As soon as Donald Trump stopped talking during a White House press conference Tuesday, he dropped his head, fluttered his eyelids, and seemed to power down. The sudden siesta came on the heels of an announcement in which Trump advertised an unprecedented $25 million program that he believed would entice the public to report suspected fraud.

“Today I’m thrilled to announce the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Fraud. Whistleblower. Incentive. Program,” Trump said. “All Americans will now be able to go to the Fraud.gov and report cases of corruption and theft of taxpayer dollars in their communities.”

“Here’s what we’re going to be doing: anybody that can prove that he turned somebody in, in other words he or she, if you turn somebody in and you let’s say report, and you find a billion dollars, we are giving a commission to that person of one percent. That’s a lot of money.”

“And if it’s $10 billion, $200 billion, $400 billion, we’re giving a one percent commission to that person. You have to prove that you were the one and prove that it was you, and I don’t know if you can do this but subject to the laws of our nation, which I feel very strongly about—if a reporter turns somebody in, you have to get approval. Perhaps from your wonderful newspaper. But if you turn somebody in, you get a one percent commission. You may turn it down, or you may say, ‘I’m not going to be a reporter any longer, this is too easy,’” Trump said.

The pitch was, apparently, not enticing enough to keep Trump alert and aware, however. Within minutes, the president appeared to be snoozing, taking a break at the Resolute Desk while Vice President JD Vance spoke in his stead.

The first person to receive the president’s award was conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley, who joined Trump and Vance in the Oval Office.

Shirley gained national notoriety last year after he published a video that inspired the conservative caucus to politically scapegoat Somali immigrants. In his widely circulated “investigation,” Shirley door-knocked several Somali-run day care centers in Minnesota, arguing that sites that did not respond or allow him—an unannounced, unknown white man—entrance into a center filled with children must have fraudulently accepted federal funding.

It would later emerge that elements of Shirley’s piece were incorrect or inadequately reported: at least two of the centers featured in his video had been closed for several years, according to Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families. The government had also already investigated federal fraud in Minnesota during the Biden administration. More than 90 Minnesotans were charged at the time, at least 60 of which resulted in convictions.

Nonetheless, Shirley will receive $10,000 from the Trump administration, according to Fox News.

“Wait! Shh! No, no no!” he shouted at a female reporter during the question period of his announcement. “Wait. Wait. Wait!” He then took a male reporter’s question instead.

Next, Trump snapped at The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg. Feinberg first asked Trump a question about why his 1 percent commission on anti-fraud tips would be significantly less than the 10-25 percent going rate that whistleblowers can receive as part of the False Claims Act of 1863—a question that both Trump and Vice President JD Vance bristled at, asking Feinberg where he was from. He answered.

But when Feinberg asked Trump another question five minutes later, he appeared not to recognize him, and even threatened him.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful,” he said, pointing a finger at Feinberg.

“I had told him exactly who I was not five minutes before this exchange,” Feinberg commented online shortly after the press conference.

Trump then snapped at Feinberg for a third time a few minutes later. “Quiet. Quiet! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” he asked.

“Not that I know of sir,” Feinberg responded quietly.

“I actually think there’s something wrong with you,” Trump replied.

Vance later shared the exchange online, calling Feinberg an “imbecile journalist.”

“Mr. Vice President, if you’re going to insult me at least have the guts to tag my account,” he responded.

Mr. Vice President, if you’re going to insult me at least have the guts to tag my account.

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) October 20, 2026

The president’s childlike outburst is the most recent in the long, acrimonious relationship he’s had with anyone who dares to ask him a real question. It also makes him look ornery and unwell.

“The US President literally snarls at a journalist and calls him a ‘sick person’ for asking a question, and then someone from his administration shows up in Europe and gives a lecture on free speech,” Polish journalist Jakub Wiech commented.

The Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee’s team released a statement Tuesday championing an ugly attack ad featuring Donna Arthur, who lost custody of Acton after years of documented issues, including homelessness and sexual abuse by a stepfather.

“We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor,” said Connie Luck, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy.

In a video first obtained by The Rooster, a local political blog in Ohio, Arthur accused her daughter of lying about her upbringing, specifically that her family had been homeless.

“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, adding: “Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself. It will only get worse.”

In 1978, Arthur’s husband, Cledith “Bud” Arthur, was charged and indicted for rape. Court documents indicate he’d engaged in sexual contact with Acton when she was less than 13 years old. In a 2019 interview, Acton said that she’d been sexually abused between the ages of nine and 12. After her stepfather pleaded guilty, he skipped bail, and Arthur left town with him, Acton said.

The advertisement doesn’t include the typical political disclosures, isn’t running on television, and isn’t being pushed on social media or search engines. Rather, it is being solely championed by right-wing influencers who are foaming at the mouth for the chance to smear Acton’s character.

It’s still not clear who produced the video, but Acton appeared certain that she knows who’s really behind it.

“I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is something I’m just complaining about, who today just released an ad using my birth mother who I was removed from at the age of 12 for severe abuse and neglect, sexual abuse,” she said in an television interview Tuesday, referring to Ramaswamy. “The words our leaders use matter and I think it’s going to take courage right now, from all of us, to stop normalizing this sort of rhetoric.”

Ramaswamy previously blasted Acton for discussing the abuse, claiming Ohio needs someone with “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

Acton’s brother Philip Stearns also condemned the ad. “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,” Stearns said in a statement.

“After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core—a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants.”

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, the president lamented that Minnesota had hundreds of lakes—until the Somalis arrived.

“They’ve ruined a great state,” Trump said, referring to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. “You know I remember Minnesota in the old days, what a beautiful, beautiful, with lakes all over the place, they had more lakes than any place I’ve ever seen. It was so beautiful.

“They’re destroying it, probably, maybe they’ve destroyed it,” Trump continued, referring to the Somali immigrant community. “And I only hope a Republican woman who happens to be very respected by everybody gets in because you will see a difference.”

Trump was likely referring to Lisa Demuth, who is running in Minnesota’s gubernatorial election against Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar.

But the nonsensical conjecture emerged in the midst of a lengthy rant against Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, during which the president warned that the congresswoman could be deported or “go to jail” if evidence emerges that her father inaccurately reported her age on a citizenship application nearly three decades ago. Trump slammed Omar as a “sick” and “very dishonest person who hates our country.”

“She comes from a country that is essentially not even a country,” Trump said, referring to Somalia. “It’s a real shithouse.… Then she comes over here and she wants to tell us how to run America.

“She’s a disgrace to our country, and it’s amazing she can get elected, but Somalians vote for her,” Trump continued, using the wrong term for Somalis.

Trump then proceeded to disparage America’s Somali immigrant population, baselessly projecting that 98 percent of Somalis in the country “don’t work.”

“Most of them shouldn’t be here,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.”

Some residents have received pamphlets and fliers from the “Texas Transgender Student Union,” a made-up organization, advising them on how to emancipate from their parents and receive out-of-state medical care. The pamphlets seem to be leaning into right-wing hysteria over gender-affirming care for minors.

The branding on the flyers mimics that of the real-life Transgender Education Network of Texas, which disavowed the mailings on a statement on its website.

“We are aware of text messages and now physical mailers that have been circulated concerning TENT that appear to have been issued by or on behalf of the organization,” the website states. ”These text messages and mailers were not authored, authorized, approved, or distributed by TENT and are not affiliated with our organization. The texts do not represent the official position or communications of the organization.”

Republicans across the Lone Star State who received the literature, which seems to be specifically targeting them, are falling for the ragebait.

The mailings include an “LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guide” flyer that has resources and websites aimed at helping transgender youth. The Concho Observer, an independent local news outlet based in San Angelo, Texas, found that the address provided for the Texas Transgender Student Union is a UPS Store in Flower Mound, Texas.

The Observer estimates that sending the mailings would cost between $3 million and $4.4 million, proving that they must have been part of a deliberate political operation. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has already poured nearly $190 million into the Texas Senate race, and has engaged in shady, legally gray tactics before. He, or another Republican megadonor, is likely responsible for the mailers.

The flyers come after suspicious text messages seemingly impersonating TENT went out to Texans last week purporting to offer help about gender-affirming care in the state and provide guides to “bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” The organization sent out a cease and desist notice to two digital messaging companies to halt the campaign.

Trump made the announcement about the Justice Department’s new $25 million anti-fraud program on Tuesday afternoon alongside Vice President JD Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and right-wing provocateur Nick Shirley.

Trump explained the new program while handing a $10,000 check to Shirley, a 24-year-old YouTuber who gained notoriety for a shoddy investigation into Somali daycare centers in Minnesota that led to an increase in racist attacks on that community, culminating in the recent raid on the home of Somali American Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

The website seeking tips is Fraud.gov.

“If anybody turns anybody in [for fraud of] a billion dollars, $5 billion, $100 billion, you get a 1 percent commission,” Trump promised during the announcement. “The kind of money that’s been stolen is trillions from this country, by crooked politicians that made things, and set things up.… I can name all of them.

“All of those people that are willing to do the right thing and turn people in … they’re gonna become rich. When you get 1 percent of a billion dollars, 1 percent of a hundred billion dollars, it’s gonna be a tremendous amount of money,” he continued. “It’s the largest commission ever paid, probably for anything anywhere—because the numbers you’re talking about are in the trillions.”

Given the administration’s poor track record at tackling corruption, here are some tips you can submit to the website:

Just a week ago, U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle was forced to resign after reports that she allegedly threatened a host country official and offered pay-to-play access to Trump administration officials in return for $100,000.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is estimated to have gotten $2.7 billion richer since being elected in 2024. The Trump family’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial Fund made a $500 million deal with the United Arab Emirates, after which the country suddenly obtained U.S. AI chip technology. Trump sued the IRS after his tax returns were leaked during his own first term—and he then settled his lawsuit with the establishment of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to reward his allies.

A broker representing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was caught trying to invest in defense companies right before the administration started bombing Iran in February. Trump has rewarded countless donors with appointments and favors, used taxpayer funds to broadcast his own propaganda commercials, and has had his FBI and Justice Department drop bribery probes and disband offices looking into corruption, even in the middle of massive cases.

Case in point: Last week, Senator Elissa Slotkin said at an academic panel that Congress must impose accountability on mid-tier government officials who enable corruption at higher levels. MAGA personalities cherry-picked one quote from the Michigan Democrat to insist she called for the indiscriminate prosecution of young Trump supporters.

It’s pure bulls--t. But the online outrage they ginned up has started paying off with headlines like this one from CNN:

Democratic Senator sparks controversy over comments on investigating the Trump administration

Note how the right is drained of agency entirely: The only actor who sparked the “controversy” is Slotkin! But she didn’t spark anything, as any fair reading of her comments immediately indicates.

You can watch the key Slotkin monologue starting right here. Slotkin says “accountability” for the Trump administration requires Congress to pick high-profile examples of its “corruption.” She adds that such oversight should “not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” that is, on officials “who are doing his bidding.” Slotkin says she hopes real oversight might dissuade young people from joining the administration if they conclude association with a corrupt administration will buy them “a ton of problems.”

The MAGA right jumped all over this after an obscure conservative account clipped 26 seconds of it and packaged it as a call for “political prosecutions” designed to “scare young conservatives” away from politics.

Brian Beutler tracked the whole sordid spectacle that unfolded next: Big MAGA personalities adopted that exact framing. One falsely insisted that Slotkin had threatened “illegal arrests,” which will require reminding her “why we have the Second Amendment.”

Trump just got in on this scam too. Speaking to reporters, the president called Slotkin a “lowlife” who “weaponized government,” repeating the phrase for emphasis.

There was also this exchange:

REPORTER: She says she wants there to be prosecutions of Republicans, to scare young conservatives from going into office.

TRUMP: That’s a hell of a statement. Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics. That’s a Democrat. That’s all they do. That’s all they’re good at. And you know what? That’s why they’re getting their asses kicked.

Note that the reporter recites the invented interpretation of Slotkin’s comments as if that’s what she’d said verbatim, then invites Trump to “respond” to that. This unnamed reporter may be one of the propagandists handpicked by the White House to deliver questions exactly like this one.

The only correct response to this nonsense is: Who the f–k are we kidding here?

We already know that mid-tier government officials are indeed under pressure, here in the real world, to engage in extreme corruption and likely lawbreaking. That’s because this has been publicly documented again and again and again. Here’s a partial list:

• Numerous prosecutors in Minnesota quit after coming under pressure to baselessly investigate the widow of Renee Good, who was shot to death by a federal agent.

• A top military commander resigned amid private concerns over the administration’s orders to carry out the likely illegal killing of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean.

• A prosecutor in Virginia stepped down after facing pressure to corruptly prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James, a longtime Trump foe.

• Trump openly directed prosecutors to indict former FBI Director James Comey, even though career lawyers thought the case was too weak to justify it.

• Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi precisely because she wasn’t adequately prosecuting his critics in defiance of facts and law.

• As a senior housing agency official, Trump ally Bill Pulte made a hobby of scouring the mortgage applications of Trump critics to gin up fake rationales for prosecuting them.

• Top Trump officials corruptly brought the full weight of the government down on Kilmar Ábrego García, all because his wrongful deportation to a foreign gulag embarrassed the despot, so he had to be found guilty of something.

The right retort to MAGA personalities faking outrage over Slotkin’s comments is to laugh in their faces.

What about Slotkin’s remarks about young people entering government? The entire context for her answer was a question about how Congress can reclaim power it has abdicated as a check on the executive branch. This abdication has indeed happened at a large scale.

Slotkin’s point, then, is that it’s not desirable for young people who aspire to careers in government to come to believe that executive branch corruption can unfold even as congressional oversight is reduced to a dead letter. At worst this was inartfully worded on her part. The larger meaning is perfectly clear.

The stakes here are considerable. All the outrage and intimations about the Second Amendment are taking their toll: Josh Stewart, a spokesperson for Slotkin, tells me that she and her staff have “received a huge uptick in threats,” which have been reported to the U.S. Capitol Police. Stewart adds: “This has resulted in an increased security presence for Senator Slotkin and her entire team.”

Mission accomplished for MAGA, apparently.

Democrats absolutely should be saying right now that if they take congressional power, mid-level government officials will need to prepare for much more robust efforts at transparency and accountability. Democrats should urge them to consider whether they want to continue enabling Trump’s corruption at risk of public exposure to themselves.

It’s no accident that Senator Jon Ossoff has emerged as a successful communicator in Democratic politics while making vows like this one about Trump’s corruption and its enablers:

If you’re involved in any of this, next year you’ll be raising your right hand and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God, in front of Congress!

Meanwhile, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed went viral after a MAGA plant demanded he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. He didn’t give an inch to the bad-faith question itself and made the exchange all about the veiled Christian nationalist intent of his questioner—a GOP operative who once worked for Senator Josh Hawley—to mark Muslims as unfit to participate in U.S. democracy.

The virtue of these approaches is that they don’t waste time pretending there’s a shred of legitimacy to MAGA outrage. They don’t let the media tendency to elevate that outrage into double-sided “controversy” lead to pulled punches and mealymouthed apologies or equivocation.

What really happened with Slotkin is that she pointed out the obvious: Trump’s corrupt and potentially criminal schemes depend on underlings being willing to carry them out—and a Congress that has dispensed with its oversight role entirely. And that can’t be allowed to stand in a republic grounded in rule of law.

For some reason, MAGA personalities decided that this very suggestion constitutes a dire threat to their political project. In truth, they’re not wrong about that last part. But this doesn’t make the point they think it does.

Insiders that spoke to ProPublica shared that political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security had asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, to covertly obtain a voting machine, break into it, and report back to the White House.

The directive reportedly shocked CISA employees, who felt the request was antithetical to their mission of thwarting potential hackers. Furthermore, staff were concerned by another DHS request that would have restricted CISA from notifying the voting machine companies of their findings.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any results they don’t like,” one former official told ProPublica. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The request was ultimately not fulfilled, in no small part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation were terminated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Eventually the political appointees stopped pressing the issue, according to ProPublica.

Over the course of Trump’s second administration, more than 1,000 employees have been pushed out of CISA—about a third of the agency. But CISA could be on the brink of more devastating cuts: The president’s 2027 budget proposal would shrink funding for the agency by $700 million, a number that could result in another 900 employees getting axed.

Against all democratic principles, Trump has repeatedly attacked the concept of voting and stoked election conspiracies for his own personal gain. He has continually made unfounded claims about voter fraud, pressured state election officials, strong-armed state legislatures to reshape their districts for the benefit of his agenda, and attempted to dismantle mail-in voting—all to remain in power and disregard or overthrow electoral results that he has perceived as less than favorable.

The Washington Post reports that about 10 former and current employees with experience in the Department of Defense have been advising states on how to counter President Trump’s efforts under the radar. Some of the people have experience with opposing authoritarian governments overseas.

Two members of the group anonymously spoke with the Post, telling the newspaper that they were not motivated by political affiliation or bias but rather the fear that Trump is trying to damage democracy in the U.S. by undermining election integrity to protect himself and his Republican allies. The group, which also shared documents with the publication, has reportedly consulted with election officials, governors, and members of Congress comprising both Democrats and Republicans across 10 states.

The group is focusing on states and localities where races are expected to be close and could determine which party controls Congress after the midterms. The group is in constant contact with congressional staffers, and at least one state is holding ongoing meetings, according to the Post. In addition to raising awareness, the group is also trying to help states make their election protocols harder to for the federal government to exploit.

“All of them have said ‘We’re concerned but we don’t know what to do,’” one member of the group told the Post. “The outcome that we hope for is that states would be prepared for any contingencies should they arise.”

In a statement, the White House attacked the group and claimed Trump is only pushing for stricter election laws.

The Trump administration “is taking decisive action to protect our elections including prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis.

Trump has continued to fuel election conspiracies and insist that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Administration officials have seized voting machines and ballots, demanded voter rolls from state governments, and taken legal action against Democratic states based on faulty or even fabricated evidence.

The White House has also sought to purge the federal bureaucracy of civil servants it deems disloyal to Trump, especially in federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI. Congress and state officials are right to be concerned about the election: Trump could interfere with the results, skirt or break laws, or outright disavow any losses without fear of legal action.

Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias was found unconscious in his bed Saturday morning at the Rio Grande Processing Center. ICE had detained Andrade-Covarrubias on June 26, as he was returning to Texas from Mexico through the port of entry in Laredo. The agency claimed that he’d failed to disclose a prior arrest when applying for his green card in 2004.

Andrade-Covarrubias’s daughter, Estefani Andrade, told the Tribune that her father had disclosed his criminal record during his application process and was still approved. Andrade-Covarrubias was scheduled to appear at an immigration court hearing on November 2.

As of Monday, his cause of death was still unknown.

Andrade told the Tribune that her father had a heart condition, diabetes, high blood pressure, and experienced a lasting toll from being hospitalized with Covid-19 in 2021. She claimed that staff at the processing center had refused to give him his medication, and that when her father began reporting symptoms, such as a persistent cough, difficulty breathing, and tightness across the chest, medical personnel “would just ignore him.”

In a statement, ICE claimed that Andrade-Covarrubias received proper medical care.

A Bloomberg Law investigation concluded that 37 people died in ICE custody between October 2025 and September 2026, marking the fiscal year 2026 as the deadliest in the agency’s recorded history.

Under the Trump administration, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, and insufficient food and water. Immigrants have been denied adequate medical care and legal counsel, and were even locked in cages.

“These efforts to retaliate and discriminate against CNN based on the content of its news coverage are mistaken, counterproductive, and unlawful,” Ted Boutrous, the network’s outside counsel, wrote in a letter to the Justice Department on Tuesday. He added that CNN “will be forced to pursue additional judicial relief” if Trump does not stop.

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico all moved to sue Trump last month when he dramatically banned the trio of networks from the White House because he didn’t like the way they were covering him. While most access has been temporarily returned as the lawsuits continue in court, the administration has still decided to keep CNN off the presidential jet.

“Those spaces belong not to any particular president or administration but to all Americans, and CNN and other members of the press serve as surrogates for the public when covering the White House,” Boutrous continued. “If these actions persist … CNN will have no choice but to return to the court to defend its rights, and it is prepared to fight as long as is necessary to secure them.”

The White House maintains that its decision to shut out CNN is justified.

“No person and no journalist have a constitutional right to access to the President’s Oval Office, Air Force One, or other sensitive and private facilities,” it wrote in a statement. “When publications lie, fabricate, and ignore the truth, proximity matters less and they can write their fiction from outside of these secure facilities.”

The secretary defended Trump’s intended meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, telling reporters Tuesday morning that the U.S. president’s detractors need to “grow up.”  

“People need to grow up when it comes to foreign policy a little bit. I don’t think it’s unusual for the three most powerful, nuclear-armed nations on earth—for their leaders to communicate with one another,” Rubio said. “I think it makes all the sense in the world.”

Rubio argued that Trump “does not consider talking to someone to be a concession.”

“For example, how are you going to reach a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine if you don’t talk to Russia and Ukraine? You have to talk to them, right?” Rubio continued. “That’s the bottom line of diplomacy and negotiation.”

“Frankly, I think if there’s an opportunity … to have a conversation about things like arms control, that would be a very positive thing for the world,” he said. “I think the world is a safer place when the leaders of the world are at least communicating with each other.”

