. And what we did here has just been incredible. It's become the most popular place to have a news conference, and I hope you enjoy it.

I even... See the cushions, those beautiful yellow cushions? They're supposed to be a half an inch high. I said, "How about four inches?" Don't they feel nice? . They don't make them in four inches. I had them specially made four inches for everybody. . So it lifts you up higher, and it's a lot more comfortable than the one-inch deal. Enjoy it.

And outside, you have the new heliport that just opened, and behind you, you're gonna have one of the greatest ballrooms and military complexes. Very complex situation going on, I will tell you, but it's it's on time. It's actually ahead of schedule, I would say, and it's gonna be the greatest ballroom and the greatest military complex combination that's ever been built. So it's very important.

The White House has needed that for 150 years. Presidents have been saying, "Please, we gotta have some room." We had President Xi recently, and he called with a request of 350 people. In other words, 350 friends or representatives from the United States. I said, "The room holds 125. 350 is gonna tough, be tough." So we gave him 10. . And we won't have that problem anymore. Then we had King Charles came in. Likewise, he said "Would it be possible to have 293 people? We have them from the UK, all over the United States. They wanna fly in." I said it's gonna be a little possi- it's about three times more than the room holds. That means I would get none." . So we made a little compromise, but we're gonna have no problem very shortly. We're gonna have the kind of room we want.

Trump can’t stop showing his true priorities, which are cushions and the ballroom. Donald Trump has no interest in the economy, women’s health, or the American people.

Republicans are about to get smoked in the midterm election because they sold America the lie that Donald Trump cared and would do something about their problems. Trump doesn’t care. He is doing nothing, and his lunatic ballroom ramble shows why Americans increasingly can’t stand this president.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of Washington DC and East Potomac Golf Links Map.

New York Times, Judge Grills Witnesses About Decisions Behind Trump’s Golf Course Plan, Zach Montague, Oct. 19, 2026. The Justice Department clashed with Judge Ana C. Reyes over testimony by several government witnesses about the chain of decisions surrounding East Potomac Golf Links. 

A hearing about the fate of the East Potomac Golf Links in Washington turned into an icy standoff on Monday as a federal judge went to extraordinary lengths to learn who has been responsible for decisions about the property and whether plans to overhaul it have been kept from the court.

A day after President Trump announced that his administration would transform the municipal course into a professional golf venue, Judge Ana C. Reyes summoned a constellation of officials to testify about whether the government has been plotting the renovation even while swearing in court that no decisions had been made.

While the stakes of the case are relatively low — the fate of one municipal golf course on a spit of land not far from the monuments in Washington — it has taken on symbolic importance as the latest blowup between Mr. Trump and the federal courts. It is proving to be a test case for how far Mr. Trump is willing to go to get his way on a project that he has made clear is important to him.

Judge Reyes asked several senior officials to testify on Monday about a decision to cut down hundreds of trees at the course after providing only a few hours of notice. She had requested notice of major changes at the course, so she could consider whether the proposed actions would be legal, given a challenge from a preservationist group trying to halt the project.

The Justice Department responded by alleging that Judge Reyes, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has shown bias in the case and asking her to recuse herself. She declined.

Facing an army of lawyers from the Justice Department, including the department’s third most senior official, Judge Reyes made clear that her patience was running thin. She said the government’s position that the tree removal was part of routine maintenance — not in preparation for a renovation that Mr. Trump has now trumpeted on social media — made little sense.

“There is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happened at the same time,” she told the lawyers. “There just isn’t.”

In his Sunday post, Mr. Trump announced that the course would close for a 14-month renovation on Nov. 15. On Monday, he followed up to say that work was scheduled to begin immediately.

Judge Reyes has ordered the administration to halt all tree removal until at least Oct. 26, but she is considering a more expansive block on work at the site.The hearing opened with drama, as Judge Reyes asked all of the Justice Department officials present, including junior lawyers and nonpolitical career lawyers, to raise their hands if they agreed with a filing that had been submitted on Sunday by Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the associate attorney general. If they did, she said, she would order them to add their names to it as well.

That document tried to square the government’s courtroom statements with Mr. Trump’s social media commentary. It argued that federal agencies were still studying the plan and that cutting trees on the property did not amount to a determination about the future of course.

“The plan is not final because the Park Service has not completed its review and the details of the proposal are subject to change during the review process,” it said.

Mr. Woodward told Judge Reyes that her request was “inappropriate.” He added that he would instruct his colleagues not to do as she had ordered.

“I’m the one who’s going to say how we move today, not you,” she fired back.

She then ordered Mr. Woodward to explain in writing by later on Monday why the Justice Department did not have to follow her direction.

The hearing continued with testimony by Gregory Wischer, a deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department, who was involved in meetings about improving East Potomac Park as part of larger “beautification” efforts in Washington.

Facing questions from Abbe Lowell, a lawyer representing the group suing to stop the renovation, Mr. Wischer testified that taking down the trees was a basic aesthetic decision. A 2019 report that proposed restoring the course’s original layout had recommended tree removal, he testified.

“We were just trying to find ways we could clean up the course,” he said.

Mr. Wischer’s testimony on Monday played out against a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s conflicting public statements.

Mr. Trump has attacked Judge Reyes as “a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane.” The Justice Department had requested that audio be released of a hearing she conducted last week, in which she angrily took the Trump administration to task for removing trees with minimal notice.

In denying the administration’s request that she step away from the case, Judge Reyes pointed out that she had consistently rejected what she described as premature requests by the preservation group suing that she block work at the course.

Instead, she wrote that she had approached the case as a “pragmatist” who had urged the parties in July to hammer out an agreement on their own, rather than pre-emptively halt work by court order. She had instead asked the government to provide notice before undertaking major work at the course.

“Between February 13, when this case was filed, and October 11, the court had not barred the government from taking any action in East Potomac, including tree removal,” she wrote.

“It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion,” she added. “But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the government fails to meet the standard for recusal.”

All Rise News, Judge rejects recusal motion in East Potomac case, Adam Klasfeld, right, Oct. 19, 2026. Hours before an evidentiary hearing in the East Potomac Golf Course case, Judge Ana Reyes emphatically rejected the Trump Justice Department’s demand that she recuse herself.

“That is a serious charge,” she wrote, referring to claims of alleged bias. “The Court answers it. With the record.”

Donald Trump and his top Justice Department attorneys repeatedly attacked Judge Reyes over her reaction to the government’s sudden decision to destroy more than 500 trees on East Potomac Golf Course with little warning. The judge yelled at government lawyers and said that they destroyed their credibility.

In a 13-page ruling, Judge Reyes made clear that she had repeatedly praised the government’s attorneys and ruled in their favor before that moment.

“So what happened? Not sudden onset bias,” Reyes wrote.

Instead, the judge said it was a simple case of an action and a reaction: Trump Justice Department attorneys assured her that no formal order was needed to protect the public golf course because the government would provide ample notice before making any major and irreversible changes.

She said she rejected “nearly a dozen” requests to issue that formal order so that she could hold government attorneys in contempt for violating that vow.

That’s what she said sparked her outrage.

“Yes, the Court was ‘furious’ and ‘beyond disappointed,’ and said as much,” she wrote. “"But ‘[p]articularly in hard-fought litigation dealing with controversial issues, district judges must sometimes take strong actions and use strong words.’”

Since that time, Donald Trump and his highest-ranking Justice Department attorneys have personally attacked her. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward filed a disqualification motion demanding the release of audio from the hearing and denouncing what he called her “histrionics.”

In an erudite response to that insult, the judge noted in a footnote: “‘Histrionic’ derives from the Latin term histrio, meaning actor.”

“And so the Court is reminded of Hamlet’s advice to the players: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,’” she wrote.

Woodward was the sole author of the disqualification motion.

Since the courtroom flare-up, Trump repeatedly posted on social media about his intention to transform the golf course — designed to provide greater access to the general public for a nominal fee — into a championship-level venue.

Woodward claimed that Trump’s social media posts don’t represent a final agency decision.

Once again, he was the only Trump Justice Department official to sign the filing taking that legal position.

As an evidentiary hearing kicked off on Monday, Judge Reyes ordered Woodward to refile that motion with as many other signatures from Justice Department lawyers who would be willing to adopt that position for the purposes of her considering sanctions.

The hearing is ongoing. Shortly before it began, Trump took another swipe at Judge Reyes: “The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane? The tapes have been blocked from usage by the judge.”

The preservation group that brought the lawsuit alerted the judge to the social media post before today’s proceedings began.

Israel, Middle East Wars 

New York Times, Houthi Strikes Kill Dozens in Yemeni Desert Military Camp, Officials Say, Saeed Al-Batati and Ismaeel Naar, Oct. 19, 2026. The Iranian-backed militia struck with ballistic missiles deep in government-held central Yemen, in what appeared to be among the deadliest attacks of the renewed war.

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia killed dozens of Yemeni soldiers in a strike on a desert camp in the middle of the country on Monday, officials said, in what appeared to be one of the deadliest attacks since their war resumed.

Col. Majed al-Nuzaili, a spokesman for the Yemeni armed forces, said in a statement on social media that the Houthis had fired three ballistic missiles at the camp, Al Alam, which is in Shabwa Province. They hit what he described as a training center for security and police recruits. He told a Saudi-owned broadcaster, Al Arabiya, that at least 47 people had been killed and 53 others wounded.

Saba, a Houthi-run news agency, said the group had struck what it called Saudi “troop buildups” at the camp and made no mention of recruits.

“The number of martyrs is very high and is expected to rise,” Fahd Al-Khulaifi, the deputy governor of Shabwa Province, said in a telephone interview. He said there were dozens of casualties, some of whom were being transferred to the government-held cities of Aden and Al Mukalla.

The Saudi-led military coalition that is fighting the Houthis in Yemen has not commented on the strike.

The Yemeni government and the Houthis, a rebel group from the country’s north, have been at war since 2014, when the militia seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, which it still holds.

Graphic footage published on social media and verified by The New York Times shows multiple bodies and blood on paved ground at Al Alam. At least 15 bodies can be seen as the camera pans the military camp, with clothes and sandals strewed around.

The scale of the attack underscored the rapidly intensifying war in Yemen, which erupted earlier this year after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the Houthis’ main patron.

Last month, the Houthis seized swaths of strategic territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast in a lightning offensive, gaining greater control over a crucial choke point for global trade. In recent weeks, forces affiliated with the Yemeni government have mounted a counteroffensive to retake the territory, backed by Saudi warplanes.

Drop Site New, Israel-Backed Palestinian Militias Terrorize Displaced Families in Gaza, Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Oct. 19, 2026. Over the past year, attacks by Israel-backed Palestinian militias have become increasingly frequent in Gaza, particularly targeting Palestinians living close to the ever expanding “yellow line.”

Youssef Al-Sheikh was asleep with his wife and eight young children in a room on the ground floor of a badly damaged building in the wasteland of northern Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp when the group of masked, heavily armed members of an Israeli-backed Palestinian militia broke down the door and stormed inside. It was around 2 a.m. on the night of September 24. Decked out in tactical gear and with their assault rifles pointing menacingly down at his family, they began shouting at Al-Sheikh to get up. The light from their military headlamps pierced the darkness, blinding Al-Sheikh.

“They came inside, and as soon as they entered, one of them raised his Kalashnikov and aimed it at me while I was here,” Al-Sheikh told Drop Site News, pointing to the only bed in the room, made up of thin mattress laid on a thin piece of wood propped up on concrete blocks.