Trump mused Monday that he would be open to an unprecedented three-way meeting with Xi and Putin regarding nuclear weapons and disarmament. 

“We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it. I’m sure we’d talk about other things like trade too.”

But the optics of Trump’s latest encounters with China and Russia have leaned more toward kowtowing than communicating. Last year, Trump had the U.S. military literally roll out a red carpet for Putin during his first visit to the U.S. in more than a decade. Trump did the same for Xi last month, when service members were filmed on their hands and knees picking and brushing imperfections out of the carpet fibers.

A video of the president departing for Kansas Monday afternoon showed him wandering off across the White House’s newly renovated helicopter pad, waving, saluting, and bowing as if he were interacting with a crowd of onlookers. When the camera panned out, however, it was clear that there was no one in the vicinity.

From another angle, Trump can be seen dragging his right leg and patting it as he approaches Marine One. He suddenly stops walking and starts waving to no one. Meanwhile, his aides approached from an entirely different direction.

Users on X speculated that the president might’ve been hallucinating or waving at his reflection—both troubling possibilities.

Brian Krassenstein, a political podcaster and social media influencer critical of Trump, responded to the strange moment. “I now have absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump has major mental decline,” he wrote on X. “Just think for one minute if Joe Biden had waved into the abyss like Trump just did here. Imagine what Fox News would be saying.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has appeared to wander off confusedly. In October last year, Trump seemed to forget where he was going as he walked through a room filled with dignitaries and a military band during a visit to Japan, at one point even leaving Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi behind.

This strange behavior is just the latest example of Trump’s apparent cognitive decline. Since returning to office, the president has often appeared to lose track of his thoughts, his whereabouts, and even his grasp on the English language.

More than 104,600 people in Harris County voted in person on Monday, the first day of early voting in Texas, according to the county’s elections department. That breaks the previous record set in 2018, when 63,188 votes were cast and Democrats went on to recapture the House.

While Monday’s turnout isn’t necessarily indicative of a Democratic advantage, the broken record indicates that Texans have been strongly compelled to participate electorally by any number of factors, which could include affordability, ICE raids, and President Trump’s war on Iran.

“The coffee that I buy two years ago was $12 for a big can, and now it’s $25 for the same thing, it’s ridiculous,” one voter told KPRC-TV’s Sandy Torres.

“[The] cost of living is way too high, war in Iran, our support to Ukraine,” said another.

“Thirty years of one party dominating the state; it’s time to get the other guy’s chance,” said one more.

This comes ahead of one of the most contested Senate races in the country between Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico—a contest that could turn the state blue for the first time in over three decades.

This positive development also comes less than a week after voting rights groups sued the Texas Department of Public Safety over a “glitch” that caused 600,000 Texans to have their voting registration delayed.

Early voting is open for 11 more days in Harris County.

At a rally in Park City, Kansas, Tuesday, Trump referenced the student protests in France, using anti-immigrant bigotry and Islamophobia to try and scare Republicans into turning out over the next two weeks.

“Globalist left-wing have treasonously imported millions and millions of third world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West, and they are incompatible with Western values. They despise everything about France, and they’re destroying that country, and we’re not going to let that happen to this country,” Trump said during his speech. Despite interruptions by protesters, the crowd broke into applause at Trump’s words.

“When you see burning steeples and raging fires in ⁠France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America,” Trump added.

Trump is only in Kansas because the Republican Party is polling historically low, putting normally safe candidates in jeopardy thanks to his own bad economic policies and an ill-advised war he started. Republican Senator Roger Marshall was expected to coast to victory in the state, but is now polling neck and neck with Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton.

Trump’s fearmongering over the invented specter of riots is a desperate effort that isn’t likely to sway any voters on the fence, who can plainly see skyrocketing fuel prices and inflation with their own eyes. Besides, if Republicans lose big, which side of the American political divide, based on recent history, is more likely to violently protest?

The 42-year-old is theoretically supposed to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man and political successor. Yet nearly two years into Trump’s second administration, the two still aren’t on the same page. In a sit-down interview with conservative commentator Mark Halperin on Air Force Two Monday, the vice president didn’t seem so confident that he would definitely obtain Trump’s endorsement.

Halperin posed two questions to Vance: first, if he planned to run for president, and second, if he would “definitely” obtain Trump’s endorsement.

“I’ll tell you Mark that I’m focused on the midterm elections and I want to get as many good Republicans elected in early November as possible,” Vance said.

“Look, I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028, I really haven’t focused on it,” he continued. “You and I have talked about that. Look, I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”

“Right away? Right at the beginning?” pressed Halperin. “In other words, the day you announce. He’d endorse you, right?”

“I don’t know, man, I haven’t talked to him about it,” Vance laughed.

“It would be kind of weird though if you said, ‘Mr. President, I’m going to run,’ and he said, ‘Let me think about it,’” Halperin said.

But Vance equivocated.

“No, it wouldn’t be weird,” Vance said. “I think I’d get his endorsement, but I also think there’s something to be said for people actually running their own race. And because the president’s endorsement is so dispositive, you could absolutely see a scenario where the president says, ‘You know what, we need to let this race play out and not preemptively prejudge the results.’”

“Sometimes media scrutiny, pressure, policy goals—” Vance continued before Halperin interjected that he “might be horrible at it.”

“I would be terrible at it,” Vance said. “So I don’t know, having never spoken to the president about this, I can’t speak to his psychology on it. But my attitude is, if I run, I think the president will endorse me. But I also haven’t talked to him about it.”

Inside Washington

Dems and GOP differ in one big way when it comes to cash

With just two weeks to go until the midterm elections, competitive races are blowing through cash at unprecedented rates. “This is a whole new world, even in the post-Citizens United era,” said Jake Grumbach, a professor at UC Berkeley, about the amount of money raised and spent in the 2026 cycle. More than $15 billion has already been raised, and AdImpact predicts ad spending will hit a record-shattering $11.6 billion.

So far, Democratic candidates in the most competitive races have raised the most money. In some races, the difference is massive: In the Georgia Senate contest, Senator Jon Ossoff has outraised his competitor, Representative Mike Collins, by more than a factor of 10. But add super PACs and party spending into the mix, and suddenly Republicans have the advantage. “Republican megadonors and the super PACs they’re funding are more than making up that gap, and in our system, money matters,” said Eric Petry, counsel in the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “It’s helping to keep Republicans in some of these key states, key races, competitive.”

Elon Musk is one such Republican megadonor. Musk, the richest person in the world, has poured more than a quarter of a billion dollars into super PACs and Republican groups. Over the summer, Musk gave $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP’s PAC for Senate candidates. That single donation was more than the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC raised from all its donors during that quarter.

The flood of money from wealthy donors like Musk has made this a uniquely expensive election. “In the past, it’s typically been not complete parity between Democratic and Republican candidates, but by and large, the two parties have kind of raised and spent relatively equal amounts,” Petry explained. “So far this election cycle, Republicans are on track to dramatically outspend Democrats in a way that we just really haven’t seen before.”

Super PACs like Fairshake, which is aligned with the cryptocurrency industry, and AI-focused Leading the Future, which is backed by tech giants like OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, have also spent millions to support their preferred candidates and oppose those they see as hostile to their agendas. Experts worry that this unbridled industry spending will ultimately affect the legislation that Congress pursues, particularly now, when Americans want to see the AI industry regulated. “When you’ve got major tech titans spending just gobs of money to influence the political process, that sends a real message to members of Congress to think twice about how they’re approaching these issues,” said Michael Beckel, the director of money in politics reform at Issue One.

PAC money has been a lifeline to Republicans like Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, who has raised far less than his opponent, James Talarico. Between July and September, the GOP’s main Senate super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, raised a record $272.9 million, about $122 million more than its Democratic counterpart. In turn, the Senate Leadership Fund funneled $158 million into Texas PAC, which backs Paxton.

Republicans have also benefited from a June Supreme Court decision that struck down limits on the amounts that parties could spend in coordination with candidates. National parties, like the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), can accept much larger donations than individual candidates can, and they can now coordinate their spending of that money with their preferred candidates. At the end of August, the RNC had more than seven times the amount that the DNC had in cash on hand, and the June decision made that advantage all the more powerful.

“Both parties feel like they’re in a political fundraising arms race that they don’t want to fight with one hand tied behind their back, and so they’re using every weapon available,” Beckel said. That’s led Democrats to engage in some strategies that others find unsavory, such as constant spam texts asking for donations and an embrace of their own megadonors like George Soros. (He and his family have  given $103 million to support Democrats this cycle.)

Whether Republican spending is enough to counter the mounting blue wave remains to be seen. But no matter the outcome, experts say, this election should change how we think about money in politics. “This election cycle is really kind of shining a spotlight on just how unequal our campaign finance system has become,” Petry said.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Josh Turek had a busy weekend in his campaign for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat, knocking on doors with former Senator Tom Harkin. Talking to the Iowa Capital Dispatch’s Robin Opsahl, both politicians argued that they don’t see Iowa as an inherently red state: “I just think that a lot of Iowans felt—rightfully so—that people maybe in both parties were not really paying attention to their basic needs,” Harkin told Opsahl. “They then sort of said, ‘Well, we’ll try something new and maybe flashy, like Trump.’” Turek added: “I think that Iowans, more than almost any other state, they vote for the person, not just the party.” He contends that Trump “accurately identified the problem” that Iowans face, with lots of talk on the campaign trail about bringing prices down. But then he did “the opposite.”

Turek has been polling neck and neck with Republican Representative Ashley Hinson so far—some polls putting one a couple points ahead, some the other. Democrat Rob Sand, who is running for governor, by contrast has consistently polled between four and 12 percentage points ahead of Republican Zach Lahn. Newsweek’s Anna Skinner on Monday tackled the question of why Turek seems to be lagging behind Sand right now. One big factor that experts identified was name recognition—not just for Turek and Sand but for their opponents. Many people don’t know who Lahn is, which gives Sand an advantage. Turek’s opponent, Hinson, on the other hand, is much better known, since she currently holds one of the state’s four seats in Congress, while Turek as state legislator represents a “district on the far western part of the state,” University of Iowa professor Timothy Hagle told Skinner.

Elsewhere:

• A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds, alongside the usual dismal Trump approval rating, that 66 percent of likely voters think the president “is using the presidency to enrich himself, up from 56 percent last fall.” Also of note: For the first time since this poll began in 2014, more voters trust Democrats than Republicans to handle the economy—but that’s only 40 percent of people trusting Dems versus 33 percent trusting Republicans. A more useful way to think about this might be that voters think neither party is especially good at managing the economy!

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Wednesday at 10 a.m., the Brookings Institution hosts “AI on the ballot: Data centers and the 2026 midterms,” an in-person and online conversation with Elham Tabassi, Representative James A. Himes, Kyle Chan, Anthony F. Pipa, Mark Muro, Thomas Wright, Valerie Wirtschafter, and Sanjay Patnaik, probing “how decisions about where AI is built and how it is used have become part of the choices facing voters this fall.”

Government watchdog Public Citizen releases a report quantifying the strangeness of the Make America Healthy Again movement’s alliance with the Trump administration. In May 2025, Public Citizen notes, the Trump admin published a “MAHA report” on the dangers of various environmental contaminants. Yet “for 20 of 21 environmental chemical substances that the MAHA report focused on,” Public Citizen notes, “the administration has either moved toward loosening regulations that protect public health (nine chemicals), done nothing (ten chemicals), and endorsed one chemical’s use despite its links to cancer.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

For a few days in October 2008, Ashley Todd seemed like she might loom large in that year’s election. But her story turned out to be false. What did she allege happened to her, and what was the bizarre tell that she was lying? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

* An earlier version of this piece misstated the tool used to create the charts.

“Here are pictures of Trash Island for the Judge to study. This is just a small area, and better than some!” Trump wrote on Truth Social overnight Monday, referring to a heavily overgrown area at the center of the course where the National Parks Service had already begun to fell dozens of trees. 

The president shared photographs of abandoned wooden pallets, construction equipment, large bins, and trucks for tree removal. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the debris was from the president’s stalled efforts to transform the public park into a high-end, exclusive golf course. 

He also shared images of damaged iron fences along the course and waterfront. “Collapsing Sea Wall—Very dangerous to one’s health!” Trump wrote, including a photograph of a fence that had been nearly swallowed by the Potomac.

Last week, District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the government from felling hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, and tore into the Trump administration lawyer for claiming that tree removal is not part of the president’s renovation plans. The Department of Justice demanded that she step down, claiming that her outburst proved she was biased against the government. The judge refused, sending Trump spiraling on social media.

Trump’s posting may have already landed him in trouble. At a hearing Monday, the preservation group mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s federal takeover of the course introduced the president’s own Truth Social post as evidence that the government plans to proceed with renovations “IMMEDIATELY!”

New reporting from ProPublica details the dealings of the South Carolina politicians with Navatek executives, including CEO Martin Kao, who told the FBI that he was exchanging campaign donations and gifts for millions of dollars in naval contracts.

In March 2020, the late Senator Graham met with Navatek lobbyists at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C, and made a deal to give a $10 million government contract to Navatek in exchange for $100,000 in campaign donations, on top of the $40,000 he charged just for the meeting, according to Kao.

“This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Graham allegedly told Kao.

Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House, also met with Navatek leaders—and asked them to match Graham’s campaign gift of $100,000 in exchange for political favors. Fellow South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican, also allegedly made cash-for-contract dealings with Navatek.

Kao was eventually arrested for campaign finance violations in September 2020 and confessed to federal agents that Navatek’s entire business model relied solely on bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts. The agents working on the case told their superiors their investigation could eventually include the lawmakers involved, but they were fired as the Department of Justice took revenge on the public corruption team, which previously investigated Trump.

This reporting from ProPublica is a continuation of its investigation into Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, who also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Navatek in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. Collins’s PAC received $150,000 from Kao right after their own D.C. restaurant meeting in 2019, and two months later, Kao informed Navatek that Collins committed to giving it $32 million in naval contracts.

This had the potential to be one of the biggest political corruption scandals of the modern era, a tangible exposé of just how much influence lobbyists actually have in Washington and how eager our self-interested politicians are to take money from them. And the FBI knew that. But as soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, the case was killed. This move inadvertently prevented a bipartisan whale of a corruption scandal from fully coming to light. And while Kao remains in jail, none of the powerful senators the FBI was investigating have faced any kind of repercussions—thanks to Trump. The team can’t even file a new case.

“You gotta hand it to Trump: he holds the consistent position that, Republican OR Democrat, bribery is not a crime,” journalist Matthew Chapman wrote on X. “He’ll cook up any number of bogus charges to take down his political enemies. But he’ll never go after bribery, even if it’s his enemies doing it.”

Kao has made political donations to dozens of politicians from both parties, including Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, and Tulsi Gabbard. Clyburn, Graham, and Wilson’s offices all deny Kao’s quid pro quo allegations.

“[Marshall] was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request strongly money owed from patients. You’re not allowed not to do it. You have to by law go after these people, and they made it, like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy,” Trump said in a speech to the crowd.

The term refers to a Jewish character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice who is portrayed as a cunning moneylender, fueling stereotypes about the Jewish people. In a guide for educators, the Anti-Defamation League states “Shylock, and by extension, all Jews, are presented as money-hungry, conniving, and cruel.”

Trump used the term in a speech last year about a bill he was trying to pass, distinguishing between respectable bankers and exploitative ones.

“No going to the banks and borrowing from in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases Shylocks and bad people,” Trump said at the time. Following the event, when reporters questioned him about its antisemitic origins, Trump said he had “never heard that.”

Marshall, who was a doctor before entering politics, is under fire for suing hundreds of patients over unpaid medical bills, even pursuing criminal charges over debts as little as $101. His record has given Democrats an opening in the normally safe Kansas Senate seat, with Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton, a pastor, seizing the opportunity and polling neck and neck with Marshall.

“There are 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak to caring for the poor,” Hamilton said at a debate with Marshall last month. “This is not happening under this man.”

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

We’ve got tons of new developments in the battle for Congress. New polls show Donald Trump cratering and the Democratic lead growing. The GOP leaks of panic are growing more humiliating for the president. And Trumpworld is responding to all this in a way that some Republicans call shocking.

We think all signs are that Trump and his aides are already planning to blame a big loss on everyone but him, and we think that would be bad for the country in terms of what’s coming next. So we hope Democrats won’t let them get away with that.

We’re talking about all of it with Madison Andrus, a senior operative overseeing House races for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. She’s got some new polling to share, as well. Madison, thanks for coming on.

Madison Andrus: Thanks for having me Greg. It’s really great to be back on again.

Sargent: Well, the new Washington Post poll has Trump’s approval at a record low of 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving. The Post has Democrats leading in the generic ballot matchup by eight points, 52–44. The new NBC poll finds Trump’s approval at 34 percent and Democrats leading in the generic matchup by 10 points, 55–45.

Madison, it’s clear that Trump’s approval is now dropping into the low 30s, and the Democratic lead in the generic ballot matchup is growing. Do you think Democrats are up by 10 points in the generic matchup right now?

Andrus: We are seeing in Trump plus 10 districts all across the country that Democrats are either leading or well within striking distance. You know, looking over to North Carolina with Jamie Ager, just an incredibly well-run campaign with a great candidate who’s a part of his community, and in a Trump plus 10 district. And we are feeling really good and confident about our odds there.

And so I think that there are a lot of districts all across the country, you know, that we’ve had on our map for months and months, if not years. And people thought we were crazy to kind of be going into these traditionally red areas and red districts. And now we are just a couple of weeks away from the election, and we see that it’s really paying off.

Sargent: I want to come back to that, but let’s talk about Jamie Ager in North Carolina’s 11th district for a second. It’s one of the ones I’m really watching closely. This is in western North Carolina, the western tip.

It’s in Appalachia. This is really heavy-duty Trump country. It does have Asheville, but it’s very rural in a lot of stretches. And like I say, Appalachia, Trump country. This is a place where you guys really think you’re going to win?

Andrus: Yeah, we feel very good about what is happening in western North Carolina. Just a couple of days ago, there was a huge, huge rally that Jamie Ager put on in North Carolina 11. Over 3,000 people came out to see and hear from Jamie Ager.

JD Vance is actually in that district today, and judging from the photos that I saw, he could barely pull together 30 people to come and see him.

Sargent: Well, that’s pretty striking that they’re sending JD Vance to North Carolina’s 11th district.

Let’s talk about some of these Republican leaks. They’re really off the charts now. Republicans leaked to Politico that there’s a new level of panic over their internal polling in the House races. A growing number of Republicans blame Trump directly for this situation.

And one House Republican blames GOP leaders for being too slow to deliver reinforcements to safer seats that are now at risk. This Republican says: “The leadership at the NRCC is living in a bubble. We’re getting killed out here.” The NRCC is, for folks who don’t know, the counterpart to the DCCC.

Madison, that strikes me as interesting. Has there been, like, a sudden deterioration in these safer seats? Can you give us a few examples of where you’re seeing that, if you are?

Andrus: I don’t think that this is a sudden deterioration. It feels like Republicans have just finally opened their eyes to what folks all across the country are feeling. They started out this cycle by gutting Medicaid, by nearly a trillion dollars, cutting Medicaid. They are cutting food assistance benefits, they’re backing this war in Iran.

Gas prices are up all over the country, diesel fuel hitting over $6 in many parts. You know, this is the reality that working families in America have been facing for over a year now. This is not a sudden shift. It just feels like finally, when they are actually staring down their election, they’re finally waking up, and it’s just too late.

Sargent: What are some of these districts that are really on the outer tiers looking like? I mean, these are places maybe where they haven’t really been on people’s radar at all, but now that Trump is just continually deteriorating the way he is, all of a sudden these outer-tier places are within play. Can you talk about a few places like that?

Andrus: Yeah, we talked about North Carolina 11, but we’re seeing it in so many other places. Kind of bringing us back down to Texas, in Texas 15 with Bobby Pulido against Monica De La Cruz—everybody’s been really talking about Bobby Pulido for a while, but folks were really questioning if a Democrat could win in this district that Trump won by a fairly large margin.

And what we’ve seen in the last two weeks is, absolutely he can. And even Monica knows this. When Mike Johnson was there just a couple of days ago, Monica was begging people not to believe the polls, because even their numbers are that bad for them.

We’re seeing over in Florida 25 with Jared Moskowitz against Scott Singer, Republicans are having to dump tens of millions of dollars into a district that was supposed to be an easy pickup for them. And so I think what we’ve clearly seen is that these gerrymandering attempts have backfired. And as we get closer and closer to Election Day, we are just seeing Republican chances in these districts absolutely crater.

Sargent: Well, there’s another development involving money. One Republican operative tells Politico this: “No one in the world expected that the Senate would need as much money as they did. 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.”

So Madison, there you have it. House Republicans blaming Senate counterparts for overconfidence and sucking up the resources they want. But what I don’t get about this, and maybe you can shed light here, is, aren’t House Republicans currently outspending House Democrats right now, when you put together the candidates’ war chests with the national group spending? What’s the situation there?

Andrus: Look, there’s no doubt that there is a ton of money flying around everywhere. And that was what people had said about Republicans pretty much this entire cycle, is that they’ve got this huge war chest and they’ve got all this money.

And what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks is that, you know, there’s a few things that money can’t fully buy. And we’re seeing that elections are one of them, when people are in just such a rough spot economically. Any money that they are pouring in is not actually changing the fact of the matter on the ground.

Sargent: Right. Although I will say, I pick up some angst from Democrats about the money. What I tend to hear from Democrats is that Republicans are spending so much now, like with Elon Musk’s millions, MAGA Inc.’s millions. They kind of say this is really uncharted territory, like no one feels confident about what the results will be of all the spending, because it’s just such a crazy amount. Is that an unreasonable fear?

Andrus: Yeah, I mean, we are not taking any of this for granted. Very recently we sent out a memo to donors saying that we wanted to make sure that we had the resources needed to fight, especially in kind of some of these outer districts, like in Florida 7 and in North Carolina 9.

And so we are still, you know, 15 days out from the election, we are still raising money to make sure that we are putting all of our candidates, all of our incumbents, in the best spot possible for November.

Sargent: So here’s something else that’s remarkable, as well. Trump’s super PAC officials are now telling Politico that they can’t really help embattled Republican incumbents and candidates all that much.

These officials are telling the Republican candidates that it’s on them to close on a positive message and tell voters what they will deliver to voters once they’re in office. This has left Republicans shocked, according to Politico.

So Madison, I mean, what’s surprising about this is how Trumpworld is just kind of washing its hands of the situation.

Andrus: They have not delivered in two years. As I mentioned, gas prices are up, the cost of health care is up, the Medicaid cuts endangered rural hospitals all over the country. They have no message on what they are going to deliver, because it has been a string of broken promises from day one with this Congress.

Sargent: Well, there’s more leaking coming from Republicans who are absolutely prepared to blame Trump. One GOP operative working on many races tells Politico: “He’s constantly been distracted and not focused on what the voters care about. It’s insane.”

That is really sort of a remarkable development that I don’t really know what might be a parallel in recent history—the degree to which Trump is just sort of out there, you know, talking about the ballroom, talking about his vanity projects, talking about what he’s doing next in the Capitol, a golf course now that he’s doing, and at the same time saying affordability’s a hoax and so forth.

But it sure looks to me like the situation that these Republicans are in, incumbents and candidates alike, is dictated wholly by the failures of Trump’s agenda, and that that’s just front and center in people’s minds. Right?

Like, so maybe they don’t pay close attention to Trump’s craziness day in and day out, but they are keenly aware that Trump is in charge, and that Trump is responsible for the situation in their daily lives. Is that something you see very clearly?

Andrus: That’s definitely something we’re seeing on the ground, is that voters are holding House Republicans responsible for co-signing this disastrous agenda that is just leading to higher costs across the board.

It’s higher prices at the grocery store, higher prices at the gas station, higher prices at the doctor’s office. And folks are really holding Republicans accountable for these failures of that agenda.

Sargent: So you have some new internal polling to share. This is in Texas’s 28th congressional district, where Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar is the incumbent. The new DCCC poll has Cuellar up by 54–34 over Republican challenger Tano Tijerina.

The poll has Trump’s approval at 34 percent to 57 percent disapproving. That’s 23 points underwater in a district that Trump carried in 2024 by over 10 points. Madison, is that what you found? And can you explain why you see it as significant?

Andrus: Yeah, these are just some really shocking and impressive numbers that we are seeing coming out of South Texas. And what’s interesting about this is that we’ve actually been hearing for months that Republican internal polling was showing some pretty equally horrendous numbers for them.

And putting all of this together and seeing these new numbers that we have, knowing that Republicans were seeing some pretty similar things, it really comes as no surprise why Republicans pulled out of this race and decided that they were no longer going to be funding Tano Tijerina’s campaign against Henry Cuellar, because they were just going to be flushing money down the toilet.

Sargent: Yeah, in fact, we should clarify that the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is, like, the leading Republican super PAC in the House races, recently pulled its funding, as Punchbowl News reported—pulled its funding out of this particular race.

This is a place that was a prize for Republicans, right? Like, they redrew Texas. They were aiming for Henry Cuellar’s district big-time, right? And so that’s a real sign of how much stuff has shifted. Can you talk about that?

Andrus: Yeah. At the beginning of all of this, they were calling Tano Tijerina their star recruit. He was the best of the best that they had, that they were propping up in South Texas. And to just go from, this is our prized recruit, to pulling millions of dollars away from him—I think it goes to show exactly how much Republicans have failed, but also just how strong of a candidate Henry Cuellar is, and how strong of a representative he is.

He has brought billions of dollars back to his district. He’s been a leader on how Democrats are talking about immigration. And he’s one of the most well-known people in all of South Texas.

And so I think we are just starting to see, one, the pipe dream that Republicans were ever really going to take him on fall apart, but also this Texas dummymander. Like you said, Republicans drew these districts, redrew these South Texas districts, to try to flip these seats. And this was one of their prime targets, and we are already seeing complete and utter failure there.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, a collapse of this magnitude in a place like that is striking. What’s going on in Texas’s 35th district? That’s another one. It’s a Democratic-held seat that Republicans redrew in hopes of winning, right? Like, what’s going on in that place?

Andrus: Yeah. So Texas 35, San Antonio area, that is basically a completely new district now, thanks to the Republican redraw. And we are still seeing really, really great signs coming out of Texas 35. You have the Democratic candidate there, Johnny Garcia, is a longtime sheriff’s deputy. He’s a law enforcement guy who has been a part of this community for years.

I think actually last time we talked, we talked about how I had actually just been down in South Texas with Johnny Garcia, and we were just walking around a couple of neighborhoods. And we stop by a house, and it’s a guy cleaning out his boat to go fishing later that afternoon or that weekend.

And he said to Johnny, I remember you from the sheriff’s office. I’ve never voted for a Democrat before in my life, but I’m voting for you this time.

Sargent: Striking stuff. What races do you predict Democrats will win in South Texas? Which districts?

Andrus: I think we are sweeping the South Texas districts. So that includes holding on to Texas 28 with Congressman Henry Cuellar, as well as Texas 34 with Congressman Vicente Gonzalez. And I think we’re flipping Texas 15. You know, Bobby Pulido is this once-in-a-generation candidate, an incredibly strong candidate for this community.

You just saw, he did the last concert of his career, and just the incredible crowd that came out to celebrate Bobby Pulido 15 days out from the election. The momentum down in South Texas is just something that’s been so incredible to see. And I think we are also going to take home Texas 35. This entire Texas redistricting is shaping up to be probably one of the most embarrassing dummymanders we’ve seen in a long time.

Sargent: Well, that would essentially mean that Democrats are going to win Texas’s 15th, Texas’s 28th, Texas’s 34th, Texas’s 35th. That would be quite a sweep. And that’s what you’re predicting. You’re going to win all.

Andrus: Yep. We are winning all of those.

Sargent: OK. Brass tacks. How many House seats at the end of the day, at the end of Election Day, how many do you think you’re going to end up with?

Andrus: I am not in the business of making those predictions. I’m bad at it. But no, I will tell you, we’re fighting every single day from now until November 3 for every single vote and every single district that we can.

Sargent: Madison Andrus, if you guys sweep South Texas, it’s going to be a seismic event. So I really hope to see it. Thanks so much for coming on. Really great to talk to you.

Andrus: It’s shaping up to be a good night on November 3.

Then, last week, Brazil basically voted Lula out of office in favor of Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio promises to free his father, remove all the current Supreme Court justices and replace them with his own, and generally carry on the brutal and corrupt policies of his father.  There will be a runoff October 25, but Bolsonaro is widely expected to win it against his 80-year-old opponent.

In short, Brazilians, just like voters in the United States, went into an election knowing full well what they were getting and chose sadopopulism (i.e., an appeal to voters that a candidate will not so much help them as hurt the people they hate) over democracy.

To most external observers, the right-wing demagogue looks like a buffoon selling magical thinking. He claims that he alone can solve everything with austerity, mass incarceration, centering society around conservative religion, and eliminating transgender people from public life. Somehow, people lose sight of the fact that they’re also voting for a justice system that shields the president’s supporters from any legal accountability, no matter what they do, while weaponizing said system against his political opponents.

The supporters of the autocrat ignore these things for a variety of reasons. Some assume that, although Trump is an incompetent idiot, their Trumpist leader will do much better despite embracing the same sorts of policies. Others don’t believe the new leader will be corrupt. Worse yet, many accept the corruption because it will benefit “their” side, even if it doesn’t benefit them personally, or even if it hurts them.

The appeal of sadopopulism is a corollary to Adam Serwer’s observation that the cruelty is the point: For these voters, the main attraction is that the president hurts the people they hate as much as possible.

This phenomenon is not limited to the United States and Brazil. In Germany, the pro-Russian and neo-fascist Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, is surging, while the center-right coalition led by Chancellor Friederich Merz is increasingly weak and unpopular. This situation resembles the Franz von Papen government that preceded Hitler in the Weimar Republic. Germany will hold its next federal election in January 2027, and the AfD is expected to win a plurality of the votes.

France’s Emmanuel Macron is a lame duck, and his coalition is collapsing too. Despite being convicted of felony embezzlement, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party was gifted the opportunity to run in the April 2027 federal elections by the court system, much the way Trump was. As a result, she is widely expected to win.

Both the AfD and National Rally are running on virtually identical platforms: pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, mass deportations of immigrants, tax cuts for the wealthy, centering conservative religion in society, austerity for the poor, long mandatory sentencing, rejecting the EU and NATO, banning same-sex marriage, and forcing transgender people out of public life.

It’s not just France and Germany, though. Reform UK would be the second-most preferred party if elections were held today (they must be held by 2029). Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia are all in the middle of a democratic backslide toward right-wing autocracy.

There are many overlapping theories as to why democracy is faring so poorly in so many places. Many states suffer from a gap between formal rights and the rule of law, where public resources are coopted for personal wealth and political status. Another potential cause is massive wealth inequality leading to oligarchy and disillusionment among voters. Heightened ideological, ethnic, and religious polarization creates deep distrust in democratic institutions and mainstream political parties, pushing people toward demagogues promising miracles.

Consolidated authoritarian regimes like China and Russia have grown more brazen in domestic repression and more influential internationally through multipolar alliances and economic leverage (such as the 10-member BRICS formed in 2009). Simultaneously, traditional Western democracies have faced internal crises, political friction, and a reduced capacity or willingness to champion global democratic norms. Regardless of the cause or causes, the quantitative evidence shows that this is clearly happening worldwide.

According to the 2026 Report on Global Democracy created by the Varieties of Democracy, or V-Dem, project, which seeks to conceptualize, measure, and provide detailed data on democracy around the world, there are 92 autocracies and 87 democracies worldwide. Seventy-four percent of the global population (about six billion people) live under autocracy, while only 7 percent live in liberal democracies, the worst it has been since 1978. Currently, 44 nations (representing 41 percent of the global population) are becoming more autocratic, while only 18 countries are improving.

Six out of 10 of the new countries in the process of becoming autocratic are in North America and Europe. These include the United States, the U.K., Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia. V-Dem reports that the U.S. dropped from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy, with its ranking falling from twentieth to fifty-first out of 179 nations amid rapid executive power concentration and attacks on judicial and media checks. Ironically, one of the very few “areas for hope” that the report listed was Brazil’s previous rejection of Jair Bolsonaro.

It is worth pointing out that all these new autocracies are right-wing, conservative movements. There are no Bolshevik or Marxist revolutions taking place; it’s all ethno-nationalism, selling sadopopulism to the portion of the public that feels it is no longer centered by society in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. As much as these people would like solutions, what they want even more is revenge. They want someone powerful to come in and brutalize the people they blame for their perceived loss of special status as “the right sort of person” now that immigrants, brown people, Muslims, and queers are no longer universally considered “the wrong sort.”

When did electing right-wing authoritarians ever work out well? They all seem to wallow in corruption, nepotism, grift, graft, and generally enriching themselves and their top-level cronies at the expense of the population. The law applies only to the everyday person and, of course, applies double to the regime’s political enemies. Let’s not forget the pointless wars that both the U.S. and Russia started and can’t back themselves out of, which threaten them with economic ruin.

Even if they do win these conflicts, the damage to their economies and prestige will linger for decades. Russia just surpassed 1.5 million casualties for the war in Ukraine, and the Pentagon is currently hemming and hawing about how many wounded and killed there have been in the war with Iran.

In the end analysis, it all feels so stupid. People have willingly traded away their say in government, a functioning economy, affordable cost of living and housing, and national prestige and maybe even sent their kids off to war in exchange for making some other people even more miserable than they already are. Incredibly, tragically, there will always be about a third of the population that looks at this trade, in retrospect, and says, “Yeah, it was totally worth it.”

It is hard to imagine, but in just a few years there will be up to a hundred million Americans who look back at Trump’s second term as a “golden age” and will go right back to voting for the next, even more far-right, aspiring autocrat. Sadly, people around the world will also look back at their own prior leaders, like Bolsonaro, Duda, Orbán, Duterte, and even Putin, and regard them as scions of a better, mythical past. This is how fascism keeps coming back repeatedly to haunt the next generation.

On paper, You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, does not exactly have the makings of a tearjerker. For many, Holmes is the opposite of a sympathetic subject: one of the few superstar CEOs of the 2010s to face actual consequences for engaging in a dangerous fraud. The fact that throughout her interviews with Fielder she admits no guilt for her deceptions at the blood-testing startup Theranos—insisting that the company had an invention that worked, and that she is now working on “Theranos 2.0”—does not help. When A24 dropped the trailer for the movie, her nodding, wide-eyed stare at Fielder inspired mockery and derision.

Nathan Fielder, meanwhile, is not best known for emotional range or psychological depth. His Comedy Central show Nathan for You was built around quick hits of shock value, as every episode he persuades small-business owners to run increasingly transparent scams in order to gain easy money or notoriety. It’s a premise he is able to execute so brazenly because the Nathan character in the show has such a flat affect; with a remarkable ability not to notice uncomfortable and often appalled reactions to his pitches, he exhibits a total lack of emotional intelligence. His 2022 show The Rehearsal is a self-consciously absurd attempt to avoid unruly feelings altogether, as he stages a simulation of a typical suburban life with actors playing his wife and child. When he starred alongside Emma Stone in The Curse in 2023, the New York Times’ critic called him a “stiff, limited actor.”

Fielder’s limitations, however, seem to make him less susceptible to manipulation than most people. There is never a moment when he is softer or more flattering than he should be for the sake of being polite. In an early scene, when Holmes shares with him her fear of being taken away from her family, he says woodenly, “That must be hard.” Later Fielder recalls that in his first meeting with Holmes he told her that, because of her reputation, he thought there was no chance anyone would ever believe anything she said.

The film he and Oppenheim have made is not interested in the science behind Theranos and does not indulge in any did-she-or-didn’t-she about the fraud. It is instead about living in the aftermath—about what happens to a person who has been blasted into little pieces by an overload of public attention, and whose efforts to hold onto an identity only seem to result in more fragmentation. The Elizabeth Holmes of this film appears as if in an eerie hall of mirrors: caught between the entrepreneur in the black turtleneck on the cover of Forbes magazine; the goofy, devious ingenue of the Hulu series The Dropout; the frazzled new mom sitting for interviews with Fielder; and the dozens of dots for a hologram created for her children. The effect is disorienting, sometimes trippy, and most often just very, very sad.

The first half of the movie is fairly straightforward: Fielder spends a month with Holmes and her family at the beachfront house they are renting in San Diego before she begins serving an 11-year sentence for fraud in a federal prison camp in Texas. (The sentence has since been reduced.) On Holmes’s side, the purpose appears to be to show that she has nothing to hide. On Fielder’s, it’s an opportunity to capture an atmosphere that is surreal even by his standards and ask some exceptionally blunt questions—a setup reminiscent of any number of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. He approaches Holmes’s father with: “I read you worked at Enron. How was that?” He suggests to Billy that Holmes may have had an ulterior motive in coupling up with him: “Isn’t your family rich?” To the couple, he muses one evening that it’s funny he is known for a show about business scams and now he’s making a film about them.

Some of the tension here builds predictably on the distance between how much Holmes tells Fielder he can see and what he is really allowed to see, between what he can capture on camera and what is being staged for his benefit. The film’s title comes from a text Holmes sends him shortly after she agrees to let him stay in the house 24-7, promising “fyi you can totally see everything.” It’s a message that feels less direct than it might sound, since Holmes sends it moments after walking away from him. As she strolls on the beach not far away, he can see her both when he receives her message and when she checks her phone for his reply. There are times when Fielder seems to have way too much access—there is a shot of Billy taking a shower, for instance, that prominently features his penis—and times when his interviews get sharply cut off.

One thing that the Holmes camp appears eager to emphasize for the cameras is her weirdness. Billy often insists that she is not normal and that she just thinks differently. When Fielder grills her about false claims she made about Theranos’s technology (“the fact that we have a single device that can perform any test”), she insists, with the unblinking determination of someone who is living deep inside a delusion, that everything she said was true. (Could she be anything but deluded when contemplating holding weekly patent brainstorm sessions with Billy from prison, or, as she terms it, “inventing from a cage”?) In this sense the weirdness serves as a kind of alibi, creating the impression that at best Holmes was somehow unable to understand that she was doing anything wrong.

At other moments, the weirdness hints at darker dynamics: In one of the film’s first truly memorable and somewhat disturbing moments, Holmes is casually beating eggs in a bowl. When the camera zooms in on her hand, it looks as though she has never attempted this task in her life before. Without saying a word, Billy removes the bowl from her hand and finishes the job. There’s a strange shift in the balance of power in the room, as it begins to seem as if Holmes’s role is to be more or less helpless in everyday life and Billy’s is to be the capable one who will make most of the decisions.

Many of the more sobering moments happen in the background, as when Holmes slips away to take a call, presumably from her lawyer or another adviser, and we overhear her asking if you are allowed to choose when you shower in prison and what time you have to wake up. In another shot, she is heard asking what an invasive strip search is. Later, we see her laying out a crewneck sweater on the bed and muttering, “I could wear this when I surrender.” If there are times, elsewhere in the film, when she appears to be pushing an agenda or courting sympathy, these scenes feel like something different—glimpses of a woman making her best effort to deal with the situation in practical terms and suddenly realizing it will not be enough. Soon she will really be gone. You can appreciate how weirdness and delusion might feel more tolerable than the reality, when she is leaving the house for prison and tells Billy to remember there is pumped milk in the refrigerator for the baby.

The second half of the film is more complicated, and deals more creatively with Holmes’s fate, as a woman who is both everywhere—there are billboards of her face in L.A. and in Times Square—and nowhere, serving her time in Texas with extremely limited access to the outside world.

Notably, for Fielder, she has disappeared from his project, since he can’t really visit her without going through Billy, who doesn’t want him to record and is increasingly cagey about the whole endeavor. This is a problem because Fielder still has questions: Did Holmes know that Billy negotiated a deal with A24 that would give him a share of profits from the movie? And if she did, does she know how that would look? Does it undermine everything that we have spent the prior 90 minutes observing?

Fielder is left with a series of echoes and distortions to sift through. He meets the hologram Holmes was posing for: Billy has positioned a large screen at the family dining table, and watches the avatar reading out an email in a computer-generated approximation of Holmes’s voice. Billy has also created an AI deepfake of Holmes, which he shows Fielder on his phone, and he has taken over her X account, sometimes posting messages she has sent him, but also broadcasting his own thoughts and often angry replies under her name, sounding nothing at all like her. Those billboards in Times Square are paid for by a mysterious superfan, who also stages, at a strip club, a play about her in which he personally arrests the Holmes character at gunpoint.

Unable to track down the real Elizabeth Holmes, Fielder enlists the next best thing: Amanda Seyfried, who won an Emmy for playing Holmes in The Dropout. Together they recreate scenes between Fielder and Holmes that he was not able to film when they happened in real life, and Seyfried contributes her own interpretations of Holmes’s motives as they go. There’s something unseemly about her participation: There’s a difference between inhabiting a character in a scripted drama that is clearly marked as a fictionalization and dressing up like a real person and doing their voice in a documentary. There’s a danger of voyeurism, even gloating. The sense of intrusion is made literal when we see Seyfried and Fielder enter the now-empty San Diego beach house and begin their reenactments. We’re very close to parody—and cruelty.

Fielder has always been most comfortable playing with this boundary. From Nathan for You to The Rehearsal, he makes the audience wince. And of course, he’s adding to the hall of mirrors effect here, as he shows us Seyfried watching his footage of Holmes watching Seyfried play Holmes in The Dropout. Later scenes of Seyfried reenacting Holmes’s conversations with Fielder are cut with scenes of her running those same lines with Fielder and trying different styles of delivery. What started out as a straight documentary turns into an almost absurd, almost distasteful experiment, and an argument that the only real way to know something is not through hours of faithful recording but through an elaborate artifice.

Still, the most impressive thing about You Can See Everything is the way it recognizes the dangers of parody and makes room for Holmes’s humanity. It’s a portrait of a woman who broke the law and isn’t even close to sorry about it, but it’s also a film about a mother leaving her newborn baby while she is still breastfeeding and entering the largest prison system in the world. If there’s one part of the film in which a simple shot has a devasting effect, it is the final image of Holmes, shot through the bars of the prison camp. She is dressed in tan prison overalls, walking the prison yard with her daughter, now a toddler, who is wearing a gauzy polyester princess costume. There are no justifications or excuses for Holmes or Theranos here. That doesn’t make any of it less heartbreaking.