“About seven people came in. They all had flashlights on them—bright white lights, extremely powerful flashlights,” he said. “With all the white light, I couldn’t see who was in front of me.”

The lead gunman started yelling “Qassam,” Al-Sheikh said, a reference to the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. “He said, ‘Why are you staying here? Where are the explosive devices you have? Where are the weapons you have?’” Al-Sheikh recalled. “I told him, ‘I’m a peaceful citizen. I don’t have anything.’” When Al-Sheikh asked if could put some clothes on, the militiamen grabbed him and began savagely beating him in front of his wife and children.

“I couldn’t process what was happening and didn’t know what to do,” Al-Sheikh said. “Three of them came at me, punching and slapping me and beating me. They beat me in the most brutal ways.” Angry red bruises were still visible on his neck and back two days later.

They bound Al-Sheikh’s hands behind his back and left him on the ground. Amid the commotion, one of Al-Sheikh’s brothers-in-law entered from the room next door, pleading with the men to have mercy. “They grabbed him by his hair. Three of them attacked him, threw him to the ground, and beat him with their Kalashnikovs,” Al-Sheikh said. When a second brother-in-law arrived, they also grabbed him and beat him with their rifle butts.

The militiamen took the three men into an adjacent room and made them kneel on the floor. What appeared to be the lead gunman pulled up a chair and sat in front of them. One of Al-Sheikh’s brothers-in-law, Muatasim Al-Aja, had his hands bound and his mouth gagged. The other, Hossam Tafesh, also had his hands bound. The militiamen pulled out a black T-shirt from Tafesh’s belongings and accused him of being a part of the resistance. When Tafesh said he had nothing to do with the resistance, they began beating him again and wrapped the T-shirt tightly around his face until he began to suffocate.

The other militiamen ransacked the rest of the house, going through and overturning the family’s scant belongings and confiscating all the phones they could find. “One of my children was inside the room while this was happening and he started slapping himself. He’s a little boy, a very young child,” Al-Sheikh said. “He kept slapping himself across the face, crying, ‘Dad, Dad, Dad! Where’s my dad?’ The officer told my wife, ‘Either you shut the children up—all of you be quiet—or I’ll shoot them all and kill them.’”Youssef Al-Sheikh in his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza that an Israel-backed Palestinian militia raided last month, beating him and his relatives and detaining one of them. September 26, 2026. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah.

Al-Sheikh said he later learned from eyewitnesses that an even larger militia force of close to 30 heavily armed men was surrounding the house outside. “It was as if an entire battalion had come to fight us,” he said.

Eventually, the lead militiaman made Al-Sheikh and both of his brothers-in-law look into his phone camera and photographed their faces. “He photographed us and sent the pictures over WhatsApp,” Al-Sheikh said. Several minutes later, the gunman received a call and announced they could be released.

At the same time, several gunmen went upstairs and detained a third brother-in-law, Said Okasha, who had gone up to the roof in fear. “They started beating him. We could hear the blows and the screaming. He was shouting, ‘Leave me! Leave me!’ They restrained him and took him away in his underwear,” Al-Sheikh said. “They took him and left.”

Two other residents in the area interviewed separately confirmed to Drop Site that a raid by a Palestinian militia had taken place that night.“No One Comes to Help Us”

Over the past year, since a “ceasefire” agreement went into effect, attacks by Israel-backed Palestinian militias have become increasingly frequent in Gaza, particularly targeting Palestinians living close to the “yellow line”—the demarcation of Israel’s line of control that runs north to south along the Gaza Strip roughly parallel to the coastline. Israel has also imposed another boundary called the orange line, which in some places encroaches more than 1 kilometer beyond the yellow line, taking over even more Palestinian land.

On the western side of these lines, virtually the entire Palestinian population of Gaza has been corralled into an ever shrinking space. On the eastern side, the Israeli military has violently reconfigured the landscape, razing the area to the ground and building dozens of fortified bases and roads—establishing a permanent presence instead of preparing for a phased withdrawal as outlined in the ceasefire agreement.

Israeli forces regularly bomb, shell, and shoot Palestinians on the western side in violation of the “ceasefire,” killing over 1,500 men, women, and children over the past 12 months. The Israeli military has also armed and equipped several Palestinian militias that operate on the ground, conducting raids and terrorizing people mostly living close to the yellow line. Large scale raids are conducted in coordination with the Israeli military, who have backed them up with artillery and aerial support.

Many of the militia leaders in Gaza who rose to power in collaboration with Israel during the genocide are former gang leaders with a history of criminal activity, were associated with jihadi groups, or are former Palestinian Authority security forces that were all sidelined after Hamas gained control of the enclave in 2007.

At least five of these militias are operating out of compounds in areas under Israeli military control across the Gaza Strip, according to satellite imagery and videos published online. 

Special Report:

New York Times, The Coverup: How a Trillion-Dollar Industry Launders Illegal Gold, Justin Scheck, Visuals by Lynsey Addario, Oct. 19, 2026. The line between dirty and clean gold is an industry fiction. Wall Street and governments profit off gold from criminals, gangsters and those who exploit children.

In an industry riddled with abuse, the world’s banks and governments rely on one entity to keep gangsters, warlords and human rights violators from selling gold into the mainstream market.

That group, the London Bullion Market Association, is the self-described “global authority for precious metals.” With the power to blacklist companies, the L.B.M.A. is the closest thing the multi-trillion-dollar industry has to an international regulator.

Governments rely on the association’s stamp as a sign that gold has been mined without human rights abuses, environmental devastation, financial sanctions or criminality. In the most literal sense, the L.B.M.A. sets the gold standard.

But a New York Times investigation found that the association has repeatedly allowed gold into the market that has been mined by criminals, cartel members and children. Refiners lie with impunity about the origins of their gold. The rules are pocked with exceptions and vagaries, and the L.B.M.A. has repeatedly decided not to enforce them.

And in the case of Madagascar, the L.B.M.A. helped change and backdate key paperwork that certified gold as free from abuse.

As prices skyrocketed in recent years and evidence emerged that gold was financing armed groups in Sudan and polluters in the Amazon, the industry perpetuated the notion that it kept such dirty gold out of the mainstream marketplace.Map shows Betsiaka, Antananarivo and Mananjary in Madascar.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

New York Times, Black Unemployment Hints at a Job Market in Worse Shape Than It Seems, Talmon Joseph Smith, Oct. 19, 2026. The Black unemployment rate climbed a percentage point to 7 percent in September, almost double the rate for white workers.

Gena Pemberton is a Black woman who has spent her career diagnosing a way to move forward in corporate America.

She spent over two decades in leadership roles in accounting, operations and human resources at large companies such as Johnson & Johnson. But now, at 50, she is not sure what is next.

She was the chief inclusion and impact officer at Omnicom Health until the company eliminated her position in July 2025. She has been without full-time work ever since, despite applying to dozens of jobs per week and lowering her expectations on seniority and pay.

“I’ve never been unemployed for this long,” she said.

Ms. Pemberton is far from alone. Black professionals across the country have faced a triple whammy in the labor market in recent years.

The disappearance of diversity, equity and inclusion positions in big companies has heavily affected Black women; a federal government firing spree that eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs heavily impacted Black workers, who are disproportionately represented on federal payrolls; and the slowdown in white-collar hiring rates has felt particularly acute for some Black business people without elite networks as expansive as those of their white and Asian peers.

When unemployment for Black workers rises sharply, it can be an early signal of trouble for everyone. Rising joblessness among Black people and weak hiring rates in the business services sector are signals that the labor market is in worse shape than the overall 4.2 percent unemployment rate implies, said Jared Bernstein, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Hiring, for example, is proceeding at a pace analogous to the sluggish years following the Great Recession, when overall unemployment was closer to 9 percent and Black unemployment was in the midteens.

“When the economy sniffles, Black unemployment catches a cold,” he said.

In 2025, Black women experienced far greater employment losses than other women, especially college graduates and public-sector workers, according to data analyzed by Valerie Wilson, an economist. And numbers from Revelio Labs, a work force analytics firm, show that U.S. employers have cut over 2,600 roles since 2023 with “diversity” or “D.E.I.” in the job titles or descriptions.

After spiking above 8 percent in November 2025, Black unemployment fell to 6 percent by August. Then, the latest jobs report showed that unemployment for Black people had jumped back to 7 percent in September — the fastest one-month increase since 2012, not counting the brief pandemic shock. The rate is almost double the 3.6 percent rate for white workers.

“It is definitely a cause for concern,” Kevin Hassett, the generally ebullient director of the White House National Economic Council, said in an interview with CNN.+

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Tom Cruise's Digger Exposes the Climate Fools, the Billionaires, and the Biggest Lie of All, Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 19, 2026. The explosive new film reveals how fossil fuel billionaires concealed the truth, bought political protection, and then blamed ordinary Americans for the destruction they helped create…

Louise and I went to see Digger this weekend. Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

That Tom Cruise made the movie at all blew my mind; this guy has spent his entire career being the most apolitical no-issues superstar in Hollywood. Something has shifted when that guy puts on a fat suit and a tangle of white hair to play a Texas oil baron who wrecks the planet.

Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made the movie The Revenant that won Leonardo DiCaprio — who is an outspoken advocate for climate action — an Oscar. Now it looks like Cruise has jumped on board, making what’s probably the best movie about climate change in a generation.

There’s been a concerted effort by rightwingers to convince you not to see the movie. Back in July, nearly 3 months before its release, a columnist at American Greatness was already warning Cruise’s “red-state base” that this was “yet another Hollywood feature warning us to treat Mother Nature with care… or else.”

Two days before it opened, Breitbart’s John Nolte, who in the same column calls climate change a “hoax,” dismissed it as an “attack on those of us who dare to use oil to better our lives” that “shames us for our standard of living, which is a direct result of the oil industry.” (He admits he’s working from other people’s reviews.) And the rightwing bots on social media have been going nuts, calling it “woke.”

It all probably parallels the Meta shutdown of No Kings this weekend, along with the billionaire-owned social media platforms’ refusal to advertise and apparent shadow banning of conversations the new movies about Musk and Zuck.

For most of the first two-thirds of Digger I was mystified about this loud, deliberately — but still entertainingly — cartoonish satire; I wasn’t sure what kind of movie I was watching, and suspending disbelief was pretty much impossible.

But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing (I’m not going to give it away) and left me — and the audience in the theater with me, who sat in shocked silence at the end — astonished at how elegantly the entire thing was put together.

The movie in many ways reminded me of Dr. Strangelove and Network (both also criticized by rightwingers): it has that kind of impact and some truly great bits of dialogue that are right up there with Slim Pickens’s character and Peter Finch as Howard Beale.

That’s mostly when the oil baron Cruise plays owns up to everything: the lies, the bought-off politicians, the decades of knowing what they were doing to the atmosphere while lying to all of us about it. But then he turns the accusation around and suddenly the entire audience for his monologue is stunned.

He lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold

us oil because we demanded they do it — that I’ve been pointing to ever since 1998 when I published the first edition of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

The book’s premise is simple and echoes the movie: for most of humanity’s history we lived off “current sunlight” captured by plants and turned into food we ate (and food for the animals we ate) and the wood we used to build with and heat our homes.

Then about 900 years ago we found coal, and a century-and-a-half ago oil, and we started burning through sunlight that had been captured by plants literally millions of years ago, then turned by time and pressure into coal, oil, and methane. As I wrote then:

“This represents a critical moment in human history, for this is when our ancestors started living off our planet’s sunlight savings. Because our ancestors could consume sunlight that had been stored by plants millions of years ago, they began for the first time to consume more resources, in food, heat, and other materials, than the daily amount of sunlight falling locally on our planet had historically been able to provide.”