And yet Hegseth’s latest announcements suggest that he has learned remarkably little from his experiences. At a recent address at Quantico, he declared that the “warrior ethos has been revived” and “American deterrence is back,” even as he announced plans to eliminate 20 percent of general and admiral positions. He also briefly championed a plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, turning military violence into a public spectacle supposedly meant to demonstrate U.S. resolve, before a public backlash—strong enough to push Trump away from the planned display of public cruelty—put the kibosh on those plans. Still, the dissonance is jarring: The defense secretary is so thoroughly preoccupied with projecting toughness and glorifying lethality, all while presiding over a war that has exposed the limits of U.S. power potentially even more than its debacles in Vietnam and Iraq.

There is an older American story about what could happen when a nation selects military leaders based on their bravado and popularity among white supremacists. The Mexican-American War was one of the clearest early examples of the difference between U.S. military belligerence and effectiveness. The professional Regular Army, though small, was a highly military force whose officers understood logistics, discipline, command, and the unglamorous mechanics that allow a military to keep functioning when a war inevitably proves more difficult than the politicians who started it imagined.

However, alongside the regulars marched tens of thousands of volunteers, largely from the Southern states that would make up the Confederacy only 15 years later. Unlike the Regular Army, whose officers held federal commissions and whose junior ranks were increasingly dominated by West Point graduates selected for their demonstrated military effectiveness, volunteer officers were often elected by the men they commanded or appointed through state-level political patronage. These mechanisms rewarded political prominence, personal popularity, and the performance of masculine authority rather than professional military experience.

Compounding their lack of experience, the white supremacist attitudes of many of the volunteer officers convinced them without evidence that white Americans were naturally superior soldiers and that “yellow bellied Mexicans” were naturally inferior and would be easily defeated. Some Southern volunteers were so confident of an easy victory that they worried the war would be over before they even arrived on the battlefield. As one commander put the pervasive attitude of many volunteers, each U.S. victory demonstrated “the order of providence that the Anglo-Saxon race was not only to take possession of the whole North American continent, but to influence and modify the character of the world.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these soldiers’ confidence in their own whiteness alone did not equate to effectiveness on the battlefield, and selecting commanders based on their popularity and manly image proved disastrous in many cases. For example, Col. Archibald Yell of the Arkansas Mounted Rifles, a magnetic Jacksonian politician who had built his reputation through personal combativeness and political connections, easily obtained a command based on his experience as a former governor and congressman. He had served in earlier wars as a sergeant and later a lieutenant, but he had no significant command experience. This would prove to be his undoing.

When the Mexican-American War began, Yell enlisted as a private in a volunteer company and was elected colonel when the regiment organized. He was still trying to preserve his congressional seat and position himself for further political advancement even as he took command. Once the regiment reached Texas, the problems started almost immediately. Most of its companies rarely drilled, its camp was so disorderly that regular Army commander John Wool struggled to impose basic discipline and sanitation, and Wool eventually dubbed the regiment the “Arkansas Mounted Devils.” He complained that the troops were “wholly without instruction and Colonel Yell is determined to leave them in that condition.” Rather than address the poor training of the troops under his command, Yell instead cultivated rapport with them by positioning himself as their champion against their regular Army commander and providing lavish food and drink.

At the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847, Yell’s regiment came under Mexican attack and fled in confusion despite Yell’s order to charge, exposing the rear of the rest of the U.S. column. Many of his men were captured or killed, and the regiment fell apart in the fighting and was distributed among different units. Yell charged alone and was killed. Yell embodied a recurring problem of volunteer command, where leaders’ ability to perform the role of a warrior and maintain esteem among their troops sometimes came at the expense of the less glamorous work of making them effective soldiers.

It is from this tattered cloth that Pete Hegseth is cut. While he spends plenty of time in front of the cameras, glad-handing troops and showing how many pull-ups he can do, he is fixated on projecting strength, whether real or imagined. This image that treats aggression, physical appearance, and ideological conformity as evidence of effectiveness, even going so far as to adopt absurd manosphere concepts as guides to military doctrine (see #lethalitymaxxing, language borrowed from incel subcultures obsessed with masculine appearance and status). Hegseth’s bizarre testosterone-screening proposal, later rescinded after questions about its medical basis, took the idea further by treating a biological marker of masculinity as a potential proxy for military readiness.

Donald Trump selected Hegseth for much the same reason that Arkansas volunteers elevated Yell. Hegseth had spent years on Fox News performing the role of the warrior who would liberate the military from timid professionals and ideological enemies. Trump wanted someone who looked and sounded like the defense secretary he imagined—a living cartoon warrior, as opposed to a military professional with a demonstrated record of managing a vast institution. Trump has said that Hegseth was straight from “central casting” and “obsessed with war.” Now Hegseth is using his authority to remake the military around the qualities that made him attractive to the president, pushing out senior commanders and disrupting promotion pathways while elevating a narrow vision of masculinity, race, religion, and ideological loyalty.

There is one crucial difference between Hegseth and the volunteer commanders of the Mexican-American War. Yell operated within a military structure led by professional officers who could challenge him, impose discipline, and help compensate for his shortcomings. Hegseth sits atop the entire military hierarchy, with the authority to remove the professionals who question his judgment and reshape the institution in his own image. The regulars once helped turn swaggering volunteers into an effective fighting force, but now the man with the volunteer’s mindset—the sort of person whom armed forces lifers refer to derisively as a “rear echelon motherfucker”—is deciding which of the professionals get to stay and who has to go.

This would all be dangerous enough if Trump were pursuing a cautious foreign policy, or the noninterventionist approach that he was somehow credited with by an ignorant pundit class, who were all too willing to be snowed by his dovish rhetoric. Instead, he is reviving the expansionist logic of the Monroe Doctrine, threatening other countries with military force and territorial demands while assuming American superiority will compel submission, even while the war with Iran has exposed the obvious weakness in that assumption. The United States can inflict enormous damage, but Trump’s and Hegseth’s belligerence has exposed a military far more confident in its capability to impose success than it is able to execute. Military effectiveness depends on professional judgment, institutional knowledge, technological adaptation, logistics, and an understanding of what force can and cannot accomplish, and these are all components of the job in which Hegseth has shown zero interest or competence.

The Mexican-American War showed that U.S. power was real, but its success depended on a professional military capable of exploiting that power. Hegseth seems to be trying to turn the entire military into a volunteer regiment for his warrior cosplay, purging the professionals who might remind him that wars are won through judgment, discipline, and logistics rather than pull-ups and testosterone. He has mistaken looking like a killer for knowing how to win, and the entire world is paying for his insecurity.

The arrests were announced in a Department of Justice press release, which lauded the capture of California residents as part of “Operation Protect the Vote”—an effort to purge voting rolls of alleged “noncitizens” ahead of November’s midterm elections. On October 14, the Trump administration gave the Golden State a flash drive of nearly 200,000 “likely noncitizen” voters it had identified. The method used to identify them remains unclear.

The administration then demanded that the state take “immediate action to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming federal election.” If California refused, the administration said it would have “no choice but to seek emergency relief.

In reality, noncitizen voting remains incredibly marginal, and “Operation Protect the Vote” in California is a thinly veiled attempt to target immigrants, spread fear, and restrict voting access in a Democratic stronghold.

“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week. California refused to look at that list. Today’s charges show exactly what that refusal puts at risk. California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

“I think the majority did cast a vote in a prior election. Not all, but most did,” Essayli said in a press conference following the arrests, admitting that the DOJ’s “high confidence” list of fraudulent noncitizen voters is not at all foolproof.

These indefensible arrests are the latest chapter in the DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data and throw due process to the wind, using “voter fraud” as a blanket accusation for anyone the Trump administration doesn’t like.

While speaking to the press outside of the White House Monday, a reporter asked Trump to respond to French President Emmanuel Macron, who’d blamed his country’s growing protests on elevated fuel prices caused by military activity in the Persian Gulf.

“Emmanuel Macron is blaming the Iran war and you, essentially, for the rioting in France right now—” one reporter said, suggesting that Macron had made a dig at Trump. The president didn’t let her finish.

“I don’t think he is, no I think that’s fake news. Who are you with?” Trump said.

“No sir, I’m Mary Margaret [Olohan] with the Daily Wire,” the reporter said, identifying herself.

“Oh, Daily Wire’s good. Sorry, Daily Wire’s good,” Trump said, suddenly apologetic.

Trump’s obstinacy is reserved only for mainstream media outlets—the same ones the president has illegally exiled from the White House and lashed out against time and time again.

It’s no secret that Trump’s meddling in the Strait of Hormuz has spiraled into a regional conflict. The president’s supposedly “six-week war” has nearly reached its eighth month, continuing to hurt U.S. and global economies. Trump’s continued unwillingness to acknowledge his own shoddy execution—or seriously address the economic impact that it’s having—shows that the president has no intention of taking responsibility for what’s happening in his own country, let alone France.

“[The] corrupt, far-left cartel has subjected this country—” Vance was saying at his North Carolina rally, before the protester stood up directly behind him.

“God bless our children!” the man in the crowd yelled. “Release the Epstein files!”

Chants of “USA” began to drown him out as he was removed from the rally by security.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna have to amend something I said earlier. I said that we have had zero illegal border crossings in the United States of America,” Vance said with a smile, implying that the protester was not a U.S. citizen. “But one isn’t bad, right?”

Vance’s response was lambasted by those to his left, as many saw his response to another call to release the Epstein files—something Trump himself campaigned on—as contradictory.

“They’re kicking people out of Republican rallies for shouting the same things they’ve been shouting at Republican rallies for years,” Puerto Rican journalist Benjamín Torres Gotay wrote on X.

“It’s insulting to suggest only ‘illegal immigrants’ care about justice for victims and accountability for perpetrators,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office posted. “Most American citizens do too!”

The Trump administration promised its supporters a full release of the Epstein files that would expose the “deep state” and bring justice to survivors. Instead it has continued to obscure information and avoid transparency, with Attorney General Todd Blanche refusing to seriously meet with survivors, survivors getting kicked out of the GOP midterm convention, and now Vance’s assumption that a nonwhite individual calling for justice must be some kind of illegal alien.

Just like with the Gulf of Mexico, Trump wants the state to be called “New America” instead, he wrote in a Truth Social post on Monday. 

“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,” the president ranted. 

Trump’s attacks on New Mexico are almost certainly because the state has voted Democratic in eight of the last nine presidential elections and has always voted against him. Its entire congressional delegation is Democratic, as well as all of its statewide elected officials. Democrats also control both houses of its state legislature.  

But aside from Trump’s normal attacks on Democrats, he has fixated on unilaterally changing place names in his second term, possibly out of cognitive decline. He’s signed executive orders to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and Lake Ontario to Lake America. His latest renaming is “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” which isn’t sticking even in his own Cabinet. 

The people of New Mexico won’t take kindly to Trump’s suggestion, and the move will just invite mockery. Meanwhile, the midterms are approaching, and the president is supposed to be spending his time campaigning to save Republicans from getting shellacked in two weeks. It’s highly unlikely that changing a state’s name is going to win any votes. 

The accusations came to light on October 9, after Habba stormed into the Oval Office to tell the president that Grenell had never deposited a nearly $6 million donation her husband made to the Kennedy Center in 2025. Grenell and Mildon were in touch in early 2025, before Mildon and Habba met, because Mildon had business contracts in Venezuela and had also expressed interest in the Kennedy Center. According to documents from Mildon’s lawyers, Grenell offered to support Mildon in Venezuela, including making him the “American face down in V.”

Mildon eventually transferred $17.6 million to an account supplied by Grenell, purportedly for a deal involving a private Texas defense company and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the understanding that $5.6 million of that sum would end up at the Kennedy Center. But according to Habba, the $5.6 million never made it there.

White House counsel Will Scharf is now investigating the donation, including texts from Grenell supplied by Mildon’s lawyers.

“Once the money comes to the company here, I will arrange the donation to Kennedy Centre, and you’ll be joining the VIP events and get close with the administration, even with POTUS,” a May 3, 2025, text from Grenell to Mildon allegedly said.

Grenell has vehemently denied the accusations. “I’ve never asked for one cent to be sent somewhere else pretending it was for the Kennedy Center, and I’ve never received any payment from him at all,” Grenell told Axios, referring to Mildon. “Make him give proof to what he is saying, not make these absurd allegations.”

“There’s no way this is true. This is crazy,” Grenell allegedly told the president.

A source told Axios that Grenell claimed he would never use the British English spelling “centre,” rather than “center,” so the text could not be legitimate.

Kennedy Center staff went looking for Mildon’s donation last year but never found it. Instead, financial staffer Lisa Dale found that Mildon actually owed the center a pledged donation of $270,000. “There was nothing about $6 million,” Dale told Axios. “I would have heard about that.”

“POTUS doesn’t want to deal with this. Of course, he’s concerned, but if there is missing money, this is a big, big problem,” said another official with knowledge of the conflict.

“Nobody wants to get in the middle of Alina Habba and Ric Grenell going to war,” a different official said.

Thelma Louise runs a large TikTok account in which she makes pro-Trump content, particularly from her perspective as a Black female conservative. On Sunday, she was excitedly documenting her experience at Paxton’s rally for his upcoming Senate race—before she was asked to leave without cause.

“And there’s no one that I can talk to about this?” Louise asks as she appears to be escorted out. “Wow. Oh my gosh. I cannot believe this.… Someone just came up to me and said that Ken Paxton’s campaign manager wanted me to leave. I am just—my mouth is wide open right now. I really can’t believe this.”

“I was just asked to leave this event, and I did nothing wrong,” she continued. “I was told that Paxton’s campaign manager didn’t want me here. I’m not making any of this up.… I have done nothing but support everyone on the Republican side, and this is how I get treated? I cannot believe the disrespect that I was just given. I left the Democratic Party two years ago, I have volunteered for President Trump’s campaign, and I have worked very hard promoting members of the Republican Party. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but to be walked out of a room full of people and isolated as if I’d done something wrong—I cannot believe it.”

Louise noted that she drove two hours to get to the rally, and even showed her press credentials for Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas over the summer.

Some online mused that the color of Louise’s skin may have had something to do with her unexplained removal—and noted that it might not have happened at a James Talarico rally because there would likely be more Black people there.

“‘Being MAGA while Black’ chapter 293,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross wrote.

“Conservative whites excluding black people? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said another.

“Was I mistaken for someone else? I don’t know what it was. And I don’t blame any of this on the Republican Party. Because they have loved me, and they have welcomed me with open arms. But Ken Paxton’s campaign manager, that person is 100 percent responsible for the disrespect that I received this evening.”

During an appearance on Fox News’s The Big Weekend Show Sunday, Homan was asked whether the Trump administration was investigating any other alleged misconduct by the congresswoman, in addition to immigration fraud allegations.

“I’m not gonna go there,” Homan said.

“Not even a little bit?” asked host Rich Edson.

“Not even a little bit. We’ll leave that up to—that’s a question for the FBI. I know things, but that’s a question for the FBI,” Homan said, smiling.

It was not immediately clear what the FBI would be investigating, or whether it was the same case being mounted by the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security Investigations conducted a raid last week on Omar’s Washington, D.C., home as part of a racist campaign to get her denaturalized and deported. The probe ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested that the government was building a RICO case against her and her family. It’s still unclear what, if any, evidence DHS has found to support its case.

In a letter to the Department of Justice Friday, Omar’s attorney asked for the return of her belongings seized in the raid, including a phone, and argued that there was “no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” Fox News 9 reported.

The apparently multiplying probes into Omar represent a lawless campaign by the Trump administration against one of the president’s most outspoken critics. The DOJ manual prohibits federal prosecutors from timing any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of undermining a candidate in an upcoming election. Early voting in Minnesota began last week.

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.

Whatever rural idyll they imagined when they bought the home and moved there in 2016, it was shattered when, about a year later, Meta began building a data center less than 400 yards away. The hulking concrete building peeks out through the evergreens, visible from their mailbox.

Last Wednesday, Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents part of Silicon Valley, came to visit. The Morrises showed Khanna the canning jars full of the well water they’d kept, in various stages of opacity from whatever brown material had infiltrated their well and clogged their filters. They showed him how the water came straight up from the earth that same solid gray-brown. They showed him a thoroughly corroded hot water heater in their shed, which they’d had to replace, along with just about every other appliance that has water running through it. They say that out of three usable bathrooms in their home, they are down to one. “I did hire a well guy to come out, and I said, ‘Is my property just full of sediment? What is happening here?’” Beverly Morris told Khanna. “And he looked at me, pointed across the road, and he goes, ‘There’s one answer to your question, and it’s not going to change.’”

They showed Khanna a map of their well-water catchment area: Their well is the only water source they have, though their lawyer said Meta has a municipal water hookup for the data center. Brown water sometimes floods their front ditch. Photos of their rural, pastoral nights show them now lit bright as day from light pollution by the data center. “This affects not only your everyday living and what you’ve got to do to adjust your life, but you can’t change, you’re trapped,” Beverly Morris said.

“We’ve got to develop the technology in a way that’s going to help all of us,” Khanna said. “Right now, it’s just helping a few of these tech billionaires, and they’re riding roughshod over communities.” He listed the other threats from Big Tech—the Hugging Face incident, the potential loss of jobs—but zoomed in on the kinds of hits the Morrises and so many Americans like them were taking in their own home, and questioned the costs and the benefits, which right now seem to only be enriching billionaires.

Khanna is pushing for a Data Center Bill of Rights to outline new rules around where and how data centers can be built, meant to protect the people and environments they might impact. He also sent a letter to Meta demanding answers for the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs: They filed a lawsuit against Meta, development companies, and authorities in August.

The fight highlights something even bigger, though. From the center-left, pro-building “abundists” have been putting pressure on Democrats to fund and build more and do it all faster—whether it’s housing or new transportation or research around the technologies that could change our futures—and ease up on the kinds of community-led concerns often dismissed as Nimbyism, which has become a dirty word. They’ve been arguing that this approach can increase unalloyed goods, like more green energy that will slow climate change.

But the data center explosion shows that sometimes bad things that may harm us and the environment can be built just as quickly if we let them, and that there are real questions about who bears the cost and who benefits when rules are waived. Some things might not belong in backyards, or front yards, at all.

The Morrises are just a tiny part of the data center rebellion unfolding across the country, the embattled front lines that illustrate the downside risks to letting the data centers go into residential neighborhoods. They want the harms they’ve listed to serve as a warning.

Meta named one of the roads leading to the data center “Move Fast Way,” borrowing from the early motto of Facebook, before it became the larger Meta, “Move fast and break things.” Breaking things is what the Morrises and their co-plaintiffs said the company did, and they want answers. They say the company has suggested that the problems they’ve encountered are their fault or due to lack of routine maintenance. The Morrises say they never had the problems they’re encountering now, especially with their water, before the data center moved in.

Beverly Morris told Khanna she felt like she was living in the early nineteenth century, having to boil water or cart it in from elsewhere for her animals to drink, which harkens back to the Flint, Michigan, water disaster, which began in 2014. Big blue tubs of clean water sit in the bed of a side-by-side off-road vehicle in their front yard. “That shouldn’t be happening in twenty-first-century America,” Khanna said.

Khanna asked about whether they could move, but the Morrises said they wouldn’t be able to sell their home for what it is worth. They are retired and wanted this to be their home. For them to move would mean cutting their losses.

Democrats have seen a political opportunity in the data center and artificial intelligence fights, both of which have united Americans across the political spectrum in opposition. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, also visited the Morrises earlier this year, and took a jar of their water back to the House floor in May to give a speech. Other Democrats, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have argued for public stakes in AI development so that people can benefit from the money it generates for Wall Street and cushion themselves against possible job losses as the technology changes workplaces.

Americans have grown sharply more negative about data centers, according to Pew Research Center, and states are considering moratoriums on building them, like the one New York passed, until more environmental and community impacts can be studied. There’s a rare bipartisan sense of unity around the issue. Yet the Morrises’ attorneys said none of their representatives, including their current congressman, Representative Mike Collins, who’s running for Senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff, have reached out to them or visited. The Republican Party dismisses data center opposition as driven by Chinese propaganda, and House Republicans have urged the Trump administration to investigate China’s influence on the matter.

Whether or not Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez have presidential ambitions, they both seem to be acting like it, appearing on morning shows and visiting parts of the country far from their districts. The most likely end result is that they will raise their profiles in their own big, influential states, California and New York, where they could have an outsize impact on these issues for the country as a whole because of their prominence.

But what should they influence Big Tech to do, and how? Khanna said the companies keep bringing up competition with China as the justification for building out new data centers so quickly. But he says it can come at irreparable cost. “We can compete without compromising our values,” he says in his letter to Meta. “As such, I also request a briefing from Meta on how, if at all, it will be revising its process of selecting sites for data centers and incorporating community inputs based on its clear failure to do so.”

It’s not the first time in history that rural areas have been asked to bear the brunt of rapid change for technology meant to benefit others. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a rural or otherwise disregarded neighborhood had to disproportionately bear the brunt of any kind of development. And environments around the country show the scars left when boom and bust cycles destroy local ecosystems and communities only to leave ruin in their wake when they move on to the next big thing. If AI is a bubble and it crashes, it will leave an empty, hulking building in its wake, and studies from abandoned mining communities to urban brownfield sites show how declining infrastructure can damage individual health, further drive down property values, and leave communities empty and vulnerable to crime.