It turns out that the “cheap energy” Digger claims we all demanded was actually never cheap; it was an inheritance from our planet and instead of conserving or carefully using it we’ve been burning through it like there’s no tomorrow. I wrote in that same book that “the availability of a fuel leads to a population that depends on it and will suffer if it is taken away.”

They encouraged building suburbs around gas stations, and are now trying to blame the drivers for wanting the gasoline. They bought up the streetcar lines, lobbied rail into a mere drop in our transportation pool, and spent fifty years lying to us about what they knew their product would do to our planet.

Hell, BP’s ad agency literally invented the “personal carbon footprint” in 2004 so that you’d feel guilty about your commute instead of angry at them. When I revised the book in 2017, I put it this way:

“The ability to buy politicians and to dump billions of dollars a year into political campaigns and into a concerted disinformation campaign is a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s business model. The longer that fossil-fuel companies and the politicians whom they own muddy the waters, the longer they can reap easy profits selling cheap oil, no matter how many people die or how much it costs the public.”

As Digger says in the movie:

“If you can’t control the course of nature, at least you can control the narrative.”

Are Cruise and Iñárritu endorsing that alibi or exposing it? At times it’s hard to tell, but the importance of story — the power of story to change our culture itself — is where this movie is so important. As I wrote in Last Hours:

“Every time a culture has been transformed, since or before then and for better or worse, it’s been because of an idea, an insight, a new understanding of how things are, and of what is possible. Ideas preceded every revolution, every war, every transformation, and every invention. So, the good news is that if we redefine our cultural norms, retell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors will change to conform to the new stories.”

Just like Dr. Strangelove prophesied Trump/Hegseth and Network predicted the Ellison’s buying up our media landscape, this movie is pointing to the next stage of our future, when fossil fuel barons both own the country and have — unapologetically — destroyed it.

So go see the movie before it’s gone, buried in rightwing slanders. Then call your elected representatives (202-224-3121) and ask them if they’re taking money from the fossil fuel industry or its apologists. And pass this “review” along to somebody who was planning to skip the film.

New York Times, Larry David Mocks the D.S.A. Some Are Not Amused, Lisa Lerer and Evan Gorelick, Updated Oct. 19, 2026. The comedian satirized the Democratic Socialists of America, its platform and its opposition to Israel in an essay that some did not LOL at.

The last time Larry David waded into politics with a satirical essay, it was to take aim at a very safe target in his liberal circles — President Trump.

Mr. David, who is known for his brand of anxious, observational comedy, mocked Bill Maher for dining with Mr. Trump at the White House in a guest essay published in The New York Times Opinion section last year headlined “My Dinner With Adolf,” in which he imagined dining with Hitler in 1939.

But Mr. David’s latest satire took aim at topics that are likely to be far more controversial within the coastal enclaves where his work is popular: the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America and its hostility toward Israel.

In a new essay published by Air Mail, the 79-year old comic channels the satirist Jonathan Swift and offers a dozen “modest proposals” for the manifesto of the socialist organization, whose actual proposals and guiding principles have been widely debated this year as several candidates aligned with the organization won primaries.

Mr. David’s suggestions start with ideas rooted in core planks of the movement, as he parodies proposals to abolish prisons and restrictions on immigration.

“In our Socialist America,” Mr. David writes, “everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes.”

“Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner,” he writes.

He rapidly progresses to more outlandish ideas, including national paid leave for the death of pets, mandating that employers provide cots for two siestas a day, allowing humans who identify as animals to “relieve themselves” wherever they wish and reparations that would enlist white people to serve as slaves for Black families.

Mr. David then aims his pen at one of the biggest fault lines dividing the Democratic Party, wading into the fraught debate over the line between opposition to Israel and antisemitism. Jews, he writes, will no longer be allowed to call themselves “the Chosen people” — a part of Jewish identity dating back millenniums — and will be known instead as “the Bagel People.”

“We strongly believe in a two-state solution,” the proposal says. “To this end, we propose that Palestinians should be given all the land currently occupied by Israel and that Israel should be given Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where the weather is beautiful and grapefruits are aplenty. We think the Bagel People will be very happy there.”

Best known for the hit TV shows “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Mr. David has long been a prominent Democratic donor in Hollywood with an interest in political satire.

A national spokesperson for the D.S.A. declined to comment on Mr. David’s article. But online, some took umbrage at Mr. David’s satire of the democratic socialists. Matthew Gauna, a 29-year-old student in San Antonio who agrees with D.S.A. ideas but said he is not a member of the organization, replied online to a post comparing Mr. David to Mr. Maher by calling Mr. David “my problematic king,” with a wilted flower emoji.

Mr. David, whose comedy has made him a millionaire many times over, did not mock the D.S.A.’s economic proposals, which include universal health care, raising the minimum wage and expanding public housing and child care. The movement’s focus on economic inequality is central to its appeal for many voters, who are struggling with higher costs and a dismal view of their financial future.

Mr. David seemed to anticipate the backlash his piece would provoke, daring his socialist targets to take the joke. His last proposal mandates that any comedian who causes “emotional discomfort” be sent to be “re-programmed” to emerge with greater sensitivity.

And if that effort fails, Mr. David offers one final “modest” suggestion: “The repeat offender will be sent to Pitcairn Island to live with the Bagel People.”

Oct. 18

Top Headlines

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• Proof, Investigative Commentary:  Second Treason Scandal Hits Donald Trump and the White House, Seth Abramson, right, Oct. 16-17, 2026. A Trump-Israel Treason scandal that’s already embroiled Trump, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee deputy David Milstein has deepened—even as a new Treason scandal involving Russia blows up. Here’s everything we know about the new Trump-Russia Treason Scandal (see here for exhaustive, reliably sourced Proof coverage of the Trump-Israel Treason Scandal).
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 17, 2026 ['No Kings' Focus On Localism, Voting], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Around the United States of America and the world, people gathered today at more than 3,000 No Kings: Vote Early events to encourage Americans to vote in the November 3 midterm elections. The events were designed to encourage people to vote early to ensure their votes are counted in an election where the president and his party have made it clear they intend to silence their opponents.

Special Report: Huge Riots In France. How Much Russian Influence Aimed To Disrupt West? 

• Wayne Madsen Report, Mapping and Analysis: Déjà vu: Moscow’s links to street violence, arson, and larceny in France, neighboring nations, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Far-right and far-left protesters encouraged by Russian influence. We’ve seen this before with Moscow, as street mobs encouraged by Kremlin-directed influence operations ravage Paris, Toulouse, Limoges, and other cities. 
• New York Times, Huge Riots in France Prompt Shock and Blame Game, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 18, 2026. After anti-government protests devolved into chaos, leaders from across the political spectrum blamed one another for the unrest, even as it largely subsided on Sunday.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Russia Declares ‘Checkmate’ as Trump Pushes Ukraine to Capitulate, Vance Confronted by Grieving Husband, GOP in Free Fall, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Today may go down as one of the most alarming days yet for Ukraine. Hours after Zelenskyy said the Trump administration is pushing his country to capitulate, Trump went on Truth Social to attack him, claiming Zelenskyy doesn’t care about ending the war and mocking Ukraine as a country “in shambles.” All of this while Russia has spent the past week launching nearly 2,700 drones at Ukraine’s power grid, Washington paused the intelligence Ukraine relies on to spot incoming ballistic missiles, and Putin’s own envoy is bragging that the “ice has begun to break” with the United States. Tonight, the Russians are celebrating.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Students Rise Up Against GOP Voter Suppression, Trump Branded a “Traitor” Over Putin Sanctions, Trump Threatens to Jail Election Officials, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 17, 2026. Yesterday I heard from my family in Ukraine. They told me the night Starlink was disrupted was one of the scariest nights they’ve lived through in more than four years of war. They could hear missiles and drones outside their apartment but had no idea where they were headed. All they could do was pray they wouldn’t be hit. And last night, Trump waived the sweeping Russia sanctions Congress passed, just days before they were set to take effect. Putin’s envoy called it “truly historic.” I call it a betrayal of the people living through this war, including my own family.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump has a serious character flaw, Heather Delaney Reese, above right,Oct. 17, 2026. At 2:18 this afternoon, Donald Trump stood behind the bright blue curtains at Truist Arena in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He opened and closed his suit coat, threw his hands out in front of him, and walked onto the stage, stopping for a moment to look out at the audience and the scattered empty seats.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is Limping Towards The Finish Line, Spent And Rejected. Now We Need To Drive The Early Vote, Close Strong, And Win This Thing, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 18, 2026. With 16 days to go nothing Trump has done- - not his ads, not his campaigning, not his corrupt influence over legacy and social media -- has been able to reverse or even stem his precipitous decline.
• Politico, Retiring GOP congressmember will 'absolutely not' vote for successor in at-risk seat, Meredith Lee Hill,Oct. 18, 2026. Retiring Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei said he won’t vote for the Trump-endorsed GOP candidate vying to replace him amid a string of stolen valor and other accusations — and warned that the once-safe Republican seat President Donald Trump won by 14 points is at risk of flipping blue on Election Day.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Raphael Warnock Drops The Hammer And Says Crook Trump Has Got To Go, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said that Donald Trump is a crook and that the president and his enablers have got to go. When Democrats are interviewed, there is a clear indication that the party has a plan for what it will do if they win back control of the House and Senate. Two themes keep coming up. Holding Trump accountable and lowering costs and inflation to promote affordability. 

More On Russia's War On Ukraine, New U.S. Support For Russia 

• New York Times, Trump Defends Plans to Ease Russia Sanctions and Hints at a Hostage Deal, David E. Sanger, Oct. 18, 2026. The president on Sunday justified his reversal of almost five years of sanctions against Russia as part of peace negotiations. He did not name any hostage.
• Thinking About, Opinion: Rape as a weapon of warThe voices of Ukrainians, Sara Cincurova, guest commentator, Oct. 18, 2026. This text includes sensitive details about sexual violence during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For about two years, as a freelance journalist, I have been documenting Russian use of rape as a weapon of war against Ukrainian civilians. As we mark four and a half years since Ukraine was plunged into war, the immense use of sexual violence remains an underreported element of this conflict. Ukrainian women and men have experienced extensive and concerted abuse at the hands of the Russian army since its initial occupation of Eastern Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donbas region, in 2014 and more intensively since the full-scale invasion in 2022.

• To the Contrary, Opinion: Russia, Russia, Russia, Was Never a Hoax, Charlie Sykes, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Lindsey Graham’s final humiliation? No one ever told me that vindication would feel so much like nausea. Donald Trump’s treachery was predictable and predicted. Even so, watching him throwing a financial lifeline to Putin as the monstrous mob boss murders Ukrainians is sick-making stuff.
• Politico, Ukraine strikes oil facility in St. Petersburg as part of ‘massive’ drone attack, Jacopo Barigazzi, Oct. 18, 2026. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week he had ordered the resumption of strikes on Russian oil refineries following a three-day pause.
• Lawfare, Russia's Digital Detox Boomerang, Tom Uren, Oct. 16, 2026. Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian data centers are causing widespread disruption to the country's internet services.

More Global News.