That history is why the hurdles that sometimes slow development, like environmental reviews and community meetings, existed in the first place. I asked Khanna about that tension: How do policymakers reconcile the need for more development around green energy and housing while showing caution around developments like data centers?

“We need to have strong safeguards and guardrails for clean water, for preserving the land, for keeping the air clean,” he said. “I am for building out clean energy, but I’m not for doing that at the expense of environmental standards, and that has to be a conversation about how we do that in the context of building out clean energy. But this is not building out clean energy. This is a data center that is making billions of dollars for these hyperscalers, and there’s no reason to give any waiver from our environmental protection for these data centers.”

That ability, to decide what’s beneficial and what is not, is exactly what so many voters don’t trust that their representatives have right now. Khanna may have been trying to build that trust when he went to visit the Morrises: People want to know someone will listen to their concerns. “Local communities should get to decide first of all whether they want them, and they shouldn’t be near residential communities or farmland,” Khanna said. “I think it’s a pretty commonsense view, and until we get that, there should be a moratorium, on a state-by-state local basis, because we can’t build in ways like this.”

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.

On Monday, the high court decided not to review a ruling from the lower U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia allowing the firing of Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump decided to axe just after his inauguration last year. Wilcox was the first Black woman member of the NLRB, and had been appointed to a second five-year term on the board by President Biden in 2023.

The Supreme Court’s decision is in line with its earlier ruling in June allowing Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. The D.C. circuit decision in Wilcox’s case came before the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter’s case.

The NLRB and the FTC, along with other federal regulatory bodies, are supposed to be independent from the president’s control, with bipartisan boards. But in his second term as president, Trump has ignored rules protecting agency members from being fired without cause, pushing out members simply because they were appointed by Democrats.

While the Supreme Court has enabled Trump in the cases of Slaughter and now Wilcox, it has drawn the line with Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, and prevented the president from firing her. That hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to smear Cook with a cooked-up investigation over alleged mortgage fraud. Cook has not been charged with any crimes, but Trump isn’t interested in sniffing out wrongdoing: He wants to assert total control over regulatory agencies.

“After many months of thought and a few sleepless nights, I have decided to separate from CNN, my partner of 43 fantastic years!” Amanpour said in a statement Monday. “[I look] forward to interesting new projects down the line, and will always be rooting for CNN and maintaining its history of independent journalism. Remember: always be truthful, not neutral.”

Amanpour’s resignation announcement comes just two weeks after pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison bought the media outlet in Paramount’s massive acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. This includes ownership of HBO and HBO Max, Warner Bros. movie and TV studios, DC, CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+. David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter, staunch Zionist, and billionaire founder of Oracle. The father-son duo have been vocal about their desire to regulate media narratives via TikTok, CBS, and now, CNN.

Amanpour’s announcement did not mention Ellison.

“Christiane has thought carefully about this decision, and she and I have been discussing it for some months,” CNN head Mark Thompson wrote in a statement. “Like so many CNNers who will hear the news today, I’m very sorry to see her go, but I’ve come to accept that this is the right time for her, both personally and professionally.”

This story has been updated.

A Guardian analysis finds that FEMA has not doled out long-term recovery funds to survivors of the 2025 tornado in St Louis, the central Texas floods, or the wildfires in Los Angeles. These natural disasters crippled infrastructure, destroyed homes, and displaced thousands.

“To find out that your own country can’t even do what it has historically done for other survivors of disasters, that’s very disheartening, and it’s also what kind of galvanized me to get involved,” Los Angeles resident Sylvie Andrews, who lost her Altadena home in the wildfires, told The Guardian. “There are people in Congress who are resistant to the idea of pre-funding anything when they’re not sure there’s going to be a disaster, and the reality is there will be more disasters every year because of climate change.… I guarantee there will be communities that need it.”

“The insurance didn’t cover much of anything. And the Fema just kind of backed you up for a little while, but didn’t get you back on track,” said Demetrice Davis, who lost his home in a St. Louis tornado. “The government agencies are not really doing what they’re supposed to do. “It’s just a matter of asking, as a taxpaying citizen, what are we paying for? ... As a taxpaying citizen, we are putting in the pot. We are supposed to get some type of return. But it seems like that’s not happening. And there seems to be a lot of excuses and passing the buck because most of the lawmakers we talked to blamed it on other lawmakers.”

Both Davis and Andrews traveled to Washington, D.C., last month with Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association to lobby lawmakers to reactivate the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program, or CDBG-DR, which is supposed to allocate funds to rebuilding homes and infrastructure after natural disasters.

“Let’s be clear: this is funding FEMA had already approved and that we have been demanding the agency release for weeks,” California Democratic Representative Judy Chu said last month. “And while today is progress, President Trump still has not delivered the long-term federal disaster recovery funding Los Angeles communities need to rebuild.”

This is not the first instance in which Americans caught in natural disasters have been hung out to dry by the Trump administration. Last year, President Trump denied disaster aid requests from multiple blue states while awarding it to red ones. He did it once again over the summer, putting millions of Americans at risk in the process.

“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things,” Henderson told CBS News. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”

Henderson pointed to the Justice Department’s demand for every state to hand over their full voter rolls, including information that is legally required to remain confidential.

“They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” Henderson, whose job includes overseeing Utah’s elections, said to CBS. Out of concerns for the federal government’s motive, she refused to provide the data alongside officials in 29 other states.

Last month, the DOJ notified Henderson in writing that she is under investigation.

“I have to tell myself it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I’m doing what’s right,” Henderson said. “I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guard rails, holding the line. Someone has to.”

Federal agents acting on orders from the Trump administration have seized ballots and voting machines this year, and President Trump himself has continuously pushed election conspiracies. Trump has signed executive orders requiring proof of citizenship to vote and restricting mail-in ballots, and last week, his Department of Justice sued California, claiming, without proof, that the state was sending ballots to 20,000 noncitizens.

California’s top elections official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, said that the Trump administration didn’t say where the “20,000” number came from or how they verified those individuals’ citizenship status.

“The USDOJ’s relentless efforts to unlawfully gain access to states’ protected voter data and purge voter rolls serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections,” Weber said in a statement.

Zacharia posted two photographs with Trump in the Oval Office after her unceremonious firing that were digitally altered to conceal an image sitting on the president’s desk, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The first post, on Friday, contained a photograph with just the two of them, where a document on the president’s desk was blurred but still identifiable to preservation advocates as a renovation plan for the East Potomac Golf Links, the public golf course the president has decided to transform into an exclusive, high-end one without any legal approval.

The second post, on Saturday, contained a photograph that included Zacharia’s family standing behind the desk, and this time the document appeared to have been removed altogether. The Post identified the book sitting beneath it as The White House Historical Association guidebook—noting that the digital alterations had removed an image on the book’s cover of the executive mansion.

The censored image could prove controversial considering that government lawyers have insisted that there is no final design for East Potomac Park, as the plan undergoes a legal challenge from a historic preservation group. Such a slipup is par for the course for Zacharia, who crashed and burned out of the White House after just five days as the president’s spokesperson.

Last week, District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the government from felling hundreds of trees at East Potomac Park. The judge tore into the Trump administration lawyer for claiming that tree removal is not part of the president’s renovation plans. The Department of Justice demanded that she step down, claiming that her outburst proved she was biased against the government. The judge refused, sending Trump spiraling on Monday.

So long, Zacharia, we barely knew ye. I would say don’t let the door hit you on the way out—but it appears you already have.

The ex–ambassador to Greece was unceremoniously dumped from the Trump administration during then–White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first and last press briefing on October 13, following a Wall Street Journal report that Guilfoyle had engaged in pay-to-play schemes, including offering a MAGA donor special access to Trump administration officials in exchange for covering her $100,000 credit card bill. The donor, Eric Deters, has since filed a defamation lawsuit against her.

After Zacharia announced to the world that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign, Guilfoyle went off the deep end. She considered rescinding her resignation, and begged Hegseth and Barrack to speak to President Donald Trump on her behalf. Barrack reportedly tried, but obviously made no impact on the president’s decision. Guilfoyle also allegedly asked 95-year-old Murdoch—whose media empire includes both Fox News and the Journal—to limit the Journal’s unfavorable coverage. He refused.

“Kimberly was spiraling, calling people and suggesting, ‘Maybe I don’t resign,’” an official familiar with the situation told PunchUp Wednesday. “I don’t think she was serious, but she was in her feelings last night. She was processing what had happened—but not very well.”

As fewer and fewer MAGA allies and conservative influencers agreed to take Guilfoyle’s calls, many scrubbed the internet of any evidence that they ever knew her. In Greece, where Guilfoyle remains ambassador until the end of the month, her authority has dissolved.

“The people in the embassy are no longer afraid of her. Nobody is listening to her or taking her orders anymore,” a source in Greece told the Daily Mail. “She is all alone in that house, screaming at her old staff that they are leakers, and waiting to get kicked out. It’s an insane situation.”

At a hearing, the preservation group mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s federal takeover of the East Potomac Golf Links introduced the president’s own Truth Social post as evidence that the government plans to proceed with renovations “IMMEDIATELY!”

Ahead of the hearing Monday morning, Trump raged against District Judge Ana Reyes, who barred the National Parks Service from cutting down any more trees on the East Potomac Golf Links. The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public course into an exclusive, high-end one.

“The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course. They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that!” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s meltdown comes after Reyes refused the Department of Justice’s request that she recuse herself, over the fact that she yelled at a government attorney last week. A furious Reyes slammed the Trump administration for giving last-minute notice that it would resume cutting down trees during the previous holiday weekend. When Justice Department attorney Marissa Piropato argued the actions over the weekend were “not a renovation,” Reyes tore into her excuse as “preposterous,” “doublespeak,” and “completely beyond the pale.”

“The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “The tapes have been blocked from usage by the judge.”

The Trump administration’s determination to proceed with expensive demolition projects without receiving a whiff of congressional or legal approval would make anyone a little crazy.

This story has been updated.

Semafor reported that Weiss was particularly focused on El-Sayed’s (nonexistent) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and 9/11, and Talarico’s (also nonexistent) trip to a mental health facility. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, has denounced the Muslim Brotherhood numerous times amid Islamophobic attacks from both the right wing and the Democratic establishment. 

Weiss “personally advocated” for a deeper dive into El-Sayed’s personal history, and she even faced internal pushback for her insistence that the newsroom inaccurately tie El-Sayed to the 9/11 terror attacks, as she published an August headline reading “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

“Anyone discussing this race needs to be very careful about putting the name of a man who would be America’s first Muslim senator next to ‘9/11’ on very thin grounds. It reads like a dog whistle,” Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis wrote at the time.  

As for Talarico, his whole “mental health” episode was thoroughly disproven as a smear campaign, even though Weiss thought it was worth spending time on. It’s notable that both Talarico and El-Sayed are progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, something that Weiss, her pro-Israel The Free Press blog, and CBS have covered with extreme bias. 

This is not the first time Weiss has experienced internal pushback for inserting herself into stories. She initially pulled the plug on former 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega’s CECOT megaprison story in El Salvador, and was “very, very hands-on” with a story covering Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. 

On Saturday, a man posing as a young Michigan voter named Tommy at a town hall in Caro, Michigan, asked El-Sayed if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed, sensing the bigoted motive behind the question, immediately disavowed the question, and pressed Tommy on why he was asking him specifically that question.

Tommy was evasive, repeatedly saying that he had not heard El-Sayed disavow the organization, and El-Sayed pointed out that Tommy was assuming that El-Sayed had a “higher order allegiance” than the Constitution. El-Sayed asked Tommy if he would “disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country.” Tommy said he wouldn’t, and El-Sayed called him out for failing to understand the Constitution.

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his. https://t.co/p09eMtsh0x

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) October 18, 2026

El-Sayed’s campaign quickly turned the exchange into a video clip, which subsequently went viral. As of Monday morning, the clip has 13 million views on X alone.

Not surprisingly, later reporting revealed that Tommy is actually Thomas Teepell, the operations director for Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley and the son of Timmy Teepell, who used to work for former Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal.

The whole Q&A appears to be part of a Republican influencer campaign to try to embarrass Abdul El-Sayed. Earlier this month, The Michigan Daily reported that the conservative PAC America Next offered College Republicans $200 to boo El-Sayed at a town hall in Flint and ask provocative questions.

The Teepells are involved in a similar campaign, with Thomas’s father’s organization, Breakthrough LLC, receiving $250,000 from Jindal’s dark money organization for influencer marketing against Abdul El-Sayed. The attempt has clearly backfired, as El-Sayed turned the exchange into a positive clip for his senatorial campaign.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

In the last few days, Donald Trump has repeatedly erupted over the Texas Senate race. He’s unleashed wild rants about Democrat James Talarico, calling him juvenile names and raging at Republicans who, in Trump’s mind, are to blame for the strength of Talarico’s campaign. It sure looks like Trump is panicking about Texas, yet the polls are sending a mixed picture. Talarico is still up, but the race seems to be tightening. And a huge amount of Republican money is still set to pour into this race.

So we thought we’d check on the state of things with Nancy Zdunkewicz, a Democratic pollster who’s based in Texas and knows the state well. Nancy, thanks so much for coming on.

Nancy Zdunkewicz: Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me. It’s exciting to get to talk about my home state being competitive!

Sargent: It is competitive, and it’s been a long time. So let’s just quickly recap what the polls are saying right now. Marist has Talarico up two points on Republican Ken Paxton, 47 to 45. Siena Research Institute has Talarico up four, 48 to 44. A Republican pollster, Trafalgar, had Talarico up four as well. YouGov had it at plus three.

Nancy, bottom line, the polling averages have the race narrowing to a Talarico lead of 2.6 points. That’s basically a knife’s edge, isn’t it?

Zdunkewicz: Yes, and I am also seeing this same margin in my own polling. And yes, that is within the margin of error, technically. But what sets this apart for me is that this is the first time that a Democrat has ever led a Republican consistently throughout the entire general election campaign.

It’s Paxton who’s picking up an inch here, an inch there. This is basically the mirror image of what my polling looked like for Colin Allred at this point two years ago.

Sargent: Right. So basically what you’re saying is that what really sets this apart is that every other time we’ve had a Democrat who appeared to be mounting a strong challenge, that Democrat wasn’t leading in every single poll.

And here Talarico is leading. You see maybe Paxton pulling back a few Republicans here, a few Republicans there, but it’s just sort of staying more or less where it’s been. Is that your feeling?

Zdunkewicz: So as you go throughout the general election campaign, you are going to expect to see undecideds go to where their homes are. This comes along with general voter education and people starting to tune in, because, believe it or not, not everybody’s lives revolve around politics.

And so we expect that we see this. It actually makes me nervous when I see a large number of people who say they’re undecided, because I know that they’re actually ultimately going to vote for the Democrat or the Republican.

And so what we saw was that they had to spend a ton of money. Hundreds of millions of dollars just got spent in a month. And that allowed you to pick up a point, two points, to bring home some people who, let’s say, at the end of the day, were pretty much always going to vote for a Republican, or maybe already voting for Republicans for other offices, too.

Sargent: Right. It’s the huge influx of money that’s starting to pull a few people back.

So Trump exploded on Truth Social over this race. He accused Texas Senator John Cornyn and GOP strategist Karl Rove of sabotaging Paxton’s chances. Trump raged that James TalaFREAKO is a “radical left lunatic”, and said:

“If Paxton loses, it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like Cornyn and Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”

Trump went on and on like that at really great length, like really losing it, calling Talarico “FREAKO” again and again. Nancy, what do you make of that?

Zdunkewicz: Gosh, you know, he really shot himself in the foot here, didn’t he? He didn’t need to endorse Paxton in this race. He helped secure his nomination in the first place. So maybe he’s feeling a little bit insecure about his poor decision-making.

Sargent: I’m glad you brought up Trump’s role in this. I think it’s worth reminding everyone, this is Trump’s fault. He ordered Texas Republican voters to support Paxton over Cornyn, and Cornyn would probably have had a much easier time here.

And there is a deep perversity about this that’s just Trump all over. Trump forced Paxton on everyone because he thinks Paxton is loyal to him. And now that Paxton could lose, he’s blaming it on everyone but himself.

Zdunkewicz: I’ve never seen so much money get so little. It has not produced an improvement in Ken Paxton’s favorability. It has, yes, maybe increased Talarico’s negatives a little bit, but he continues to be popular. People are actively voting because they like somebody this year in Texas. And then they actively dislike this other guy.

In fact, people are increasingly learning about him—which is crazy to think that not everybody knew who this was after all of the impeachments and all the money spent during the primary.

But as more people learn about him, the more they dislike Ken Paxton. So you see this opposite dynamic working, where we have a popular Democrat, we have a uniquely unpopular Republican, and all of this money has really not gotten them much in terms of making James unpopular.

Sargent: It’s wild. Trump exploded again on Truth Social, saying this: “James Talarico, who was running for U.S. Senate against the greatest attorney general in the history of Texas, recently stated, with a large mask covering his face as he spoke, that fossil fuels are destroying the planet. No more drilling for oil in Texas. That should be the end of his campaign.”

Nancy, I’m not sure what Trump’s referring to there, but it’s pretty sad that he’s trying to declare by decree that Talarico’s campaign is over.

Zdunkewicz: But it’s not particularly effective in a state where we see 54, 55 percent say that they dislike the president. In fact, please, come to Texas. Come campaign. Come campaign here. It’s not going to be helpful at all.

People are extremely disappointed in the president. They think that the economy is doing horribly. The more that he shows up, the more he reinforces this overall political environment that is demoralizing Republicans and fracturing independents and really motivating Democrats to come out in November and to vote to stop the Trump-aligned party.

Sargent: Let’s talk about why this race is tightening. Marist is a quality survey. It had Talarico up by two points. It had him 52 to 30 among independents, which seems like a healthy lead. And it has Talarico winning eight percent of Republicans. I’m wondering whether Talarico is still not winning enough Republicans to really put this thing away. Can you tell us what you’re seeing?

Zdunkewicz: Republicans are a majority of the electorate in Texas. I’m not talking registered Republicans. I’m saying people who say that they identify actively as a Republican or lean Republican: 52 percent. Fifty-four percent say that they always or usually vote for Republicans.

So if you look at the 52 percent who say that they identify as a Republican, the thinking here is you need 91 percent of those voters, plus those strong margins with independents, in order to win in Texas. And eight percent is where, you said, one of the polls, the Marist poll I believe, has him. That’s where I have him.

And I think that that is pretty darn close to what I’m hoping for, to get to a plurality plus one, or, you know, hopefully 50 percent. Just as a reminder, in a state like Texas, where you have a third party on the ballot, you don’t need 50 percent of the vote to win.

Sargent: Right. So I guess what you’re saying is that Talarico, if he’s getting around eight percent of Republicans right now, we’re getting very close to what he needs, especially with the double-digit lead he has among independents.

Let me ask it this way, then. Where do you want to see Talarico improve right now to feel a little bit better about where things are? Like, I think this is very close. It’s on a knife’s edge. Just in granular terms, where does he need to kind of bump himself up a little more in order to make us all breathe a little more easily?

Zdunkewicz: Right now we’re seeing some healthy two-to-one margins with Hispanic voters. I’m feeling very good about where South Texas is, and where these Hispanic-majority districts and the increasingly Hispanic and growing areas that are sort of the suburbs along I-35—doing quite well there.

I’m thinking a lot about the voters that are in places like, you know, Cypress, and, you know, suburbs within Harris County. These are going to be more college-educated voters. For the first time already, we are seeing a Democrat tied with college-educated voters in Texas, with white college-educated voters.

That has always been the distinction for people in the Midwest, is that you would see white college-educated voters were kind of increasingly the backbone of the Democratic coalition. And yet in the South, that was not the case. But we’re seeing this now. And I think if we can continue to do that, that would be pretty impressive.

Sargent: So basically what you want to see here is, you want to see Talarico just pad his numbers with white college-educated voters in some of the suburbs of Texas. Is that basically where we are?

Zdunkewicz: Yeah, the suburbs are so diverse in Texas that I’m just going to say college-educated voters in general.

Sargent: Listen to this exchange between Republican Congressman Pat Fallon of Texas and a Fox anchor. It starts with Representative Fallon insulting Talarico and goes on from there.

Pat Fallon (voiceover): So this little radically woke soy boy is completely out of touch with Texans, and he’s lying to them, trying to fool them, selling them snake oil. Say ‘no’ for me.

Fox anchor (voiceover): But Congressman, let me challenge you on that. You can say he’s out of touch, and I know where you’re coming from on that, but he seems to be in touch with perhaps a majority of the people who are going to vote in this election. I guess I’m trying to understand—if the polling is somewhat accurate here, and we can debate that—has the character of Texas, has all the migration from places like California, is it changing the character of your state enough that a guy with all of the, let’s call him, defects that you just mentioned there can still resonate with maybe a majority of people who are going to vote in that state?

Fallon (voiceover): No, I think he will lose. But to your point, it is a tight race.

Sargent: So I think this is really striking, Nancy. Note how baffled they seem about the fact that their smears of Talarico aren’t sticking. It kind of calls to mind something you said a little earlier about Talarico’s campaign. This is a guy who’s really, really successfully carved out a very unique and independent kind of image for himself in a state like this.