• Associated Press via Politico, Pope Leo tells faithful in St. Peter’s Square he will gradually resume duties after cancer surgery, Staff Report, Oct. 18, 2026. He said the experience of the last week “has made me feel especially close to those facing illness and infirmity.”
• Politico, Trump endorses Netanyahu for reelection, Cheyanne M. Daniels, Oct. 18, 2026. Israel's longest-serving prime minister said he was "honored and humbled."
• Politico, France says Israel must ‘stop these acts of terror’ following attack on EU diplomats, Jacopo Barigazzi, Oct. 18, 2026. Video footage of the incident in Taybeh, north of Jerusalem, showed settlers confronting a convoy of diplomats.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets`New York Times

• New York Times, 3 Charts That Explain the Economy as Voters Head to the Polls, Ben Casselman, Oct. 18, 2026. Inflation is high, consumer spending is strong and seemingly everything depends on what happens with artificial intelligence. Last week provided a final snapshot of the state of the economy before voters head to the polls for next month’s midterm elections. The flood of government data clarified a familiar picture — and thus a grim one for President Trump and incumbent Republicans.

More On No Kings Day / Vote Early U.S. Demonstrations

• New York Times, 4 Takeaways From a Voting-Focused ‘No Kings’ Day, Tim Balk, Updated Oct. 18, 2026. Saturday’s gatherings were more subdued than some past events, and many prominent Democrats skipped them.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: O.J. Simpson, a Secret Informant and a Decades-Old Mystery, Mike Baker and Tim Arango, Oct. 18, 2026. An “extremely reliable” informant told authorities about the missing murder weapon, according to newly unsealed records. The informant’s brother told The Times his sibling was at the crime scene.

Top Headlines 

President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

Proof, Investigative Commentary:  Second Treason Scandal Hits Donald Trump and the White House, Seth Abramson, left, Oct. 16-17, 2026. A Trump-Israel Treason scandal that’s already embroiled Trump, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee deputy David Milstein has deepened—even as a new Treason scandal involving Russia blows up.

Here’s everything we know about the new Trump-Russia Treason Scandal (see here for exhaustive, reliably sourced Proof coverage of the Trump-Israel Treason Scandal):

The Treason statute reads as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States….adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of Treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than 5 years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

Russia is currently a belligerent against the United States on multiple fronts.

First, the Kremlin is waging cyberwar against America’s elections infrastructure (a war that faced only “some interruption”—not as much as many thought or had hoped—during recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers).

Second, the Kremlin is coordinating Iran’s missile-targeting in the Iran War to ensure that as many U.S. soldiers as possible (21 and 865 so far) are killed or injured, respectively—and as many U.S. bases (20) damaged, possibly beyond repair or reoccupation—by a nation that otherwise wouldn’t have such capacities.

Third, the United States and its longtime European allies are variously selling and gifting war material to Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine War, with Ukraine a chartered U.S. ally for nearly 20 years now (a period covering both before and during its years-long defensive war against Russian war criminals); meanwhile, Russia has been an acknowledged major U.S. adversary for nearly 80 years.

Fourth, Russia has repeatedly and often aggressively violated the airspace of the U.S. and NATO, indeed the airspace of every American ally who shares a land border with Russia, during its ongoing invasion of Europe, and these violations have increasingly involved not just airspace-violative plane and drone maneuvers but, in several instances, actual asymmetrical warfare (as well as material assistance for seditious plots in U.S.-allied countries).

Fifth, because Congress has made clear that declarations of war and the War Powers Resolution are immaterial to whether America is currently in a war—indeed, Donald Trump has now referred to multiple conflicts that he says he didn’t need congressional approval for as “wars,” notably the wars in Venezuela (a “big war,” Trump crowed) and Iran (a war he admits he runs with domestic politics in mind)—neither Trump nor his agents can hide behind claims that the above actions by Russia don’t fall somewhere between military hostilities and open war. In other words, Russia incontrovertibly qualifies as an “enemy” of the United States under federal law—and no declaration in an executive order or in his imagination permits Mr. Trump to pretend that matters stand otherwise.

Against this backdrop, a small cadre of Trump officials and agents, including Trump himself, are cutting deals with America’s legally cognizable enemies.

In fact, the state of affairs must be expressed more strongly than this: every person Trump has designated to treat with the Russians on the Russia-Ukraine War is (i) unqualified to participate in U.S. diplomacy, (ii) a security risk who has struggled to get or not been able to get a top security clearance through the usual channels or protocols, and (iii) someone with clear conflicts of interest that suggest they’re putting personal business interests over the national security of the United States.

This includes Trump himself, Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff.

President Trump's Russian and Iranian war negotiators Jared Kushner, left, and Steve Witkoff have business ties to two of the Middle Eastern investors involved in the deal (Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin).

Meanwhile, as to the involvement of their potential and current Russian business partners in the Iran War, President Trump and his team have dismissed the issue by falsely claiming that Russia isn’t involved in targeting U.S. troops in the Middle East, just as Trump previously claimed that Russia was not paying bounties for U.S. soldiers’ deaths in Afghanistan (at a time the USIC was saying it was) and has openly said he trusts Russian intelligence more than U.S. intelligence.

In other words, in order to continue his own, his agents’, and friends’ clandestine business dealings with the Kremlin and its agents and associates, the president has lied to Congress, American media, and most importantly U.S. voters to try to ensure—in vain—he’s not caught cutting deals with America’s enemies amidst multiple wars in which America is engaged and Russia a clear adversary.

Until now, however, Trump’s actions weren’t broadly seen as interceding directly in any war in which the United States was participating—but that’s changed.

President Trump has long worked closely with top Russian officials, often in secret, as in his meeting at the White House shown above, from which U.S. media were barred, with the result that all photos as here were from Russian state media: Portrayed with Trump were Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak, with all concerned reportedly seeking to thwart then-current FBI, congressional and media investigations into Russian influence to help Trump during the 2016 presidential elections and advance his and his allies' private business interests (Tass photo May 10, 2017). 

Conclusion

President Trump and Elon Musk (Photographic via Proof).

America can’t abide this much longer.

It’s now generally accepted that the Department of Justice and FBI are inoperative; that all Trump co-conspirators—indeed, nearly all Republican politicians writ large—will be pardoned before or after the fact for their crimes, even as Trump seeks to have his American-citizen political opponents in the Democratic Party killed or deported; and that the President of the United States and his ad hoc diplomatic corps (composed of family members, associates of dead pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, mega-donors, and persons who fit two or more of these descriptions) are far more attuned to their own business interests than anything that involves American national security.

In other words, traitors to America are running America.

And with just two weeks left before a midterm election that Republican politicians won’t commit to honoring the results of, there’s every reason to fear that letting traitors run America will have exactly the outcome post-midterms that anyone would expect: the near-term destruction of the United States of America and its democracy.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 17, 2026 ['No Kings' Focus On Localism, Voting], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Around the United States of America and the world, people gathered today at more than 3,000 No Kings: Vote Early events to encourage Americans to vote in the November 3 midterm elections. The events were designed to encourage people to vote early to ensure their votes are counted in an election where the president and his party have made it clear they intend to silence their opponents.

Since Trump launched the Big Lie that he had been cheated of victory in the 2020 presidential election by voter fraud, Republican-dominated state legislatures have restricted access to the vote. Although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and such votes are vanishingly rare, Trump and his allies are insisting that states must restrict the vote to prevent voter fraud. According to the Brennan Center, which works to protect voting rights, in 2021 at least 19 states passed 32 laws to make voting more difficult. Since the 2024 election, 22 states have passed 47 laws that restrict the vote.

As Bob Ortega of CNN reported yesterday, states have closed polling places in Black and Latino districts, required new paperwork to vote, reduced early voting, and restricted the use of student IDs for voter identification. Celina Stewart, the chief executive officer of the League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan organization that works to expand access to the vote, told Ortega: “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.”

No Kings organizer Ezra Levin said the way to judge the effectiveness of this No Kings Day was to answer the question: “Did we drive the biggest early vote in the history of the Republic?” He added: “I think we’re gonna do it.” People turned No Kings

But just at the height of the pro-voting events, Meta took down the main No Kings organizing page on Instagram for about four hours. According to Levin, Meta didn’t respond to the No Kings team, “even as the account was offline at the peak of our national day of action and livestream.” Once the account was viewable again, “Meta told us in their response email that they made a bad call.”

Still, though, No Kings administrators had no access to the account, blocking their ability “to post about an ongoing day of mass action for early voting.” Levin noted: “This is part of a much bigger concern: activists and movements around the world are increasingly vulnerable to decisions made by powerful technology platforms that can determine who gets heard and who gets silenced.”

The League of Women Voters wrote that the timing of the blackout mattered. “When people are gathering, organizing, and seeking information about civic participation, cutting off a movement’s primary communication channel—even temporarily—is deeply troubling. This is about more than one account. It raises serious questions about transparency, accountability, and the power private technology platforms wield over public communication.”

Meta later claimed the issue was technical, saying, “When accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies it can trigger automated systems. That’s what happened with the No Kings IG account in the lead up to today’s day of action. Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error. Everything is now working as it should and we sincerely apologize.”

The timing of the error was unfortunate. Just yesterday, Reuters reported on a story out of Brazil claiming that in internal communications, Meta employees acknowledged that the company had restricted the Instagram accounts of Brazilian ​President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the country’s recent election. The story says the employees’ messages also recommended accounts related to his challenger, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing ex-president who tried to overthrow Lula’s government. Senator Bolsonaro did much better than expected in the election, and the two face a runoff.

It was not until close to 6:00 Eastern time that the No Kings account could be used again. “WE ARE BACK IN! We can post again,” Levin wrote. “This was utter bullsh*t on the biggest early vote effort in history. But it will not stop what we’re building.”

“No Kings means no kings in the White House,” he wrote, “or in Silicon Valley.”

Special Reports: Huge Riots In France. How Much Russian Influence Aimed To Disrupt West?

Wayne Madsen Report, Mapping and Analysis: Déjà vu: Moscow’s links to street violence, arson, and larceny in France, neighboring nations, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Far-right and far-left protesters encouraged by Russian influence. 

We’ve seen this before with Moscow, as street mobs encouraged by Kremlin-directed influence operations ravage Paris, Toulouse, Limoges, and other cities. 

New York Times, Huge Riots in France Prompt Shock and Blame Game, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic, Oct. 18, 2026. After anti-government protests devolved into chaos, leaders from across the political spectrum blamed one another for the unrest, even as it largely subsided on Sunday.

France was in a state of shock on Sunday, as citizens walked through streets lined with shattered storefronts, charred cars and burned-out government buildings after the country’s largest demonstrations in years devolved into riots and looting.

The unrest on Saturday — which led to some 2,000 arrests — caused widespread damage to several symbols of the state, including a 19th-century city hall in Limoges, a town in central France renowned for its porcelain, that was largely destroyed in a nighttime arson attack. More than 600 police officers were injured, Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, said on social media on Sunday.

Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where they broke into the local government headquarters and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. A fire also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon, and 1,500 shops were damaged or looted nationwide, according to Alexandre Bompard, head of the French federation of commerce and distribution, who estimated that the cost of repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

“I’ve never seen this before, I am disgusted,” said Sophie Vanpoperinghe, 47, as she gazed at ransacked shops on Boulevard Magenta, the road in Paris where she has lived for 22 years and which is frequently used for demonstrations.

More than half a million demonstrators marched on Sunday to protest the rising cost of living and poor conditions in schools, among other grievances. Many were stunned on Sunday at how rioters had used those demonstrations as a smoke screen for vandalism.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Russia Declares ‘Checkmate’ as Trump Pushes Ukraine to Capitulate, Vance Confronted by Grieving Husband, GOP in Free Fall, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Today may go down as one of the most alarming days yet for Ukraine. Hours after Zelenskyy said the Trump administration is pushing his country to capitulate, Trump went on Truth Social to attack him, claiming Zelenskyy doesn’t care about ending the war and mocking Ukraine as a country “in shambles.” All of this while Russia has spent the past week launching nearly 2,700 drones at Ukraine’s power grid, Washington paused the intelligence Ukraine relies on to spot incoming ballistic missiles, and Putin’s own envoy is bragging that the “ice has begun to break” with the United States. Tonight, the Russians are celebrating.