He talks a language that I think sounds new to a lot of people, maybe doesn’t sound like the language of a Democrat to the ears of many people in Texas. And there you can kind of get a sense of why Republicans are spending hundreds of millions of dollars calling him trans or whatever the hell they think they’re calling him, freako or whatever. And that stuff isn’t really sticking. What do you make of all that?

Zdunkewicz: Yeah, as I said before, it is still a Republican state. And so if we make this a contest between a Democrat and a Republican, it’s just not going to ever work out in someone’s favor.

And so instead, this race has been defined not as Republican and Democrat, but right and wrong. And by having a really strong moral core, a really reason for running that is based in his faith, in a state where this resonates with a lot of people, that has allowed him this opportunity.

And I think that people are really sick of a politics that is about scoring political points, and are ready to hear something that feels more authentic. When you can go back not to somebody’s political ideology, but to understand I think I know where they’re coming from and how they might make a decision, because I feel like I know who they are, like, where are they grounded? And when that resonates with, you know, how you were raised, that really means something to a lot of people.

As I said before, he is actively liked here. And so when they throw out all of these insults, and they’re, what, that he’s too nice? God forbid. I think we’re all hungry to turn the page and have a politics that is less nasty and less full of hate. And I don’t blame people like the congressman and Donald Trump for being blind to it, because that’s where their politics is grounded in.

They can’t possibly understand why so many people might just like somebody because they think maybe we should help people, and we should be good, and that we shouldn’t call people names, and that that might be a better way of doing politics.

Sargent: That is so beautifully said. And I’m going to throw this out there. Every time Trump unleashes some deranged, crazed rant like that, it just reminds everybody of what they don’t want. And it could in fact make Talarico look good in comparison.

Zdunkewicz: Yeah. Yeah, the things aren’t sticking to him. He built up a really good foundation that people felt like they understood. And so when people throw these things out, it just doesn’t stick.

And the other good thing is, you know, I want to give all that credit where it’s due, but I also want to acknowledge that the terms are different than they were two years ago, because now Democrats aren’t in charge anymore. Republicans are in charge.

And so they focus a lot on these anti-trans attacks and these sort of masculinity attacks, and they just really are lacking credibility. And it’s because the shoe’s on the other foot now. It’s really interesting to see in polling just how little credibility some of these negatives had that were so tarnishing only two years ago.

Sargent: It really is extraordinary. It’s going to get tight, though, and a lot of money’s going to flow. So folks, just buckle up and be ready for this. Don’t freak out. Nancy Zdunkewicz, thank you so much for coming on. That was fascinating stuff.

Zdunkewicz: It was so great to join you today, Greg.

Americans can thank diligent investigative reporting for alerting them to much of the self-dealing by Trump, his family, and aides. For example, The Washington Post has reported that Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were investors in 15 companies that “collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” On Tuesday, in a rare retreat, the White House asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as U.S. ambassador to Greece after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Guilfoyle promised political favors to a Trump donor if he would quietly pay off her $100,000 American Express credit card bill.

Throughout the history of modern polling, voters have usually ranked the economy (or its proxies, such as “the cost of living”) as their top issue. Now, linking corruption with the cost of living, “Democrats Are Making Corruption Messaging a Pocketbook Issue,” a recent Politico headline declared. The Democrats’ claim, The New York Times reported, “is that rampant corruption in Congress and the administration is directly costing average citizens who are paying more for necessities like groceries, gas, and medicine.”

Both Democrats and the press, however, so far, are overlooking one of the most overt and consequential examples of Trump’s pay-to-play behavior. On May 24, 2024, Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow of The Washington Post published a blockbuster exposé, reporting that Trump privately told a group of oil company CEOs they should donate $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign. It would be a good “deal” for the industry, Trump reportedly said, because of the tax and regulation benefits they would receive if he returned to the Oval Office.

Specifically, Trump reportedly said he would reverse the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export permits, approve more drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and roll back environmental regulations the industry didn’t like, including electric vehicle purchasing mandates and vehicle emissions limits. Dawsey and Joselow then published a follow-up, reporting that Trump also promised to soften Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of industry mergers and acquisitions.

Two and a half years later, his administration has delivered on each of these promises and then some. The Brennan Center has published a well-documented summary of Trump’s assault on climate policy—including his administration’s repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which granted the federal government the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—that connects the dots between Trump’s actions and the many billions of dollars the oil industry has reaped as a result, including many millions of dollars benefiting oil executives as individuals.

What makes all this relevant to the midterm elections—beyond the fact that the leader of the Republican Party is directly implicated—is that many of Trump’s accomplishments were only possible because of rubber-stamp support from Republicans in Congress. Now those same Republicans must face the voters. How will they explain themselves?

To be clear, Democrats don’t get a pass here; corruption has been part of politics forever, and one of the press’s central obligations is to expose and hold its perpetrators to account, whoever they may be. That requires following the facts where they lead. But it also requires challenging the practice, still common among old-school newsrooms, of false equivalence—of portraying both sides as equally culpable for a given transgression for fear that an accurate portrayal would look like “taking sides.” If most of the facts point in one direction, our reporting should have the integrity and courage to say so.

Most voters don’t have access to directly question candidates seeking their votes. It’s our job as journalists to ask questions on their behalf so they can make informed decisions about their leaders.

Corruption is understandably a hot issue these days. Meanwhile, new scientific analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central shows that every congressional district in the country is hotter than it was in 1970, thanks to climate change. No surprise, then, that polling also shows that the vast majority of people want their government to take stronger climate action. Journalism that connects those dots—accurately and fairly, and without pulling any punches—is a true public service.

More often, Alex’s time crunch has an apocalyptic bent. When Patrick (Rupert Friend), an old flame who’s recently reappeared in her life, asks if it’s the right time for her to start a relationship, she replies indignantly, “It is the right time, it has to be the right time, because another time’s gonna be too late.” Later, when Alex briefly explores a relationship with Michael, a much older man, the problem of time becomes fatally strange. Describing his mother’s passing, he tells Alex with a look of profundity, “Her last words to me really stuck: ‘I’ll be dead tomorrow, and so will you.’” Alex recoils, but he explains, “Yeah, she meant live every day like it’s your last.” Alex, a mother herself, is skeptical about Michael’s extraction of such a neat moral from such a bizarre final utterance. “Did she?”

Youth, which airs on HBO, is one of several extraordinary series Horgan has created on the subject of motherhood. Time is each show’s most deranged and deranging element. In Catastrophe (2015–2019), time moves too fast. In each of its four seasons, Sharon (also played by Horgan) is either pregnant or the mother of a small child. The time jump from season one to two takes her from a newlywed in the process of delivering her first child to a soon-to-be mother of two. Motherland (2016–2022), which Horgan co-created but does not star in, focuses on the harried, endless grind that characterizes being the parent of school-age kids. From managing schedules to managing feelings, the time moves impossibly fast, but it also drags. When Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) loses the childcare she has relied on up to now (her own mother, who flatly quits), an avalanche of new duties falls on her, impeding the orderly forward motion of her life.

At the center of Youth is the period of parental life that critic Nina Renata Aron recently named “middle motherhood.” The world of culture, Aron argues, is filled with compelling, dramatic narratives of new motherhood, which she describes as “a time to swoon, and also to rage and cry.” That world is not similarly filled with narratives of mothers whose children have, to some degree or another, grown up, whose motherhood is no longer new, raw, exciting, rupturing. These motherhood narratives, if and when they’re even recognized as motherhood narratives, are few and far between. And yet, their fast-approaching but glacially unfolding temporality makes them rich stories to tell. “I can actually feel myself occupying a new developmental phase,” Aron writes of her own middle motherhood, “taking a different place in the generational order.” Stories of new motherhood are about being caught up in the rush of a new biological current; middle motherhood stories are about finding a new place in history.

Youth is a story about this transitional state, and it’s told by a writer and performer very much aware of the way such stories remain often unseen, unheard, untold. With her characteristic fizzing wit, blinkered charm, and soulful realism, Horgan has opened up a new stage of her own career. When I think back to Michael’s recounting of his mother’s last words, what strikes me is not so much that Michael extracts a trite maxim from her enigmatic phrase; it’s that Alex understands immediately that that’s not really what she said. This woman, at the end—not the beginning or even the middle—of life, of motherhood, of womanhood, said something way weirder than carpe diem. You just have to listen.

It is something of a reductive synopsis to say that Youth is just a show about motherhood. Indeed, the first episode presents us with a woman who is ready and eager to send her son off to college and explore the world as someone who is no longer defined by being a parent, no longer constrained by the demands of raising her son. Her ex-husband, a middling actor, has lived his life heedlessly, leaving all the child-rearing to Alex as he remarries a younger woman and prepares to leave the country for a sci-fi pilot shoot. As her son, Ruarí (Aran Murphy), gets in the car to drive off to school, Alex runs desperately after it only to burst out laughing. She sets to transforming his old room into a yoga studio, alternately collapsing into sobs and rising up with giddy glee. Later that week, she brings a man home for a successful fling, only to find Ruarí—surly, upset, uncommunicative—has reclaimed his bed. Alex would love her story to have stopped being about motherhood any longer; Youth is about the uncanny disappointment of finding out that hasn’t happened.

So, Youth is not a narrative of the disappearance or recession of motherhood from Alex’s identity so much as it’s a narrative of its eccentric reassertion. Rather than a series about the liberation from motherhood or a wish fulfillment tale of Alex getting her groove back in her perimenopause era, the show thinks about the different, weird ways motherhood adapts itself to this new stage of life.

The most direct way is through the manosphere-curious Ruarí. When we meet him, he’s seemingly embarked upon a self-destructive spiral. He stages a cheeky, disruptive protest at his high school graduation ceremony; he squeezes burrata all over himself and his family at a celebration dinner; and then there are the circumstances of his sudden return from uni. While it takes a few episodes for us to learn the whole story, it’s immediately clear that ­Ruarí has conducted himself poorly, and that this has made him unwelcome on campus. Back at home, he retreats into old clips of Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up and videos about semen retention. Alex is both terrified by her son’s sudden sullen mania and ill-equipped to get him to divulge what’s wrong. For much of the season, Ruarí is a mute stranger, haunting her halls. For a show as regularly funny as this one, it’s an upsetting portrait of a seemingly common contemporary phenomenon: a son lost to the online void, now become a man you can’t seem to fully trust.

So, as Alex navigates the physical changes of her age—her ailments range from spontaneous lockjaw to surprise menstruation—she’s also dealing with the emotional ravages of being both thrust back into active motherly service and rejected for that job. The seeming stable solution to these problems is Patrick, her longtime, on-again-off-again, “institutionally single” ex-lover. Alex and Patrick have an easy chemistry—Horgan has always known how to write great, crackling, funny flirtation—but it’s underlaid with a barely unspoken tension. The problem of their relationship is both that Ruarí still takes up too much of Alex’s life and that Alex can’t, and won’t, ever be able to give Patrick children of his own. It’s a banal kind of star-crossed love. What would it mean to accept someone for who they are when they are both too much and not enough of a mother?

“I live with the dim awareness that a tragedy is unfolding,” writes Nina Renata Aron. “The tragedy of mortality, of time passing, of exiting the phase of life where it’s possible to make new life.” Aron acknowledges the sexism of this tragic framing, the idea that women’s aging itself is a kind of death. Youth is nonetheless preoccupied with the sticky feeling of loss that comes with Alex’s feelings of liberation. The challenge of assembling a new life mostly out of available, remaining parts. The judgment that comes with that assertion of continued existence.

Midway through the season, on a holiday in Spain, Alex becomes kind of obsessed with a woman her age or a bit older who seems to breeze through the world with confidence, wisdom, and panache. She dines alone with gusto, her voluminous hair proudly showing its gray. On one occasion, Alex catches her eye, only to start coughing on smoke from her own cigarette. Later, Alex spies her again and tries to express what an inspiration she is, how her small example of living out loud has given Alex strength and courage. “I wanted to tell you, you look great,” she says. “So cool and content and comfortable in your skin, just you by yourself.” But the woman doesn’t speak English. Instead of picking up on Alex’s gratitude, she reads only anxiety and discomfort. The woman calls for help. “I think there’s something wrong with her,” she says, in Spanish.

Youth is a sexy, dazzling, often devastating comedy of middle motherhood. It’s a show with no neat maxims and plenty of weird, wise things to say about being alive, and a woman, and 50 all at once.

Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, who is physician to President Trump, pronounced five months ago that Trump is “fully fit to carry out all duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.” Barbabella said much the same after Trump’s chest and belly underwent a CT scan the previous October. But no presidential physician has ever dared state otherwise. Rear Admiral Cary Grayson said Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in 1919 was merely a bout of “nervous exhaustion.” Dr. Janet Travell lied her head off to cover up John F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease. Even the autopsy report sent to the Warren Commission omitted that Kennedy’s adrenal glands were only barely still present, presumably because these pathologists didn’t want to acknowledge the undisclosed cause.

Compared to Trump, though, Wilson and JFK were compulsive truth-tellers. So what are the odds we’re getting the straight story about the president’s physical and mental fitness now? Any serious inquiry into Trump’s health must weigh the official line against medical doctors’ analyses of what they see on television; observations from Trump’s staff; and various reports from books, newspapers, magazines, and so on. We scrounge for evidence where we can.

Diagnosing any patient from afar is a tricky business, especially when the diagnostician (me) never attended medical school. It is also perhaps unkind. But to any who would criticize the following inventory as cruel, let me remind you that, 22 months into his presidency, Trump still habitually blames “Sleepy Joe Biden” or “Slow Joe” for everything that goes wrong. Other countries, Trump said last October, “looked at him falling down stairs every day, every day the guy’s falling down stairs.” In January, Trump told The New York Times: “I think Joe Biden is the worst thing that ever happened to old people.” When Biden disclosed that he had Stage 4 prostate cancer, Trump said: “If you feel sorry for him, don’t feel so sorry, because he’s vicious.”

In saying such manifestly cruel things, Trump forfeits any right to deference about his own physical frailties. Plus, he’s the president! In that spirit, let’s plunge our tweezers into President Cavity Sam, and try not to set off too many buzzers.

Hair

It’s dyed. Natural hair doesn’t change color except to turn gray or white, and nobody would wear a toupee this bad. Trump’s hair is sometimes blonde, sometimes orange, and sometimes a little pink, though that may just be Trump’s angry-red scalp peeking through an ever less convincing comb-over. Male-pattern baldness has reportedly stalked Trump for decades. According to Harry Hurt III’s book Lost Tycoon, Trump had scalp reduction surgery in the 1980s and it didn’t go well. Jeffrey Epstein confirmed Trump had the procedure, but Trump has denied it.

Why such weird colors? Ivanka Trump has reportedly said her father uses a product called Just for Men that you’re supposed to apply slowly, but Trump lacks the patience to do that, so he ends up with weird coloration. Michael Wolff reported this in Fire and Fury (2018), so take it with a grain of salt; the book’s reliability is a matter of debate, and besides, nearly a decade has passed. Wolff said recently on his podcast that Trump has an emergency hair kit, carried by Natalie Harp or perhaps someone else, containing “small tufts of hair that match whatever color his hair might be at the time. And those are applied if needed and necessary.” Interesting, if true.

Face

Clearly Trump sprays or slathers something on it. The consensus is that it’s some self-tanning product like Man Tan. That would also explain the white circles frequently seen around his eyes. Wearing goggles under a tanning bed would do that too, but Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote in her 2021 book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now, that, at least during Trump’s first term, the White House was tanning bed–free. Grisham writes, “The president’s look was created with makeup that he put on his face every morning,” and that before one public appearance, Trump borrowed her face powder. Grisham refers in the book to an “arsenal of products” that an aide traveling with Trump would carry, but she doesn’t enumerate what they were.

Brain

This is of course the principal area of concern. I reviewed serious reasons for worry in some detail last month (“Why Trump May Not Serve Out His Presidency”). To summarize: STAT News reported nine years ago that neurolinguistics and cognition experts comparing old videos of Trump with more recent ones observed deterioration in the complexity of Trump’s unscripted public utterances. Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley compared Trump’s 2016 rhetorical style to “a monkey with a machinegun.” (That’s not a medical opinion, but it’s very good.) Groups of mental health experts again declared in 2024 that Trump displayed signs of cognitive decline, and 18 months later that he’d “deteriorated even further.” Trump falls asleep a lot during White House meetings. He says crazy stuff all the time. The latest expert to note this is Trump himself. At a MAGA rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, earlier this month, Trump said, “I could say the stupidest things, and you’d clap me.”

Right ear

This is the most famous presidential body part; it’s Trump’s battle scar from the attempt on his life in Meridian, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. The bullet created a two-centimeter wound, according to the former White House presidential physician Ronny Jackson, who by then was a Republican House member from Texas. There’s apparently a scar on Trump’s ear now, but in September 2024 Trump showed it to New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi and she said she couldn’t see it. Nuzzi, however, has come to be regarded as a potentially problematic source.

Neck

Asked last March about some really alarming redness on the right side of Trump’s neck, Barbabella said, “President Trump is using a very common cream on the right side of his neck, which is a preventative skin treatment. The president is using the treatment for one week, and the redness is expected to last for a few weeks.”

Can you indulge me one pet peeve? The word is preventive. More substantively, Barbabella left unanswered the following questions: 1) What was it that the offending cream was intended to prevent? 2) If the cream was causing that angry rash, why was it still being applied?

The rash does seem to have gone away.

Heart

Yes, he has one. So far as we know it’s in decent shape; we don’t know why Trump’s doctors last year felt it necessary to do a CT scan of it. Trump takes two drugs, rosuvastatin and ezetimibe, to manage his cholesterol, which as a result is within normal range. Trump takes Bayer aspirin daily to reduce the risk of a heart attack. But for some bizarre reason his favored dose is 325 milligrams, which his doctors have repeatedly told him is about four times too much. A dose that high increases Trump’s risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. Trump’s doctors want him to drop down to 81 milligrams, but he refuses to do that. Is our teetotaling commander in chief an aspirin junkie, like the murderer Perry Smith in In Cold Blood? We can’t rule it out. Aspirin-use disorder is, according to one 2019 study, “an underreported condition.”

Belly

Trump’s May physical measured his weight at 238 pounds. At a reported six feet, three inches, Trump’s body mass index was 29.7. That would put him a whisker shy of “obese.” But Trump isn’t six foot three; he’s six foot two. That’s what Trump’s driver’s license said in 2012, Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn reported in 2016, and it’s what his draft card said in 1968, The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported in 2015. As people age, they don’t get taller, they get shorter, so probably Trump is now closer to six foot one. But let’s be generous and say he’s still six foot two. That would put his BMI at 30.6 and make him officially “obese.” Indeed, 30.6 is higher than the BMI of any previous president excepting William Howard Taft (reigning champ at 42.3), Grover Cleveland (34.6), and Trump’s hero, William McKinley (31.1). However, Trump has a lower BMI than our other two obese presidents, Zachary Taylor and Theodore Roosevelt (both 30.2). Trump’s doctors have told him to lose weight.

Since you were about to ask: Yes, as of February 2024, “Sleepy” Joe Biden’s BMI was 23.1, classifying him as “healthy.”

Backside

Not an important concern, but a delicate one: Does Trump wear an adult diaper? He would hardly be the first national politician to do so, nor even necessarily the first president. I’m guessing there are at least four or five diapers in our superannuated Congress. But put me down for a probable “no.”

Our main source on the Trump diaper rumor is Noel Casler, a stand-up comedian who says he worked six seasons for The Apprentice, the reality-TV show Trump starred in from 2004 to 2015. (Starting in 2008, it was called The Celebrity Apprentice.) Like everything else in Casler’s story, Casler’s work for The Apprentice is unverified. In 2020, Casler said Trump’s “incontinence stems from his decades of stimulant abuse and fast-food diet.” Casler went on to explain that the stimulant in question was Adderall: “He snorts Adderall as his maintenance high. When he gets too wired, this is tempered with benzodiazepines.” Around the time Casler added that Trump “sent his secretaries to the CVS on 57th Street to pick up his scripts for ... herpes treatment,” I concluded the man was a teller of tall tales who just doesn’t like Trump.

Why, then, only a “probable” no to a Trump diaper? Because former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, who made an enemy of Trump by voting for his impeachment after the January 6 insurrection, and as a consequence lost his seat in 2022, said afterward that Trump constantly smells bad. “I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odor,” Kinzinger tweeted in December 2023. “It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can.”

The following year, Kinzinger said on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “If you take, like, armpits, ketchup, makeup and a little butt, it’s probably like that, all mixed up.… A little bit of a pungent odor, I would say.” If Kinzinger was telling the truth, this might simply be an unusually bad case of flatulence. But if so, then, why is Trump’s posture sometimes peculiar, and what’s with the strange bulge sometimes seen in his pants? I can’t say.

Right hand

We’ve seen weird bruising on Trump’s right hand for well over a year now. Sometimes he covers it up with makeup, but you can still see it. The White House said it was from shaking hands, but then the condition spread to Trump’s left hand. This may indicate circulation problems. The White House said that the underlying cause was Trump’s overconsumption of aspirin, which is plausible. But if Trump refuses to cut back on his daily 325 Bayer milligrams even as it turns his hands purple, that strengthens the hypothesis that Trump is hooked on aspirin.

Legs, ankles

I mentioned already Trump’s awkward posture, and how that may (emphasize may) mean he’s a nappies guy. The official diagnosis is chronic venous insufficiency, which is not life-threatening. The unofficial speculation is that, like Woodrow Wilson, Trump may have suffered an unreported stroke. Professor Bruce Davidson of Washington State University’s medical school told Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz, on their podcast The Court of History, that he thinks Trump had a stroke perhaps six months ago and that it was “on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body.” There’s also been speculation that Trump is wearing some sort of leg brace, based on footage that appears to show something under his left trouser leg.

I’ll skip Trump’s feet, which at one point had bone spurs that kept him out of the Vietnam War, because the spurs vanished the moment Richard Nixon ended the draft in January 1973. The point of this exercise has not been to engage in body-shaming, or even, really, draft-dodger-shaming. I wouldn’t do it if the Cavity Sam in question weren’t president of the United States. But he is the president, he’s entered his ninth decade, and he’s been acting and looking weirder than usual. That has implications for the health of the republic.

But let me close by conceding, once again, that I am not a doctor. I’m just a guy poking some tweezers into the body politic.

Six days later, a military junta took control of the country under the leadership of Mohamed Siad Barre. He was a socialist, and he imposed Marxist-Leninist government, aligning with the Soviet Union. But over time, his relationship with Moscow soured. The Soviets frowned upon Somalia’s 1977 invasion of Ethiopia and switched allegiances. According to a 1982 New York Times op-ed by the respected comparative political scientist David D. Laitin, Washington began to take an interest in Siad Barre. Jimmy Carter did so tentatively, but “President Reagan, abandoning caution, gave Mr. Siad Barre a warm welcome in Washington” that March, Laitin wrote. Little countries like Somalia at the time were just pieces on a Cold War chessboard on which the Reagan administration moved around its pawns with particular aggression.

By the late 1980s, discontent with Siad Barre was such that rebel groups began engaging government forces; a civil war erupted. By the early 1990s, Somalia was a failed state. Siad Barre went into exile. Governments couldn’t patch the nation together. And around that time, Somalis began to flee to Kenya—hundreds of thousands of them, into refugee camps. The largest, Dadaab, is still home to some 400,000 Somali refugees, 35 years later.

Why should all this matter to you right now? Because one of those refugees, Nur Omar Mohammed, took his children to Dadaab. By 1995, they were granted asylum by the United States of America and came here, eventually applying for citizenship. One of those children was 17 or 18 at the time of the citizenship application. That wouldn’t seem to matter much in the broad scheme of things, whether a youngster was this age or that some 30 years ago. But today, that youngster is Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, and Donald Trump and his subordinates are moving heaven and earth to use that alleged discrepancy to get her expelled not only from Congress but from the United States that once welcomed her.

The Trump administration’s move against Omar is repulsive. And it’s sure not happening because her father might have recorded her age inaccurately half a lifetime ago (an allegation that, as yet, remains unproven publicly). It’s happening first and foremost because she’s a very vocal critic of Trump and MAGA-ism. True, alongside her criticisms of Trump, she’s also made some remarks that smacked of antisemitism, and which were deserving of denunciation. But in this country, it’s the voters who decide whether such comments disqualify someone from office. And Omar’s voters have returned her to Congress three times after her initial election in 2018, and they’re about to do so again. And since she hasn’t been stopped at the ballot box, Trump is now searching for other means to do so.

And by the way, those voters include citizens in the heavily Jewish enclave of St. Louis Park, the famous home of the Coen Brothers and Al Franken. If homegrown opposition to Omar was to arise, it would have been from there. She did win the 2022 Democratic primary narrowly, but in 2024, she won the primary handily, and in the general, she carried nearly 70 percent of the vote in St. Louis Park.

But let’s be real. This is also happening because Omar is Somali—because she’s a Black Muslim woman who wears a hijab. These things aren’t quantifiable, and of course Trump and his spokespeople, at least the ones who haven’t lied about their legal careers, would never admit to these aspects of this piece of political persecution. But we all know it’s there.

Actually, now that I think about it, Trump has admitted to his hatred of Somalis and has done so rather openly. Ever since details spilled out about large-scale welfare fraud in the Minneapolis Somali community, Trump has been talking and posting about it incessantly and trying to connect it to Omar. It’s undeniably true that the scale of the fraud is nightmarish. But there’s no evidence of any such connection. (The Biden Justice Department opened an unrelated investigation into Omar’s finances, but it “stalled for lack of evidence.”)

That hasn’t stopped Trump from calling Omar “garbage,” as he did in a Cabinet meeting last year, and from ranting about Somalis generally in a way that can plainly be called racist and can arguably be called fascist. Am I being melodramatic here? Consider these Trump sentences, from an October 8 Truth Social post: “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”

The racism is apparent in the first two sentences, which seek to incite hatred based specifically on the nationality of the population in question. But those third and fourth sentences … how exactly is he proposing that Minnesotans “fight back”? And when he says the federal government will “come to your rescue,” what precisely does he mean? And who is the “you” he is addressing?

I think we have a pretty good idea—he means that if certain “real” Minnesotans were to take the matter of the “Somalians” into their own hands, he’d order in armed troops to back them up. Whether this is fascist is in the eye of the beholder. But I’ll just note this: On April 1, 1933, the Nazis organized a boycott of Jewish shops and department stores. Brownshirts who stood outside the stores held signs: “Germans, defend yourselves against the Jewish atrocity propaganda, buy only at German shops!”

We’re not there just yet. But what if a few Minnesotans—good, pure, white, ancestral Minnesotans—barreled into Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis’s “Little Mogadishu,” incensed in part by the incendiary rhetoric of the president of the United States, and had themselves a little shoot-up, or broke a few shop windows? Trump has already committed the federal government—a phrase that implicates all of us, by the way—to coming to their “rescue.”

And what of his pursuit of Omar? Trump has been firing blanks in courtrooms his entire second term in his jihad against his political enemies, so there’s reason to think that this one will crumble the way all the others have.

In the meantime, it’s the duty of every antifascist American, however one might feel about some of Omar’s past comments, to stand arm in arm with her here. She is in this country as a result of a tragic chain of events that the United States, playing Cold War roulette, helped set in train. But this country did make amends by welcoming her to its shores. And once here, far from asking for handouts—the right’s standard caricature of people like her—she got herself educated and elected to the Minnesota state house and, finally, to the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Omar were a Republican with a last name like Schultz, Trump sure wouldn’t be ordering people to raid her house and asking what year she was born—he would be effusing over her American success story. But to Trump, who has nothing but contempt for this country’s founding principles and its immigrant fabric, she is the wrong kind of American. He’s right that there are wrong kinds of Americans. He’s just wrong about who they are.

On the other hand, we have Senator Jon Ossoff, who has taken the debate stage twice in recent days to tell his Republican opponent to his face that he’s a racist scumbag.

My paraphrasing here is more blunt than the rhetoric that Ossoff has been using, but only just. In the pair’s first debate, Ossoff threw daggers, accusing Representative Mike Collins of hiring “half the Third Reich to staff [his] congressional office,” adding, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” During Tuesday night’s debate, an embittered Collins tried to play the civility card, claiming that Ossoff’s incendiary statements about Collins’s very real embrace of white supremacy had led to death threats. Ossoff breezily brushed away the accusation and went back for more. Referring to Collins’s son-in-law, a white-nationalist influencer, Ossoff jabbed: “Can you commit for just three weeks to stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from your home?”

This is like watching a fever finally break, and it’s not just Ossoff. In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed has gone at Mike Rogers with both barrels, repeatedly referring to the former congressman as weak and cowardly. In Maine … well, let’s just say that I wished Troy Jackson had a bit of that dog in him, but he doesn’t. Still, I can tell he’s trying, and his better moments against Senator Susan Collins, like telling her “You can’t eat road salt,” at least have a bit of a surly edge. At any rate, the rise of rude Democrats has got me believing in the potential cure for one of our greatest civic maladies: degenerative Senate brain, the very condition that leads a Sheldon Whitehouse or a Martin Heinrich to work with MAGA filth bent on desecrating the constitutional order.

Right now, there should not be a bipartisan anything, unless it’s a negotiated agreement to mass-retire Republican lawmakers. As I’ve noted numerous times before, the GOP is essentially a criminal syndicate, aiding and backstopping a corrupt and self-dealing presidential administration. There can be no collaboration with Donald Trump and his goons on any level. So, no: I don’t want to see Democrats reaching for comity and accommodation. I don’t want collegiality. What I want to see is Democrats dogwalking their Republican opponents on live television. People like Ossoff are giving me faith that there are members of this party who are truly wedded to the notion of robust accountability, which is what the post-Trump era desperately needs.

One thing that the years ahead can do without, however, is pundit and anthropomorphic smarm-fountain David Brooks, who is apparently not a fan of Ossoff’s sublime debating technique. This week, in an appearance on PBS Newshour, Brooks complained, “Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.”

Let’s take a look at the litany of things that we have been doing in this country that occasional TNR contributor Greg Greene compiled in response to Brooks’s call for toned-down rhetoric. The Trump administration is putting the finishing touches on a new prison for immigrant children and families. It has continued to murder people in the Caribbean. It has destroyed a girls’ school in Iran with a “double-tap” strike, killing 165 people. The shuttering of USAID has led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Just this week, Representative Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal agents in a trumped-up criminal probe into her citizenship. Then there’s the ICE violence, the criminalization of dissent, the abrogation of the media’s First Amendment rights, and the constant flow of white supremacist rhetoric from the Department of Homeland Security.

All of that is to say that, contrary to Brooks, I don’t think Ossoff’s debate rhetoric really rates as a problem right now. Let me put it plainly: Civility is a con. It’s a tool of the status quo. It’s most often called for when the people who get mauled by the powerful try to vindicate their rights or their humanity. It’s a brand wielded by smarmy phonies; demagoguery dressed in the robe of a high priest. And as TNR contributor Nacona Nix explained at length, the liberal commitment to civility theater does a lot of real-world harm: It’s currently one of the primary vectors by which antisocial and undemocratic ideas get laundered into respectability. And while it may seem laudatory to wish for a day when there’s nothing but an abundance of highmindedness for all to share, the Trump era can’t be ended by a change in tone or temperament. We can’t nice our way to a better future. As Nix writes, “The task now is not to lower the temperature, but to raise the standard.”

Democrats should embrace the rudeness and vitriol if for no other reason than because it’s fully what the GOP deserves. But they should also just watch Ossoff cook, because the man is straight-up running a debate clinic. He’s calm, composed, and fully committed to tearing his Republican opponent to shreds. I find it comforting to watch Collins disconsolately shuffling his papers and stumbling back to his talking points. That he looks like a hunted man on that stage alongside Ossoff makes my soul feel lighter. That’s how Trump’s enablers should feel. That should be an essential part of the midterm message: Hunting season is coming. When I hear Ossoff’s debate rhetoric, I hear nothing discordant. I hear the sound of standards being raised.

If you are looking for a moment that sums up Vance in 2026, you could hardly do better. It epitomizes his mean-spiritedness, his comfort with casual bigotry, and his inability to behave like a normal human being. The jab was, like Vance himself, incredibly uncomfortable—a “no homo” joke that would have been stale two decades ago, when Vance was an awkward undergrad at Ohio State. It lacked even a whiff of the rhetorical shield that has accompanied most of the right’s insults of Talarico, which typically aim to undermine his Texan bona fides. Vance basically just said he was gay.

.@VP JD Vance implies U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D-TX) is gay: "I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I'm the Vice President, not James Talarico." https://t.co/1u5BqG7cD3

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 13, 2026

Vance is not, and never has been, a natural or charismatic stump speaker. He’s the right’s new Richard Nixon in many ways: a striver of boundless ambition and considerable intellect—at least within the confines of the Republican Party—who just never quite seems at home with other people. It worked for Nixon, eventually. But Vance has a problem neither Nixon nor any other Republican has had before: He will have to succeed Donald Trump. And, as his attempt at humor in Texas suggests, few people are set up worse to follow Trump than Vance.

In some respects, Vance is walking a tightrope familiar to vice presidents with aspirations to succeed their boss. In this thankless job, he is forced to take on unappetizing tasks (like his on-and-off role as a principal negotiator with Iran) and publicly defend his boss’s unappetizing positions, even those he does not personally agree with—like Trump’s ill-conceived war in Iran. But at the same time, he cannot merely imitate his boss; Vance’s attempts at recreating Trump’s unique appeal always end up backfiring. So Vance has to carve out a distinct political identity, which explains why his aides have been leaking to the press about his disapproval of that war. And he has had to do all of this while competing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio for Trump’s endorsement in the 2028 race.

But even if they have diverged on policy or not gotten along particularly well, presidents and vice presidents have tended to at least appear to occupy the same plane of reality when speaking publicly. That is not the case with Vance and Trump. Take the midterms, which Trump has repeatedly insisted will be a “surprise” to people who expect a Republican bloodbath. The president has insisted that he is personally flipping entire districts with his barnstorming tour of the country, even as he has struggled to fill arenas that are considerably smaller than the ones he packed two years ago.

Vance is singing a different tune. He comes across less as a chest-thumping gladiator than a jilted ex, trying one last time to win back someone who never wants to see him again. Appearing on the All In podcast last month, Vance implored voters to “give us another chance—or, give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.” A month later, he was even more dejected. “We know that we’re swimming upstream,” he said in Texas on Tuesday.

The obvious rejoinder is, “Who’s ‘we’?” The president certainly isn’t talking that way; he proudly denies the reality that all of us can plainly see. Vance’s approach is quite different: He acknowledges reality but sounds a positive note about overcoming the odds. “I think that we have as good a chance as I’ve ever seen to really defy those historical trends,” he said on Tuesday. Which is the kind of thing vice presidents say when heading into tough midterm elections. It’s not the kind of thing Trump says, though.

This is an important distinction when considering where the Republican Party is headed after its term-limited octogenarian leader waddles back to Mar-a-Lago in two years. Vance can lean into bigotry and meanness, but he’ll never be Trump. He’ll never be able to replicate Trump’s odd, unique appeal. He can’t even compete with what Trump is doing on the campaign trail now—which is disjointed and incoherent but still unquestionably Trumpy. (In contrast to Vance’s homophobic humor, Trump is out there complimenting the butts of male Republican candidates.)

That Trump is sui generis has been undeniable for over a decade. Republican voters like him, in part, because he’s unpredictable, gleefully breaks political and social taboos, never bows to reality, and is funny—or funny to them, at least. Vance, meanwhile, is very much something we’ve seen before: ruthlessly ambitious, albeit in a palpably desperate way. He sticks to the talking points even when they’re not great. He’s bound to reality. He’s predictable. And he isn’t funny even to the handful of Republicans who profess to love him.

None of those qualities are electoral deal-breakers in and of themselves, but Trump has fully MAGA-fied the Republican Party. And since it lacks someone who can replicate the president’s unique appeal, any follow-up act will be a letdown for the president’s devotees—something Rubio has to contend with at least as much as Vance does.

But lately Trump has been making this transition a little easier for everybody. Rallies that were once hot tickets, with a charged atmosphere somewhere between a carnival and a tent revival, have become heavily scripted, bromide-filled snoozefests. And the aging man leading them—slower, sleepier, more scatterbrained—is clearly going through the motions. Vance, at least, has youth on his side, with apparent vigor to spare. Then again, it’s not like people are flocking to his rallies. Turns out, gay innuendo doesn’t pack arenas to the rafters.

The Telegraph, citing four anonymous sources, reports that Musk proposed slowing down Starshield, the military-grade version of Musk’s Starlink satellite communications system, and that Trump agreed. The move hindered Ukraine’s drone defenses of Russian attacks, and came while Trump is upset with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to target Russian oil refineries and infrastructure after Trump lifted sanctions on Russian fuel. After Ukraine’s Starlink access was restricted, Russia launched a massive aerial attack on Wednesday that continued into the next morning.

Shortly afterward, Musk directed blame at the Trump administration, saying that “Starshield systems are owned and controlled” by the federal government and “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” An unnamed source told The Telegraph that after the “night of carnage” in Kyiv, Musk was reportedly scared that he would face a backlash from consumers in Europe.

“[Musk] tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it. The reality is that they were both in it,” the source said.

On Friday afternoon, Trump was asked by a reporter outside of the White House who was responsible for hindering Starlink, him or Musk. He claimed ignorance.

“Well, I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon, and from what I understand, it’s the same as it’s always been,” Trump said.

Appearing on Real America’s Voice, Mullin discussed his agency’s plan to go after the Democratic lawmaker after her home in Washington was raided Monday, just three weeks before November’s midterm elections. The federal government is reportedly investigating how Omar got her citizenship after she arrived in the United States from Somalia as a child.

“If someone comes in and claims—that fills out their paperwork illegally, and they claim that they are this person, and this is their background, and then underneath that individual, a lot of other people come in … then that can be considered a RICO case,” Mullin said.

“There was a conspiracy to deceive the American government, and therefore everything else that came in with it could then for be looked at as the same case,” the secretary said.

“Good thing about something like a case like that, is when it is a RICO case, that the statue of limitations on things, they don’t, they don’t apply. A few cases they do, but in most cases they don’t,” he added.

The probe ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. In order to strip her American citizenship, the Department of Justice has to sue in federal court and prove that the person materially lied to get their status. It’s still unclear what, if any, evidence DHS has found to support this crusade against one of the president’s most outspoken critics.

Mullin claimed that DHS “worked very closely with DOJ through the whole process.” So surely, he should know about one crucial section of the DOJ manual that bars federal prosecutors from timing any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of undermining a candidate in an upcoming election. Mullin’s remarks came the same day that early voting began in Minnesota.

If the Trump administration really wants to talk about a RICO case, then maybe we should discuss how President Donald Trump is weaponizing federal agencies to go after his critics? Or if we want to just stick with a classic, we can always revisit that pesky grand jury indictment Trump and his buddies received for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2024 presidential election.

EU leaders met in Brussels for the conclusion of the European Council summit Friday, where they closed ranks around Ukraine in its ongoing war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. During one press conference, Zelenskiy was asked if he felt Trump was making him a “scapegoat” before America’s November midterm elections.

“President Trump is facing pretty difficult midterm elections. His personal popularity is very low, diesel prices in the U.S. are very high, and the war that he started in the Middle East is not going the way he wants it,” the Sky News reporter asked. “Do you think you are being treated as a scapegoat for his own problems?”

Zelenskiy took a long pause, glanced at the papers on his podium, and then looked up, smiling. The whole room laughed.

“This is my answer,” Zelenskiy said.

It is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that Zelenskiy is being scapegoated for Trump’s disastrous second-term record. Only two days ago, SpaceX throttled Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite internet network with no warning. On Friday, The Telegraph reported that Elon Musk went to the White House to specifically discuss the cuts ahead of time. “The reality is that they were both in it,” one source said of Musk and Trump’s plan.

Trump has also recently ramped up his public criticism of Zelenskiy and Ukraine, specifically for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on Russian oil in a misguided attempt to bring down diesel prices before the midterms.

Judging by the laughter in Brussels, however, Trump is not fooling most of our allies. Ukraine is no more responsible for high gas prices in the U.S. than for the empty seats at the president’s rallies or the blue momentum building in deep red states. Look in the mirror, grandpa.

Anthony Scaramucci, who only served for 11 days as White House communications director, had a charitable take on the firing, posting on X, “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” in response to a post about Zacharia’s dismissal.

Unlike Scaramucci, who was fired for criticizing multiple Trump administration officials in a New Yorker interview, Zacharia was fired for a disastrous first press briefing, misrepresenting her credentials as a lawyer when she hasn’t passed a bar exam, and bombing an interview with pro-Trump pundit Sean Hannity on Fox News. White House staff were even trading scathing insults of her over text messages.

Scaramucci lasted long enough to get hilariously parodied on SNL by Bill Hader in 2017, but it remains to be seen whether Zacharia will have Scarlett Johansson playing her as she had hoped. She still faces a bar complaint in the state of California that could become criminal charges, and the media is dissecting her husband Tyler’s work history for a North Korean firm. Trump’s political career has been known for train wrecks, but Zacharia might be the biggest one of all.

Fox News also reported that Zacharia would be “transitioning out” of the job, though it’s unclear what exactly that means.

Zacharia has faced intense media scrutiny and blowback this week regarding her bogus legal credentials, train-wreck first press briefing, and a disastrous appearance on Fox News’s Hannity where she tried to defend calling herself a “lawyer” but not an “attorney.”

The news of her exit comes shortly after President Donald Trump told reporters that the media was treating Zacharia “nastily” but admitted he had suggested she “reconsider” the position.

“I said, ‘Katie, you don’t have do this if you don’t wanna.’ She said, ‘This is a lot tougher.’ I said, ‘Welcome to the world of Trump.’”

“Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this,” the president said he told her.

“I said to her, honestly if I were you, I’d reconsider. You think about it, but I would reconsider.”

CNN White House reporter Kaitlan Collins reported that Trump was “embarrassed by the coverage of Zacharia’s briefing and when he polled other aides about her, Zacharia had few allies willing to stand up for her or defend her performance.”