Here at home, a grieving husband confronted JD Vance over his wife’s death in Trump’s Iran war, Trump’s approval just hit a record low two weeks before the midterms, and the president announced a plan for a D.C. golf course that his own lawyers have spent months telling a federal judge doesn’t exist.

I am working around the clock to get you news in real time from Ukraine and everywhere else it matters. The White House hates this. They would much rather you hear their version of events, filtered through friendly outlets and press secretaries who last five days. But no advertiser, corporation, or politician controls what I report. I answer only to you.

Let’s get into it.

Grieving Military Husband Confronts Vance Over “Fundamental Failures” in Trump’s Iran War

The husband of a soldier killed in the Iran war confronted JD Vance, right, at a CBS News town hall, demanding accountability for “fundamental failures” by military leadership. Master Sgt. Nicole Amor, an Army Reservist from Minnesota, was one of six service members killed by an Iranian drone strike at Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba on March 1, just one day after Trump launched the war. It remains the deadliest attack on U.S. forces in the conflict, and CBS has reported the facility wasn’t adequately fortified, lacked drone defenses, and that the Army chose not to move troops farther from Iran or bulk up medical support. Her husband, Joey Amor, told Vance that while an Iranian drone killed his wife, a failure of leadership led up to it, adding that his wife had told him things before she died and that other soldiers know more but are staying quiet. Vance called Nicole a precious human being who served honorably, but said this was literally the first time he had heard of the failures, explaining that as vice president he lives in a bit of a bubble. He then acknowledged there were issues with where troops were located that were a huge mistake and have since been changed, and promised not to forget.

Vance faced tough questions throughout the town hall, including from voters who backed him and Trump in 2024. A Michigan man who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket said he now plans to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and pressed Vance on soaring gas prices caused by the war. Vance blamed the situation in the Middle East and former President Joe Biden, without acknowledging the crisis stemmed from the war Trump launched, and said it’s easy to criticize something that happened sevenmonths ago. A Catholic nun challenged him on immigration raids that separate children from their parents, and Vance conceded that some agents have really screwed up and that striking the right balance is a work in progress. A naturalized citizen who voted for him accused him of scapegoating immigrants after he called H-1B visa holders “foreign indentured servants,” and Vance admitted his rhetoric had been imperfect. At least 21 U.S. service members have now died in the Iran war, which Trump launched without congressional approval and promised would last only weeks.

Vance defended Trump against corruption concerns while saying selling White House access would be “disgusting.” Moderator Tony Dokoupil pressed him on the nearly $1.2 billion Trump took in from his crypto businesses last year and the recent resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece over allegations she leveraged her position, which she denies. Vance said he had never seen anything from the president that made him squeamish and insisted claims he has looked into turned out to be untrue. He did say that anyone selling access to the White House should suffer consequences. The sharp questioning previewed the challenges Vance may face defending the administration’s record if he runs for president in 2028. He told the audience there is “of course” a chance he won’t run.

Ukraine Hits St. Petersburg With 1,000 Drones as Zelenskyy Warns Trump of a “Historic Mistake”

Zelenskyy told Bloomberg he believes the Trump administration is pressuring Ukraine to capitulate to Russia. He said the U.S. is threatening to cut off some support if Ukraine keeps striking Russian oil refineries, explaining that Washington just wants Ukraine to stop attacking diesel and will “disconnect us from something” if it doesn’t. Zelenskyy said he offered a compromise: Ukraine would stop targeting Russian diesel if the U.S. provided Patriot missiles to protect Ukraine’s own energy facilities. He also accused the U.S. of slowing deliveries of Patriots that Ukraine has already paid for through the PURL program, insisting the delay is “not a technical issue.” Despite the tensions, Zelenskyy said he expects things may calm down after the midterms, describing politics as very aggressive during election time. He said the current moment feels like agony, but believes life will continue more calmly once the elections are over. Meanwhile, Russia is declaring “checkmate.”

Trump lashed out at Zelenskyy on Truth Social, claiming the Ukrainian leader doesn’t want to end the war and probably never did. Hours after Ukraine’s massive drone attack on St. Petersburg, Trump said Zelenskyy could have gotten a better deal two years ago and accused him of being enriched by European aid and money from “Crooked Joe Biden.” He described Ukraine as being in “shambles,” claiming it has lost much of its land and access to its seas, and that its male population is low, wounded, or dead. Trump again condemned Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil facilities, saying they are seriously hurting world diesel markets as he tries to bring down fuel prices before the midterms. He said he is negotiating peace and doesn’t want to do anything that would drive Russia away from the bargaining table. The attack came the same day Zelenskyy accused Trump of pushing Ukraine to capitulate, and after he called Trump’s diesel deal with Putin a birthday present for the Russian leader. The Russians celebrated tonight:

Ukraine launched one of the largest drone attacks of the war overnight, setting a major oil terminal in St. Petersburg ablaze. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down about 1,015 drones over Moscow and several western regions, in what appeared to be the biggest attack St. Petersburg has seen. Drones struck the Petersburg Oil Terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, a data center belonging to tech giant VK, and a logistics center for retailer Ozon. The city’s governor said one person was killed and five were injured, while two substations were hit in the surrounding Leningrad region, leaving about 20,000 people without power. The strike came days after Zelenskyy ordered his military to resume attacks on Russian oil facilities, defying Trump, who called the renewed strikes “a disgrace.” Ukraine had briefly paused the attacks under Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” but says it got nothing in return.

Russia never stopped attacking Ukraine’s power grid, despite Trump’s claim that both sides agreed to an energy truce. Zelenskyy said Russia carried out at least 76 attacks on Ukrainian energy, oil, and gas facilities over the past week, leaving tens of thousands of families without electricity. Over that same week, he said, Russia fired nearly 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs, and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic. Overnight strikes hit substations in four regions, including Odesa, killing at least two people and injuring more than a dozen. A wiring plant in Lutsk that supplies BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche halted operations after being struck. Zelenskyy said the Russians are trying to cause a blackout, and that America should see Russia is taking no reciprocal steps in response to sanctions relief.

Zelenskyy warned on “Meet the Press” that Ukraine cannot survive if the United States sides with Russia. He called that prospect unbelievable, a tragedy, and a historic mistake, capping a week of rising tensions that began with Trump’s diesel deal with Putin and ended with his waiver of the Graham Act sanctions. Zelenskyy said Putin “feels victory” from the sanctions pause and expressed hope that Trump will change his attitude toward the Russian leader. He also revealed that the U.S. had paused intelligence sharing, leaving Ukraine blind to Russian ballistic missile attacks for three days. That sharing has since resumed, and Zelenskyy said he was very thankful. He also spoke with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and is reportedly seeking a new peace meeting next week.

A fight over Ukraine’s satellite internet has deepened the rift, with conflicting accounts from Washington. Ukraine says drones relying on SpaceX satellite service stopped working at speeds above 100 mph, disabling interceptors meant to shoot down Russian attack drones, and that terminals worked normally when tested across the border in the EU. Zelenskyy called it “a planned operation” and said the message came from the government. Trump denied ordering any restrictions, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said nobody ordered the slowdown and that it has been restored. But Elon Musk has suggested the restrictions came from the government, and The Telegraph, citing four sources, reported that Musk proposed the limits and Trump approved them. Ukrainian officials say they still can’t confirm full service has been restored, and a bipartisan group of senators is demanding an investigation.

The fallout is spreading across Europe. NATO jets were scrambled Sunday after an unidentified object entered Lithuania’s airspace, and residents in parts of the country were told to take shelter for about an hour. Officials later said it was likely a drone that came in from Poland, and Ukraine said it regretted the possible diversion of its drones, which it blamed on Russian electronic warfare. Arson attacks have also hit Starlink ground stations in Poland and Bulgaria, with Polish authorities blaming Russian intelligence. Meanwhile, the EU is reportedly rushing to prepare new sanctions on Russia before France’s 2027 presidential election. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, the current favorite, has vowed to end support for Ukraine within six months if elected.

A top Putin envoy says Russia and the U.S. are discussing new joint business deals, including nuclear-powered data centers, following Trump’s diesel agreement. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy and a key figure in U.S.-Russia talks on the Ukraine war, told an energy conference in Moscow that the two countries are exploring data center projects using small-scale nuclear power plants. He said “the ice has begun to break” and predicted several other significant initiatives will be announced soon, despite widespread resistance. Dmitriev revealed that the U.S. Treasury asked Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, which he runs, to help sort out payment issues on the diesel deal, and said brainstorming sessions are already underway on how to lift sanctions. He called the Graham Act sanctions law “misguided” and said Russia will keep pursuing projects with the U.S. until the war ends. The Kremlin has long been frustrated that Washington tied such deals to a peace agreement, but Dmitriev’s remarks, made a day before Trump waived the Graham Act sanctions, suggest that link may be breaking.

Trump Hits Record Lows as Voters Sour on GOP Two Weeks Before the Midterms

Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low, giving Democrats a clear edge heading into Election Day. A new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll puts Trump’s approval at just 33%, lower than at any point in his first term, with 66% disapproving and 52% disapproving strongly. Democrats now lead by eight points in the race for the House, up from three points in July. By 58% to 39%, registered voters said they would rather have a Democratic Congress acting as a check on Trump than a Republican one supporting his agenda, roughly double last year’s margin. For the first time since 2014, voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy. Democrats are also more motivated, with 75% saying they are certain to vote or already have, compared with 67% of Republicans.

A separate NBC News poll finds Americans more pessimistic about the country than at any point in Trump’s second term. A record 71% of adults say the country is on the wrong track, and Trump’s approval has slipped to 34%, with a second-term high of 51% strongly disapproving. Registered voters prefer Democrats to control Congress by 55% to 45%. Trump’s support is eroding even within his own coalition, with approval at just 76% among Republicans, 28% among men under 30, and 31% among Latinos, groups that helped him win in 2024. A majority, 52%, say his administration is more corrupt than previous ones, and 58% say his policies are hurting the country. Americans are split almost evenly, 52% to 48%, on whether a Democratic House should pursue impeachment.

The Iran war and rising prices are driving voters’ anger. In February, before the war began, 71% of Americans said gasoline was affordable, but that has completely flipped, with 71% now saying it is not. Majorities also say groceries, health care, and home energy are unaffordable, and 48% say they are financially worse off than when Trump returned to office, the highest share for any president in Post-ABC polling since 1986. About 65% say going to war with Iran was a mistake, and Trump’s approval on handling the cost of living sits at just 27% in the NBC poll. Most Americans are also skeptical of his promise of $5,000 payments if Republicans hold Congress, with 71% saying they don’t expect to see a check. Even 47% of Republicans say they don’t believe they’ll receive one.

Instead of focusing on the economy, Trump has spent his final campaign rallies gushing over men’s bodies. At a rally in Kentucky on Saturday, he described closely examining the physique of Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, from his jawline to his backside, and claimed without evidence that the remarks boosted Husted’s poll numbers. In Georgia on Friday, he praised Senate candidate Mike Collins as “all man” while mocking Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff’s looks and comparing him to Pee-wee Herman. He also gushed about “big, strong, handsome soldiers” and said spending time with them was one of the reasons to be president. Even allies haven’t been spared, as Trump told a Dallas crowd last month that Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton may not be the best-looking guy he’s ever seen. The New York Times notes the pattern comes as Trump might otherwise be selling voters on ending the Iran war or bringing down prices.

Trump Announces D.C. Golf Course Overhaul as Judge Demands Answers on His Plans

Trump announced Sunday that his administration will rebuild a public golf course in Washington, contradicting his own lawyers’ claims in court that no final plan exists. In a Truth Social post, he said the Interior Department worked with golf architect Tom Fazio to turn East Potomac Golf Links into a championship course capable of hosting events like the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the Ryder Cup. He said work would begin November 15 and take about 15 months. He called the current course old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use. The project is being challenged in court by a preservation group and two D.C. residents. The announcement puts Trump directly at odds with what his administration has been telling a federal judge for months.

Judge Ana Reyes immediately took note of Trump’s post and demanded to know whether the government is abandoning its position in court. Justice Department attorneys have long argued that any plan to transform East Potomac was purely hypothetical and that no final agency action had been taken. National Park Service officials even told Reyes last week they knew of no formal renovation plan beyond what they had seen in Trump’s and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s social media posts. After Trump’s announcement, Reyes ordered the administration to say whether it still maintains that its plans are merely preliminary. She also summoned Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward to appear at Monday’s hearing, presumably to address the government’s motion to remove her from the case. The acting director of the National Park Service and a senior Interior Department official have already been ordered to testify under oath.

The administration is trying to remove the judge after she rebuked officials for cutting down trees without notice. Earlier this month, crews cut down trees at the course, which CNN reported totaled 169, before notifying the court, prompting Reyes to say she was “furious” and that the incident cost the government all of its credibility. She barred any more tree removal through October 26 and required three business days’ notice before any irreversible changes, and federal officials have said nearly 730 trees would ultimately need to be cleared. On Friday, the Justice Department filed a motion asking Reyes to recuse herself, calling her behavior “egregious” and accusing her of deep-seated hostility toward the administration. The filing also objected to her ordering high-level officials to testify, calling it a disregard for separation of powers. Reyes, a Biden appointee, previously blocked Trump’s ban on transgender service members.

Ousted press secretary Katie Zacharia posted photos that appear to have been altered to hide what may be golf course plans on Trump’s desk. On Friday night, hours after being fired, Zacharia shared a photo with Trump in the Oval Office that showed a blurred image sitting atop a stack of guidebooks on the Resolute Desk, above left. Local advocacy group Save East Po said the blurred image matches the distinctive shape of the East Potomac peninsula and earlier renderings of the project. After the post drew scrutiny, Zacharia shared a second photo, above right, in which the image was gone entirely, and digital traces show the book cover itself had been modified. The Washington Post has not independently verified the image, and the White House dismissed the questions as Trump Derangement Syndrome. The episode matters because whether a final plan exists is a central question in the lawsuit.

The golf course is the latest in a string of Trump projects reshaping Washington’s landscape. Trump has repeatedly signaled his plans publicly, writing on Truth Social in June that work on the new course would begin September 1. He is also continuing construction on a White House ballroom and has pushed forward with plans for a “triumphal arch” in the capital. His handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to close the renowned arts center for renovations. The administration also moved to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, though its new lining ended up peeling. Critics say the pattern shows a president remaking public spaces in his own image, often while skirting the usual review processes.

Other news:

CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford apologized after a social media post mocking Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed sparked backlash. At a Michigan town hall Saturday night, a young man asked El-Sayed to “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” and El-Sayed responded by disavowing it and then discussing Americans’ constitutional right to religious freedom. Crawford, CBS’s longtime Supreme Court correspondent, posted that he spent only a “nanosecond” disavowing before launching into a three-minute “diatribe,” calling it a spectacular self-own. By Sunday afternoon she had deleted the post, saying it violated CBS News standards and apologizing. The episode comes as CBS News, under editor in chief Bari Weiss, has embraced more opinion content and faced internal tensions over its Middle East coverage. ABC News declined to renew longtime correspondent Terry Moran’s contract last year after he called Trump adviser Stephen Miller a “world class hater” online.

An Air Force airman died after falling during a pregame rappelling stunt at a college football game, and critics are pointing at Pete Hegseth. The airman fell from the rafters of San Antonio’s Alamodome before the University of Texas at San Antonio’s military appreciation game against Navy on Saturday. According to the San Antonio Express-News, he was one of four service members in the demonstration and slid down the rope in an uncontrolled manner before hitting the ground. He was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening injuries and later died, and the Air Force says the cause is under investigation. Rappelling demonstrations have long been part of the game, but critics blasted what they called a pointless recruiting spectacle, noting Hegseth’s push for a “warrior ethos” and more high-visibility military displays at public events. The game was delayed 10 minutes, and UTSA’s coach said his players could tell the energy was gone when they returned to the field.

Four Canadian service members were killed and dozens more seriously injured in a massive fire at a military base in Alberta. The blaze broke out Saturday afternoon at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, one of the country’s busiest training grounds, with reports saying a live training round may have hit a gas line or gas well. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it one of the worst peacetime tragedies the military has faced at home and ordered flags lowered to half-staff. The military says there is no indication of terrorism, but the cause remains under investigation. Hospitals were so overwhelmed that patients were flown and driven to Edmonton, about 120 miles away, where a doctor called it a once-in-a-generation disaster. The tragedy comes just days before Alberta votes Monday on a referendum that could lead to a second vote on separating from Canada, which Carney has warned outside forces are trying to exploit.

Trump endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu, right, ahead of Israel’s October 27 election, breaking with longstanding U.S. tradition against weighing in on foreign elections. In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump called Netanyahu a “great warrior prime minister” and credited him with joining the U.S. in launching strikes on Iran in February. He warned that if Israel chose anyone other than Netanyahu, America would have to finish the job against Iran itself, which he said he is not inclined to do. Netanyahu quickly thanked him, but Israeli support for Trump has dipped amid disagreements over Iran, and polls show no candidate with a clear path to power. It will be Israel’s first election since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The endorsement comes as settler violence in the West Bank draws scrutiny, including an attack on a Washington Post photographer and assaults on European diplomats in a Christian village.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the country feels “anger and shame” after a day of riots that led to more than 2,000 arrests. In a national address Sunday night, Macron acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of protesters raised legitimate concerns about living costs, fuel prices, and wars France never wanted, but vowed the government would “make examples” of looters and rioters. Several hundred shops were damaged across cities including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Bordeaux, where a masked mob invaded the local prefect’s residence. Limoges’s mayor said there was a clear, premeditated intent to burn down the city’s historic town hall and threatened to resign if the city doesn’t receive repair funds. Officials said more than 150 police officers were injured and one person died of a suspected heart attack. Trump weighed in on social media, writing simply, “France is burning!”

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Students Rise Up Against GOP Voter Suppression, Trump Branded a “Traitor” Over Putin Sanctions, Trump Threatens to Jail Election Officials, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 17, 2026. Yesterday I heard from my family in Ukraine. They told me the night Starlink was disrupted was one of the scariest nights they’ve lived through in more than four years of war. They could hear missiles and drones outside their apartment but had no idea where they were headed. All they could do was pray they wouldn’t be hit. And last night, Trump waived the sweeping Russia sanctions Congress passed, just days before they were set to take effect. Putin’s envoy called it “truly historic.” I call it a betrayal of the people living through this war, including my own family.

Here at home, the attacks on our democracy are escalating. Trump’s Justice Department is now threatening to prosecute California election workers for counting ballots, and Trump says “they will all go to jail.” In North Carolina, students at the nation’s largest HBCU had to march 45 minutes through broken sidewalks to vote after Republicans took away their campus polling site. They showed up anyway.

Today, millions of Americans are expected to show up too, for No Kings, and I’ll be bringing you coverage all day long. This is exactly why independent journalism matters. I don’t answer to a billionaire, a corporation or a political party. I answer to you. If you believe in what we’re doing here, please subscribe today. Every single subscription keeps this work going and makes sure the truth gets out, no matter how hard they try to bury it:Subscribed

Here’s everything you need to know this morning.

Students at the Nation’s Largest HBCU March to the Polls After North Carolina Takes Away Their Voting Site

More than 100 students from North Carolina A&T State University and UNC Greensboro marched to the polls on the first day of early voting, after election officials refused to give them on-campus voting sites. Students rallied on both campuses Thursday and then walked to Union Square, now the closest early voting site, carrying signs that read “They close polling sites, we keep showing up anyway” and chanting “This is what democracy looks like.”

N.C. A&T is the largest historically Black university in the country, with more than 15,000 students, and both schools had on-campus early voting in 2024. “You turned out when they took your voting site away,” state House Minority Leader Robert Reives told the A&T crowd, urging students to bring their friends to the polls too. Students from Bennett College joined the march, and many of the marchers were voting for the first time. “We will come and make our voices clear, no matter how far you push a polling site off of our campus,” said student organizer Xavier Jones. “We will organize. We will march.”

The walk to the polls took about 45 minutes, through broken sidewalks, poison ivy and debris, and some students waited in line for three hours once they got there. Students had to step into the street where sidewalks were missing or blocked by branches, and Democracy Docket reports the route also crosses train tracks and a dirt path. Most A&T students don’t have cars. More than 300 votes were cast at Union Square on the first day, according to the Board of Elections, but some students had to leave the line to get back to class or work. Democratic organizer Kema Leonard, who also waited three hours, said staff at one point ran out of registration forms. “It shouldn’t have been that hard,” Leonard said. “It almost proved our point that we need our own sites. They weren’t ready.”

This is the second time North Carolina’s Republican-controlled elections board has denied A&T students a voting site for the midterms, and one student says the board chair threatened students who asked why. The Guilford County Board of Elections first rejected the campus sites, and the State Board of Elections denied them again in August, voting along its 3-2 party lines. A&T student Shia Rozier got up at 4 a.m. and skipped class to attend that meeting, holding a sign showing the more than one-mile distance from campus to the nearest polling place. Carolyn Bunker, a Democrat on the Guilford County board, said she watched Chairman Francis X. De Luca threaten students with removal and arrest multiple times for asking why he voted against their site. “To acknowledge them and then to continue to dismiss them... it almost felt humiliating,” Rozier said. The board offered Union Square, a downtown health education center shared by A&T, UNCG and Guilford Technical Community College, as a compromise.

The A&T fight is part of a broader set of voting cuts across North Carolina this fall, including slashed Sunday voting and new mail ballot rules that are already getting votes thrown out. Only 17 counties will have Sunday voting this year, compared with 40 in 2022, which cuts into the “souls to the polls” tradition at Black churches. One Anson County board member argued against Sunday voting in part because Chick-fil-A isn’t open that day, which stunned even his Republican colleagues. The state board also adopted a last-minute rule, now being challenged in federal court, requiring voters to seal an inner envelope on their mail ballots. In Wake County, exactly 2.5% of absentee ballots were rejected three weeks in a row because the inner envelope wasn’t sealed, and Guilford County’s rejection rate has topped 2%. Mail ballot requests are down nearly 33% from 2022.

North Carolina has also been flooding voters with confusing letters about their eligibility since striking a deal with Trump’s Justice Department. Some voters have received three or more letters with different and sometimes conflicting instructions about whether they need to take action to vote. This week, the state began sending letters to 1,392 voters flagged as possible noncitizens by the federal SAVE database, telling them to “voluntarily request removal from the voter rolls” or prove they are citizens. SAVE is known to be unreliable: when Texas used it, at least 21% of the people it flagged turned out to be wrongly identified. “People do get worried when they get those letters, especially elderly folks in the eastern part of the state,” said Siobhan Millen, a Democrat on the state elections board. Voters have until Oct. 20 to request a mail ballot, and early in-person voting runs through Oct. 31.

Trump Waives Russia Sanctions Days Before They Take Effect, and Moscow Calls It “Historic”

Trump signed an executive order waiving sweeping new sanctions on Russia that Congress passed and that he signed into law just last month. The Lindsey Graham Act, named for the late senator, targeted Russia’s energy and defense sectors, Putin himself and the “shadow fleet” of tankers Moscow uses to get around Western sanctions. It also would have let the president impose tariffs on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, which could include China and India. Trump waived the sanctions just days before they were set to take effect, arguing the move “is in the national interests of the United States.” The decision comes a week after Trump struck a deal with Putin to ease existing sanctions in exchange for Russia releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel onto global markets. Diesel prices have jumped almost 70% since the Iran war began in February, and the midterms are less than three weeks away.

Zelensky and lawmakers from both parties blasted the waiver as a gift to Putin. “A US sanctions blackout, easing pressure on the aggressor, financial rewards for Putin, all of this only encourages him to keep attacking,” Zelensky wrote, adding that Putin “feels joy and happiness that there is such support.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal called it a “craven, cowardly action” that has “everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.” Republican Rep. Don Bacon, a strong Ukraine ally who isn’t running for reelection, said “the president is prolonging the war, not ending it.” Sen. Darline Graham, who co-sponsored the bill named for her late brother and has made it a centerpiece of her campaign, has not criticized Trump for waiving it. Graham owes her GOP primary win in large part to Trump’s endorsement.

Russian officials celebrated Trump’s decision as Putin vowed to keep pushing deeper into Ukraine. “The Trump administration’s suspension of the Graham Act is an important and truly historic moment,” said Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy. The Kremlin itself hasn’t formally responded, but Dmitriev claimed the sanctions would have hurt the U.S. economy more than Russia’s. On Friday, Putin told military leaders he sees “a positive trend” on the battlefield and said “one of the main objectives remains the liberation of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” using the Kremlin’s name for the eastern Ukrainian region. Russia’s military chief also told Putin the military has set aside what it needs to keep attacking Ukraine’s power grid. U.S.-led peace talks have produced no breakthrough.

The waiver came as Russia hit Ukraine with another wave of deadly attacks, killing at least eight people and knocking out power to more than a million. Friday’s strikes hit nine regions, including two shopping centers in Rivne and Sumy, according to Ukrainian officials. In Kharkiv, a 71-year-old woman and a 58-year-old man were killed and 12 people were injured, and two more people were killed in the frontline city of Kramatorsk. Drones also hit a food-processing plant and a customs terminal near Ukraine’s border with Poland, setting about 10 trucks on fire. The U.N. said at least 328 civilians were killed in Ukraine last month, 85% more than in September 2025. “The first two weeks of October were among the deadliest periods for civilians in years,” said Danielle Bell, head of the U.N.’s human rights mission in Ukraine.

Ukraine is hitting back, striking a railway bridge inside Russia and Russian military supply depots in occupied Donetsk. According to Ukraine’s General Staff, forces hit a railway bridge over the Unecha River in Russia’s Bryansk region, part of the route Russia uses to move ammunition, fuel and equipment to the front. Ukraine also struck supply depots near Novoandriivka, Nikolske and Mariupol, plus a Russian drone command post near Malynivka. On Thursday, a Ukrainian brigade used a domestically built interceptor drone to target a Russian Mi-28NM attack helicopter over Russia’s Belgorod region, the second such strike in less than a week. Ukrainian officials have not released damage assessments for any of the strikes. Zelensky has made clear Ukraine will keep fighting back, saying Friday that “the main rule of our operations is to respond.”

Trump Threatens to Jail California Election Workers as Suspicious Letters Target Election Offices and Lawmakers

The Trump Justice Department is threatening to criminally prosecute California election workers who count ballots from people the federal government claims are noncitizens. “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote in a letter to Los Angeles County officials. The letter was also sent to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan, which effectively puts the whole state on notice. Trump shared a story about the letter on Truth Social and wrote, “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Any federal charges in Los Angeles would be handled by Bill Essayli, the region’s top federal prosecutor, who also helped file the DOJ’s lawsuit against the state. Logan said the DOJ “has chosen to litigate their unverified assertions,” adding, “it is best for this to be addressed in court.”

The threat came one day after the DOJ sued California to block it from counting mail ballots from 20,000 people the government calls “likely” noncitizens. The lawsuit was filed after California officials didn’t meet a 48-hour deadline to review a password-protected thumb drive the DOJ said contained the names. Weber said the administration has offered no evidence to back up its claim and called the effort a way to “cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.” The administration’s track record on these claims is poor: it said Nevada had 1,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls, and after the list was checked, the real number turned out to be zero. Research and state investigations consistently show that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. This year, the DOJ has charged about 50 people with voting as noncitizens, out of more than 227 million registered voters nationwide.

Election law experts say the threats won’t hold up in court and warn that the administration is laying the groundwork to challenge the midterm results. “They’re putting a nail in the wall for something to hang their hat on later,” said Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. UCLA law professor Rick Hasen called it “deplorable” that the federal government is “making escalating threats and unreasonable demands beyond its power in the middle of an ongoing election.” Former DOJ official Justin Levitt said, “Courts haven’t been buying what DOJ has been selling,” and that election officials “are equipped to stand up to aggressive bullying.” Sens. Alex Padilla, Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin have written to Attorney General Todd Blanche demanding the DOJ commit to not seizing ballots or other election materials before results are certified. California has more than 23 million registered voters and several competitive House races that could decide control of Congress.

Letters containing suspicious substances have been sent to election offices and more than 20 members of Congress from both parties, just weeks before the midterms. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Tina Smith, Chris Murphy, Alex Padilla, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mike Rounds, Pete Ricketts and Ted Cruz, along with more than 15 House members, have reported letters sent to their offices, and many were intercepted before delivery. In Rep. Jimmy Panetta’s Santa Cruz office, a staffer opened an envelope containing a “suspicious white powder,” cleared the office and called 911. Election offices in Delaware, Oklahoma and Louisiana also received letters with white powder, and Louisiana’s office was evacuated before law enforcement found nothing harmful. The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating and trying to identify who sent them. “This seemingly deliberate and widespread attack on our democracy and elections is unacceptable,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal said.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump has a serious character flaw, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 17, 2026. At 2:18 this afternoon, Donald Trump stood behind the bright blue curtains at Truist Arena in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He opened and closed his suit coat, threw his hands out in front of him, and walked onto the stage, stopping for a moment to look out at the audience and the scattered empty seats.

When he finally reached the podium, his freshly darkened hair and thick orange makeup accentuated the tired, swollen eyes he was using to read the teleprompter. Yet just seconds into his nearly hour-and-a-half-long speech, the President of the United States made it clear he would not be sticking to the script he had been given. Instead, he would be saying whatever he felt like, starting early in his remarks by telling the people in the room and those watching from home that his second presidential term is more powerful than his first and that he “can do stuff that’s unbelievable.”

He also admitted with a smug and shameless confidence that he likes even the most horrible people as long as they like him, even pointing out himself just how fundamentally flawed his moral compass really is. “I like people that like me. I just like it, and I can’t help it. It’s a character flaw. I mean, I’ve had a couple of people, really horrible human beings, horrible, horrible, terrible people, but I heard through the grapevine they really liked me a lot. So, I like them too.” The crowd laughed, and the strategically placed Trump loyalists behind him had huge smiles across their faces as he said it.

It got so bad that he even bragged for all to hear that “Google wouldn’t have taken my call in the first (presidency). Now they kiss my ass.” He said that knowing full well that just hours later he would be sitting right next to Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a “candlelight dinner” fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump just kept going today. At one point, he looked into the audience and told them that the immigrants who came into this country are murderers who will kill them in their homes. “Does anyone think those murderers would be very nice people, nice, gentle people, as your next-door neighbor? No, they’ll kill you.”

He described Jon Husted, the sitting US senator from Ohio and former lieutenant governor, as “a killer” who “takes people’s heads off,” again paying no attention to his words or how often he invokes violence. He did it again when he thought someone in the crowd might be protesting. Trump asked, “Are you friend or foe? Because being a foe in this arena can be a very dangerous thing.” That was the president once again threatening violence.

Still obsessed with Canada and seemingly unable to understand how its healthcare system works, he said that Canada should not be “allowed” to have universal healthcare and that Canadians “spend our money very unwisely.” This was a stretch even for Donald Trump and shows just how desperate his administration has become. We do not, and never have, paid for Canada’s healthcare system, yet he still said it. His goal with saying things like this is to discredit the way Canadians receive medical care, so that Americans who are suffering and struggling to afford their own should fear it instead of seeing it as something worth fighting for here at home.

When he realized the people in the room with him were not as alarmed as he needed them to be, he decided to tell them that they had been in danger of criminal investigation before he took office again. He tried to explain that anyone who had ever bought a Make America Great Again hat had been under investigation by former Special Counsel Jack Smith. “If you had a hat, if you bought a Make America Great Again, you were under investigation by deranged Jack Smith,” he said. There is no evidence that any investigation of this sort ever existed, but he doesn’t care about facts or the truth; he just wanted every person in that room to believe they had been personally targeted, and that they were and would be in danger without Donald Trump in office.

He then went off on a strange tangent, complete with different voices, to justify his weaponization of the Department of Justice against his perceived enemies, saying, “They indicted me and went after me like nobody’s ever gone after. They went after our people, probably people in this audience.” He wants his supporters to think that they are personally at risk if they do not help him hold onto power.

Late last night, hours before either of these events, Donald Trump did something even more horrific when he signed an executive order waiving nearly all of the new sanctions on Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act. This was a law he had signed into effect barely a month ago to honor his deceased friend, the senator from South Carolina. On the cusp of the October 18th deadline to put those measures into effect, Trump paused the sanctions, citing “national interest.”

By the time the news of what Donald Trump had done was made public, Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and special envoy to President Putin, had already posted “Checkmate” on social media, making a public statement that Russia already knew Trump would deliver exactly what they wanted. Russia played Donald Trump, and they are not even trying to hide it. Nearly every other country and leader sees what Donald Trump is doing, how he is aiding Russia and his close friend, President Putin, and enabling the destruction of Ukraine.

To my fellow Americans, aren’t we sick of the lies? Aren’t we sick of listening to him say things that are so absurd they would be almost impossible to believe if we weren’t hearing them with our own ears? Aren’t we sick of waking up every single day wondering whether he has once again sided with a dictator and a dangerous adversary, not just of the United States, but of the entire world?

Aren’t we sick of listening to him spew hatred and divisiveness, doing everything he can to turn us against one another? Aren’t we sick of worrying about whether our kids and grandchildren will ever be able to afford a house, whether there will be jobs waiting for them, and whether climate change will leave them a world that looks anything like the one we grew up in?

Aren’t we sick of living through months of not being able to eat fresh fruits and vegetables without worrying about parasites? Aren’t we sick and tired of waking up every morning wondering what Donald Trump has done now? Aren’t we sick and tired of living as a hostage to Donald Trump?

Today my husband and I went to a No Kings event here in San Diego, and that is what I kept thinking about when I saw how many people had turned out. We are all sick and tired of Donald Trump and the billionaires who are enabling him. I saw all of the clever signs and heard the powerful chants, but it was the look in so many of the attendees’ eyes that stayed with me. They are tired, but not giving up. I had tears in my eyes as I read all the signs and felt the power of so many people spending their day resisting the evil threatening our country. It took my breath away to see young and old come together.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.

It made me realize that the revolution so many of us have been waiting for might already be here. Maybe this time it’s not always loud, and certainly not violent. Maybe it is just people refusing to accept what is happening in their own ways and showing up when it counts on November third in numbers we have never seen before. Because Trump and his enablers can do whatever they want to try to break our spirit. They can make it harder to vote, gerrymander districts, and try to erase every memory of the country that existed before they took power. They can keep brainwashing their loyal devotees into thinking what they are doing is good for this country or try to convince us that they are going to hold onto unchecked power after the midterms, but we know the truth. They are going to lose, and they will never be able to break our spirit. We will never surrender our country to their demands. On November third, we will be voting them all out and taking back the future of this country and its true moral compass.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is Limping Towards The Finish Line, Spent And Rejected. Now We Need To Drive The Early Vote, Close Strong, And Win This Thing, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 18, 2026. With 16 days to go nothing Trump has done- - not his ads, not his campaigning, not his corrupt influence over legacy and social media -- has been able to reverse or even stem his precipitous decline.

Here’s what people in the Capital are waking up to this morning. This little beauty is the lead story in the Washington Post today:

In this poll Democrats lead by 8 points among likely voters and 13 among those certain to vote or who have already voted:

A new NBC News poll has Trump at a similar 34%-64% approve/disapprove, and the generic ballot at Dem +10:

With a little more than two weeks to go nothing Trump has done - not his ads, not his campaigning, not his bribes, not his corrupt influence over legacy and social media - has been able to reverse or even stem his precipitous decline. Spent, impotent, weak, desperate he is.

We all know where this election is. We’ve seen it in our overperformances in special elections all across the country these past two years. We’ve seen it our strong performance in the 2025 elections all across the country. We’ve seen it in our incredibly strong primary turnout in state after state throughout 2026. We’ve seen it in our improving voter reg numbers, in national polls and state polls, in our robust candidate fundraising, and in all the data showing the American people putting their faith back in us to make things better and put things right.

Two graphs from our discussions this week are sticking with me this morning. The first is just how much Trump has raised prices on all of us, despite making lowering them the central promise of his 2024 campaign. Inflation has more than doubled due to his ruinous government:

The second is this encouraging graph from recent Gallup polling. People are not just leaving the Rs they are returning to us and identifying as Democrats again:

I’ve written about Meta shutting down the No Kings Instagram account on Bluesky. I will have more on that, and Trump’s treacherous betrayal of America and Ukraine, tomorrow.

While it remains early in the early vote - and we must be patient - we are starting to see states where the vote is looking like what we expected it to look like. What follows is data pulled from the TargetEarly site, using modeled party, compared to 2024 and 2022 on this day.

• Indiana. Dems are running 13 points over 2022 now:
• Nebraska. Dems are running 11 points over 2022:
• New Jersey. Dems are running 9 points over 2022:
• North Carolina. Dems are running 21 points over 2022:

If you want inspiration now that No Kings Vote Early has come and gone - great work yesterday everyone! - watch some of our recent discussions with our remarkable candidates and state party leaders who are leading the charge all across the country. We are lucky that so many compelling leaders have decided to run this cycle - it is what gives me hope today more than anything else. You’ve met these candidates and state party leaders. You’ve seen what they are made of. You know that with our help they are going to close strong, close far stronger than the corrupt betrayers on the other side who’ve lost the consent of the governed and will soon need to find some other way to make themselves rich.

So, with 16 days to go in this consequential election, we are where we hoped to be. And now we need stay steady and go finish the job by……Kicking These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Winning The Midterms, And Countering The Fuckery That Has Already Begun.

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Raphael Warnock Drops The Hammer And Says Crook Trump Has Got To Go, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 18, 2026. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), above, said that Donald Trump is a crook and that the president and his enablers have got to go.

When Democrats are interviewed, there is a clear indication that the party has a plan for what it will do if they win back control of the House and Senate.

Two themes keep coming up. Holding Trump accountable and lowering costs and inflation to promote affordability.

These two goals merge on the issue of corruption. Corruption in the Trump administration means money that should go to the needs of the American people instead goes into the pockets of the president, his family, and those around him.

Sen. Raphael Warnock put all of these pieces together during an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press.

Kristen Welker asked Warnock, “I want to talk about the agenda. If, for example, Democrats win back the House, as you know, one of the big debates is what should be at the top of the agenda, should Democrats move to impeach President Trump for a third time? Where do you stand on this, Senator? Do you believe Democrats should impeach President Trump should they win back the House of Representatives?”

Sen. Warnock answered, “Donald Trump is a crook. And he’s got to go. And the people who are enabling him, they all have to be held accountable. And so we ought to have the investigations to get to the truth behind the most corrupt administration in American history. At the same time, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time, Americans are being crushed under these costs, which are connected to his corruption. And so we have to end this war, stop the tariffs, fix health care, and then lay out for the American people a vision that embraces all of us.”Stopping Trump’s Corruption Will Help The Economy

The Democratic agenda can’t be about impeachment. People are supporting Democrats to fix the economy. If Democrats were to win the midterms and only focus on Trump, they would be making the same mistake that Trump made in 2024.

Democrats are showing no signs that they will make that same mistake.

Welker asked Warnock if he thought a third Trump impeachment would backfire, and he said:

I can tell you that this corruption is crushing the American people. The American people are watching themselves get poorer and poorer while Donald Trump, his family, his friends, are getting richer and richer. He’s $4 billion richer than he was when he entered office.

And meanwhile, people are crushed under these gas prices, crushed under the price of groceries. I notice in your earlier sound, there he was saying they hit him with affordability. This is the problem with Donald Trump, it’s always about Donald Trump. He’s the one being hit.

Well, he should talk to my constituents. They’re being hit by his awful policies. I can’t think of a time in my lifetime when you could draw such a straight line between the policies in the White House and the economic pain that people are feeling in their houses. And so we have to deal with the costs and we have to deal with the corruption and the American people deserve no less.

This is not an either/or choice.

Democrats can get rid of Trump’s enablers, take on corruption, and help the economy. The public focus should be on the economy, and efforts to investigate and impeach Trump and his enablers should be connected back to the economy and corruption.

If Democrats take back power with a clear plan, it will greatly increase their odds of success.

Politico, Retiring GOP congressmember will 'absolutely not' vote for successor in at-risk seat, Meredith Lee Hill,Oct. 18, 2026. Retiring Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei said he won’t vote for the Trump-endorsed GOP candidate vying to replace him amid a string of stolen valor and other accusations — and warned that the once-safe Republican seat President Donald Trump won by 14 points is at risk of flipping blue on Election Day.

Amodei said in an interview Saturday he would “absolutely not” vote for businessperson David Flippo in Nevada’s 2nd District. “I think the seat’s at risk,” he added, citing a string of stolen valor and financial allegations against Flippo.

“You say, well, the president endorsed him,” Amodei added. “It’s like, well whoever was advising the president on, ‘Hey, this would be a good place for you to go ahead and weigh in,’ gave him awful advice. The vetting process — quote unquote — must have been nearly non-existent.”

Amodei specifically cited a series of allegations against Flippo as disqualifying, for reportedly lying about his military service and also failing to file financial disclosures on time.

“It’s just one thing after another. The stolen valor accusations — all that. But you’re just sitting here going, ‘What the heck?’” Amodei said. Flippo has said apparent exaggerations about his military service on campaign materials were mistakes by his staff and others. Still, GOP officials have been weighing whether Trump should campaign in the region to help boost Flippo before Election Day, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The district has never been represented by a Democrat.

Amodei said he plans to vote early in the coming days and “is looking seriously” at casting his ballot for the independent candidate.

Amid the deteriorating landscape, national Republicans are increasingly wary about Republicans like Flippo holding onto seats in once-safe red districts. Trump won the Northern Nevada seat that encompasses Reno and nearby rural counties by double digits in 2024 and Amodei has held it for 15 years.

On paper, Democrats should have no business playing there. And, national Republicans are still bullish on their chances of holding onto the seat, arguing it’s safer than other red districts they’re more worried about. But Republicans have watched Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former Nevada Assembly majority leader, make the race much tighter than comfortable.

Limited general election polls have Flippo either up or trailing by several points. The Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC just dropped its first spending into the district in recent days, looking to boost Flippo who has self-funded a large part of his campaign.

Nevada Republicans — once bullish about flipping the Las Vegas-area 1st and 3rd Districts — are now paying increasing attention to Amodei’s Northern Nevada district. The economic headwinds that have hit farm states across the country have slammed Nevada’s so-called cattle counties, and demographic change in Reno has favored Democrats in recent years.internet. This has resulted in strict data localization requirements. Russia has deliberately put all its eggs into the domestic data center basket.

More On Russia's War On Ukraine, New U.S. Support For Russia

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during a news conference in Kyiv. “We have a special people, an extraordinary people,” he said (Photo by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times).

New York Times, Trump Defends Plans to Ease Russia Sanctions and Hints at a Hostage Deal, David E. Sanger, Oct. 18, 2026. The president on Sunday justified his reversal of almost five years of sanctions against Russia as part of peace negotiations. He did not name any hostage.

President Trump, defending his decision to ease tariffs and other sanctions against Russia, said on Sunday that he was making “great progress” in a peace deal with the Kremlin and suggested for the first time that the process included “hostage negotiations.”

He did not specify whose release he was seeking. But the only American now categorized by the State Department as “wrongfully detained” in Russia is Stephen Hubbard, a Michigan teacher who was seized from his home in Ukraine just months after Russia invaded that country in February 2022 and was charged with being a mercenary. He was sentenced to more than six years in a penal colony, on charges that the United States has said are fabricated.

“My decision on Russia is a very simple one,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, an apparent reference to his move late on Friday to neutralize the sanctions resolution that he had signed only a few weeks earlier. “I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

Until Sunday, Mr. Trump had said little about the remarkable, rapid-fire steps he has taken over the past 10 days to side with the Russians in a conflict that has now gone on longer than World War I. Those steps amount to the reversal of nearly five years of sanctions following President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

In that time period Mr. Trump has announced that the United States will buy diesel fuel from Russia — though the announced purchases are far too small to have a significant effect on prices, despite Mr. Trump’s claims — and that he will waive imposing tariffs on Russia under a newly signed law named for its chief proponent, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died in July.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Both decisions have been criticized by U.S. lawmakers, including fellow Republicans. Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina, who was appointed to her brother’s seat and is now running for a full term, gently disagreed on Saturday with Mr. Trump’s decision on the sanctions law, saying that she “would choose to put the pressure on Russia to end the war and get gas prices down.”

The breach with Ukraine has been sudden and perhaps irreparable.

Mr. Trump has declared publicly that Ukraine needs a new leader, the first time he has called for replacing Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, with whom Mr. Trump has had a contentious relationship. And he and other administration officials have declined to explain whether they deliberately cut off intelligence warnings to Ukraine about incoming missile and drone attacks, or throttled the speed of data to the country from Starlink, Elon Musk’s critical satellite network, or its military cousin, called Starshield.

Taken together, those steps amount to a major reversal in U.S. strategy, after more than four years in which, to varying degrees, the United States has sided with Ukraine as the victim of Russian aggression.

And while Mr. Trump has episodically tacked toward Mr. Putin, for whom he has often expressed admiration, the United States has largely let intelligence assistance flow and continued to sell arms to Ukraine through the Europeans, who are paying for the deliveries.