“The main reason he rushed to select her after growing irritated with how long the process was taking to replace Karoline Leavitt was because he wanted more people defending him on TV,” Collins added. “When she failed to do so in a sufficient way with Sean Hannity, Trump said he knew she needed to go.”

Zacharia has spent much of her five days as press secretary attempting to justify calling herself a “lawyer,” despite never having passed the bar exam. She may face investigation in the state of California for purportedly calling herself a “lawyer” without a license after a bar complaint was filed Wednesday.

“Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” ex–Trump communications director Antony Scaramucci wrote on X following Zacharia’s termination. Scaramucci stood behind the White House briefing room podium in Trump’s first term for a then-record 11 days, from July 21 to July 31, 2017. Zacharia lasted about 40 percent of that time.

Before the news of her firing, reporters asked the president if Zacharia would remain in his administration. “In some form, but maybe a more pleasant form,” he said.

“I just want her to be happy,” he added.

This story has been updated.

Ahead of a referendum vote that could potentially put Alberta on the path toward independence, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney urged province residents at a rally in Calgary Thursday night to remain united in the face of pressure from foreign actors.

“The world has become more dangerous and divided,” Carney said. “Some outside our borders are working to break us so they can own us.”

Carney’s biggest moment of the night was when he spoke about fast-tracking the Pacific Link pipeline, formerly the West Coast Pipeline, connecting oil-rich Alberta to British Columbia.

The prime minister promised that the pipeline would reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States—and the crowd exploded into cheers.

“Careful, they might think that’s election interference. A little touchy,” Carney joked, as the audience laughed and cheered. “We’re not. We’re getting on with it. We are getting on with it.”

It was a major jab—one that is sure to get under Trump’s skin. As it stands, his rallies are more likely to devolve into fistfights than standing ovations.

Since Trump launched his trade war against America’s closest neighbor—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier. The White House has issued a torrent of threats, including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, such as forced annexation. But Carney has already begun looking to expand the country’s trade partnerships in Europe.

Baltimore TV station Fox 45 asked the Maryland congressman about how he flipped out at Capital News Service reporter Cat Murphy, a student at the University of Maryland, for filming him answering questions from reporters, even though other reporters were filming him too. Harris doubled down on the way he treated Murphy.

“Look the bottom line is, it’s not very newsworthy that the liberal media badgers a conservative politician. What was newsworthy is that I actually pushed back against it,” Harris said to Fox’s Mikenzie Frost. “She actually started by criticizing the way that press gaggle was being conducted. That’s not the role of a journalist, and what I did in the end is just say, ‘Look, this is all done’ and just left.” 

Frost pointed out that Harris left out some details about threatening to have Murphy arrested over a false interpretation of Maryland’s two-party consent law on recordings. 

“Oh, there is clearly a need for two-party consent, but it would have applied to everyone. That’s why, in the end, I just left everyone and their cameras and left the room,” Harris replied. When Frost asked if Harris thought he owed Murphy an apology, he said if she called him, he’d tell her that her failure to ask for his permission was what bothered him.  

“She criticized the way I was conducting the news conference. She’s a journalism student, I think she should realize that’s not really your purpose, that’s not your purpose to attempt to run a press conference,” Harris said, adding that “she was telling me how to do my job” and continuing to blame the liberal media for “badgering a conservative politician.” 

It’s pretty clear that Harris, who has been in office since 2011, is out of touch with his constituents and his state’s own recording laws. The press gaggle around him was a public event with multiple journalists recording it, which means the two-party consent law doesn’t apply. Threatening to have any journalist arrested, let alone a college student, is a sign that he doesn’t respect the right to a free press and can’t handle any pushback. It’s obvious why Harris hasn’t held an in-person town hall since 2023.

Instead, the former Trump adviser has spent his money on fundraising consultants, blowing $442,000 on a contract with the Texas-based fundraising service provider American Caging and $227,000 on a contract with the Virginia-based Rockwell Solutions, The Washington Sun reported Friday.

Just $57,700 was paid to Gessler Blue Law in March, according to listed PAC expenditures.

Nearly all of the fund’s donors are retirees, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Giuliani was once a beloved fixture of the Big Apple, earning the title “mob-buster” as a vicious U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s. He later gained the moniker “America’s mayor” for seeing the city through the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But the fading star lost a lot of that adoration when he saddled his political dreams on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race, closely aligning himself with the MAGA movement and its myriad political conspiracies.

Since then, Giuliani has served as an interchangeable mouthpiece to communicate Trump’s whims—a choice that has bled him dry. He spread baseless accusations of ballot manipulation about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother-daughter duo of election workers in Georgia, in the wake of the 2020 election. That decision cost Giuliani $150 million in damages (which he tried and failed to worm his way out of), his Manhattan penthouse, and his Mercedes convertible, and almost forced him to give up his Florida condominium.

Giuliani was also indicted—and pardoned—for his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia and Arizona. Over the course of 2024, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, was legally disbarred, and had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies.

He also begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees, though Trump reportedly refused.

Giuliani even started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash to offset the enormous costs of his unwavering MAGA allegiance. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

The 82-year-old was on a mechanical ventilator in a Florida ICU earlier this year after being diagnosed with pneumonia. He recovered and was released in May.

News flash: That didn’t happen. But Trump has good reason to pretend it did. Mahoning County, whose seat is Youngstown, has taken on immense significance for the political classes. Ever since Trump in 2016 began transforming the broader Mahoning Valley region into a GOP stronghold, Youngstown and Mahoning County have become a benchmark for reporters to interpret Trump’s inroads with the Midwestern working class. The constant media visits to Mahoning helped launch the meme of the “Trump diner safari.”

But numerous Democrats tell me they’re cautiously optimistic that they might flip Mahoning County once again. Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton—who are running for Senate and governor—are both heavily competing in the region, and both have profiles well suited to winning it back. If even one of them pulls this off, it will constitute yet another potent sign of Trumpism’s decline.

New internal data from Democrats helps explain this cautious optimism. Veteran Democratic pollster Margie Omero just did polling on Trump in the three counties that make up the broader Youngstown media market—Mahoning, Trumbull, and Columbiana counties. Omero found that Trump’s favorable rating in them is 11 points underwater, at 43–54. The poll, which came out of the field this week, was conducted for national Democrats, and it’s helping fuel their optimism.

“Trump is unpopular in this region because he’s broken his promises to make things more affordable,” Omero told me. “And people are really struggling here.”

The finding is striking. Trump won Mahoning, Trumbull, and Columbiana counties in 2024 by nine, 17, and 49 points, respectively. The latter is not flippable for Democrats, but Mahoning definitely is (Trumbull might be, but only on a very good night). Trump being that underwater in the whole region is quite a surprise.

Flipping Mahoning County would be big. When Brown lost reelection to the Senate in 2024, he fell short there by less than a point, and in Trumbull by six points. Brown—who has built his political identity around the working class—has devoted lots of time to the region, recently talking to Mahoning residents about rail safety and corporate CEOs screwing over workers.

Indeed, Brown works particularly hard to appeal to the sort of blue-collar workers who are not culturally or ideologically wedded to MAGA—people who were previously Democrats and presumably could be again. As Brown recently told writer John Judis: “Democrats don’t talk to workers enough, and don’t listen to workers enough.”

Acton, meanwhile, is running for governor as a daughter of Mahoning Valley. Acton—the state’s Department of Health inspector—grew up in Youngstown. She often talks about her difficult childhood in the region with her single mother. She went to high school in Trumbull County, where she was homecoming queen. As a candidate, she has visited the region 25 times, according to her campaign, and regularly describes herself as a “product of Youngstown.”

By contrast, the GOP candidates are imperfect fits for the region. Husted is a cookie-cutter pro-corporate Republican who was appointed by Governor Mike DeWine to the Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Brown has savaged him for offering giveaways during his stint as lieutenant governor to facilitate data center construction, an attack that Republicans admit is landing. And while GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramasawamy grew up in Cincinnati, he’s a biotech financier—not a popular profession these days in working-class Ohio.

Both races are razor-close, and the Republicans could win one or both, particularly if the polling is off. And not everything is going Democrats’ way here. Republican Mike Rulli will likely win easily in the 6th congressional district. But right now Brown and Acton are overperforming: In polling averages, both lead by around four points in a state Trump carried by double digits. And their competitiveness in Mahoning is plainly a reason why.

Marty Loney, a senior official with two union locals in the Mahoning Valley region—one representing construction workers, the other plumbers and pipe fitters—estimates that around half the members in both locals backed Trump in the past. Trump’s inroads among unionized workers aided his success in the Rust Belt, but Loney says he’s seen serious erosion in these workers’ support for Trump since.

“They’ve been disheartened by the empty promises,” Loney told me. Speaking about Brown and Acton, Loney added: “I expect them to win Mahoning County, even though it’s going to be very close.” This could also be aided if working-class voters disillusioned with Trump stay home, which other regional union officials see as likely.

Mahoning’s broader trajectory tells a big part of the story of Trump-era America writ large. Barack Obama won Mahoning County by 28 points in 2012, yet Trump erased that advantage entirely in 2016, pulling even with Hillary Clinton there, then narrowly winning it in 2020 and winning it lopsidedly in 2024. That jarring swing helped turn Mahoning into a journalistic archetype of the Obama-Trump county—a lens through which to understand blue-collar abandonment of Democrats in the Rust Belt.

The white working class’s Republican turn, of course, goes back decades and involves much larger forces. One is deindustrialization, which hit the Mahoning region so famously hard that Bruce Springsteen captured it in the tune “Youngstown,” with its great line about “smokestacks reaching like the arms of God.” In a kind of perfect subplot, Trump now hates Springsteen for telling the truth about his betrayal of working people.

It’s fitting, then, that Mahoning County is where Trump went in 2017 and shouted to a crowd, “Don’t sell your houses,” because he’d bring manufacturing roaring back. It’s also where General Motors closed its Lordstown plant in 2019, devastating many residents. That didn’t stop Trump from winning there in 2020 and 2024, but the broken promises finally appear poised to catch up with him, even in this epicenter of Trumpian success in the industrial Midwest.

Mahoning County has long been lionized as the locus point of Trump’s successful exploitation of angst over deindustrialization. Yet Mahoning is also a place where his promises imploded with unusual force, revealing Trumponomics to be a hollow scam. And so, if the region votes accordingly in two weeks, it will become a fitting coda to that very big story—a journalistic touchstone for the sunsetting of Trumpism itself.

As Republicans brace for a midterm election blue wave, Donald Trump is looking for someone to blame. Enter: Susie Wiles. The White House chief of staff is reportedly on the brink of losing her job, according to insiders that spoke with Zeteo Friday.

One top Trump adviser told the progressive news outlet that Wiles is “in some deep shit.”

The confirmation follows reporting from Politico, which revealed in its morning newsletter Thursday that Trump has been ringing his allies for their opinions on Wiles’s potential successor—and the reviews of Wiles’s performance have not been good.

“She’s burned a lot of people,” a Republican operative close to the White House told Politico.

One senior elected Republican official who fielded Trump’s call told the digital newsroom that the president had raised “the first honest questions about Susie.”

Possible replacements include deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller or—as a left-field option—Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees, insiders told Politico. Other options extend to U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, real estate developer turned federal housing director Bill Pulte, and ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Still, Trump shied away from committing to the turnover, ardently defending Wiles in a statement.

“TOTAL FAKE NEWS Politico doesn’t care about facts, integrity, or honest journalism—it’s why I kicked them out of the White House!” the president told Politico. “Susie Wiles is my loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff—there is a reason for that. She has been with me since the beginning, is my trusted advisor, and has my COMPLETE confidence.”

Trump reportedly “blew up” after his “human printer,” Natalie Harp, printed out copies of the Politico report for him later Thursday. The briefing sent the president into a full-blown “freakout,” according to three sources that spoke with Politico afterward. Wiles and her team “burn[ed] up phones around town” attempting to settle the situation.

“The White House is in a state of panic. Susie is looking over her shoulder, trying to solicit people to go out and say good things about her and her team and make it seem like everything is fine. It’s not,” a person close to the president told Politico.

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report Wednesday calling out the failure to protect sensitive communications and location information, saying there are major security weaknesses in the Pentagon’s $2.67 billion cell phone contracts, The Daily Beast reports.

The Pentagon didn’t check if phone companies were protecting data that could reveal soldiers’ locations and who they were speaking with, the report found. DOD officials also didn’t review the companies’ security checks before renewing contracts. The independent oversight agency concluded that hackers had the ability to “map entire communication networks within the [Department of Defense], pinpoint sensitive locations like safe houses or command posts, and expose operational vulnerabilities, significantly compromising national security.”

The office’s investigators found that DOD officials were aware of security vulnerabilities regarding text messages sent to and from military phones, and the possibility that bad actors could intercept them. Despite this, the department “had not issued policy for protecting text messages.”

In response to the report, Democrats in Congress have raised concerns about the Pentagon’s security issues with cell phones.

“I remain concerned that our servicemembers remain at risk from the military’s insecure communications and look forward to seeing what else the Inspector General finds,” Senator Ron Wyden told The Daily Beast. “I’ll continue to watchdog DOD to make sure they follow through on the Inspector General’s findings and finally secure their communications.”

The report found that the DOD has not yet addressed the security vulnerabilities, arguing internally over whose responsibility it is and failing to offer explanations about what it is doing to implement solutions. Maybe Hegseth and other top DOD officials should be focused on these security risks rather than pushing out trans service members, making bad workout videos, or obsessing over hormones.

Inside Washington

Can a former climate and housing activist make it to the halls of Congress? Will Lawrence’s opponents are trying to paint him as too radical for Michigan’s swingy 7th district. But as Lawrence races to eight town halls in six days, he told The New Republic that his background as an organizer has helped him win voters’ trust on the hottest topic of the 2026 election cycle: data centers.

The 7th district, which includes the state capital, Lansing, and its surrounding area, is currently represented by Republican Tom Barrett, who won with just over 50 percent of the vote in 2024. Before Barrett, the seat was held by now-Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who also won in a tight race. Limited polling suggests that the 2026 race could be just as tight.

Lawrence, who co-founded the youth environmental advocacy organization Sunrise Movement in 2015 before going on to found a tenant advocacy organization in Michigan, has become a well-known figure in the district since launching his campaign a year ago. “Will Lawrence has been spending every day in the district—extremely open and public throughout,” said Matt Grossman, a professor of political science at Michigan State University. 

2026 is the perfect environment for an activist and organizer to win in a purple area, Lawrence argues: “People feel that nobody in D.C. gives a damn about them, and nobody in Wall Street or Silicon Valley gives a damn about them, either,” he said. In that context, he views his organizing background as a plus. “Being able to motivate and inspire people to take action to win the better life that we deserve, that’s what I’ve been doing all along.” He also thinks his campaign has benefited from an active volunteer network; during the primary, over 800 volunteers knocked on 100,000 doors, his campaign said.

Still, not everyone is eager to elect a former organizer. Attack ads have portrayed Lawrence as too radical for the district. Grossman compared it to Michigan’s Senate race, where Republicans have similarly been trying to portray Abdul El-Sayed as too radical to represent the state. Lawrence also came under fire in July when The Huffington Post published comments from a podcast episode in 2024 when Lawrence said that “the older generation of Black political leadership” holds up capitalism and “defangs the white left.” And during the general, Lawrence has been somewhat more cautious about leaning into his background in climate activism, instead focusing on issues with broader appeal.

“One of the ways he did that early on was, of course, being among the most strident in taking on data centers,” said Grossman. Indeed, Lawrence began talking about data centers before they became a key issue in campaigns across the country. I asked Lawrence how he was able to identify a firebrand issue—one that caught many politicians by surprise—so early on. “It’s because I know how to listen,” he said. “That’s what an organizer’s job is: to listen to people and to take them seriously. And I started hearing last fall that people were very concerned about hyperscale data centers proposed in various corners of my district.” 

The fight against data centers makes sense for the former climate activist. Though data centers aren’t just an environmental issue, Lawrence said, they raise concerns about emissions and water usage. If elected, Lawrence said, he’d like to focus on making sure diesel-fueled data centers don’t “blow a hole in the climate.” He also said he wants to address pollution in the Great Lakes. 

But Lawrence has had to walk a fine line between leaning into his background as a climate organizer and avoiding coming across as a political radical. “It’s not like he runs away from it or distances himself from it,” said Grossman. But “he doesn’t want to run as the climate activist.” That’s particularly true in 2026, when climate politics have fallen precipitously out of the national discourse. Lawrence acknowledged that himself: “The climate crisis is no less urgent now than it’s ever been, and urgent action is still necessary,” he said. “And also, we’re dealing with other acute crises.” He pointed to democratic erosion, the cost of living, and existential threats from AI. 

Data centers have become a flashpoint for all of these issues. While Lawrence supports a full moratorium on data center construction, Barrett has said that he doesn’t think the federal government should be involved. As locals face off against powerful industry forces in their backyard, they’ll be voting, at least in part, on whether they want their leaders to stand back—or instead join the fight.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A Harris/Guardian poll released Thursday finds that 72 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 50 percent of Republicans currently believe the country to be in a recession—up from 67-54-39 in May–June. Economists, by contrast, do not rate the economy as being anywhere close to a recession—although BlackRock CEO Larry Fink conveniently insisted this week that a data center moratorium would trigger one. (Current Chicago Fed president and former Obama-era chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee has argued that an AI slowdown would do no such thing.) 

Amid the panoply of recent attempts to lower fuel prices—note the gas tax holidays in multiple states, the loosening of restrictions on certain types of diesel, etc.—it’s worth noting that neither candidate running in Iowa’s intensely agricultural 4th congressional district can bring themselves to back Trump’s diesel deal. “I have not spoken with any voters who believe that one of the solutions ought to be working with a dictator from Russia,” Republican Chris McGowan said in a televised debate this week. Democrat Dave Dawson called the deal illegal. You can read Iowa Capital Dispatch’s coverage of the debate here. While Cook Political Report has recently suggested that Dems might be ahead in the state’s 1st and 3rd districts, and might even have a shot at the 2nd, McGowan is heavily favored to win the 4th. (There hasn’t been much public polling.) In that context, it’s tempting to read his insistence on distinguishing himself from Trump—he also heavily implied during the debate that he might take action to end the war in Iran—as a sign of the president’s deep unpopularity even among staunch Republican voters.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Monday at 10:30 a.m., the Brookings Institution will host an online panel discussion about the upcoming midterms. William Galston, Erin Covey, Christopher S. Warshaw, and Kathryn Dunn Tenpas will talk about “potential election outcomes, the role of public opinion, the impact of mid-decade redistricting, and the consequences of new majorities in the House and Senate.”

At the Brennan Center for Justice, Celina Avalos Jaramillo and Joanna Zdanys explain the significance of California’s Proposition 4, a public campaign finance proposal on the November ballot. “Public financing programs currently exist in at least 14 states and 26 localities, including five California charter cities,” write Jaramillo and Zdanys, “but state law currently bans other localities and the state from creating similar programs. Prop 4 would repeal that ban, giving the legislature and local governments the opportunity to create new public financing programs.” The pair call public campaign financing “one of the most powerful” tools to give candidates options outside of courting billionaires and powerful industries.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Greece

For the past year, the proud people of Greece have had to politely endure one of the most unqualified U.S. ambassadors of the Trump era (and that’s saying something!). True to her reputation, Kimberly Guilfoyle has been nothing but a fame-seeking party animal since she washed ashore in Athens. But now that Trump has ditched her over the “honey please” scandal, the Greeks have cause to celebrate.

Bad Week: Katie Zacharia

The new White House press secretary’s first week at work has been one for the ages. On Tuesday, Zacharia held her inaugural briefing, and the reviews were unkind. Then her questionable claim of being a lawyer was exposed, prompting a complaint by the California bar. She only made things worse by saying she passed the bar exam in China, backtracking on that answer, and then revealing on Fox News that she’d failed the California bar exam and has been relying on the distinction between “lawyer” and “attorney.” And her first week isn’t even over yet.

—Ryan Kearney

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Name all of Trump 1.0’s White House spokespeople, in order.

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s America PAC offered to “randomly” give away $1 million each day to registered voters in several battleground states if they signed an online petition to support “free speech and the right to bear arms”—and forfeited their personal information in the process.

In response to a legal challenge in Pennsylvania, Musk’s attorney Chris Gober revealed that the recipients weren’t chosen randomly at all but were picked based on their personal story and “suitability to serve” as spokespeople for the super PAC.

Considering that the petition was not an illegal lottery scheme, the judge allowed the payments to continue. But after the elections, multiple lawsuits were filed against Musk and America PAC.

A one-page filing announced that the parties had reached a settlement agreement, HuffPost reported Thursday. The exact details of the settlement, such as how much Musk will owe the plaintiffs, was not immediately published.

This kind of scaremongering has been a part of Republican campaign strategy for my entire life. I hit my first Little League baseball the same year Richard Nixon launched the Southern Strategy, his dog-whistling and race-baiting campaign to carry the South in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey. I was a young man when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, touting “states’ rights” and making a point of doing so not far from the spot where three civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan 16 years before. I’m pretty tired of it, though not so tired that my blood doesn’t still boil.

But these kinds of moves used to be only part of a Republican campaign. Once upon a time, Republicans did try, sometimes, to advance forward-looking ideas, or something resembling that. Reagan had his optimism; Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America; George W. Bush, his global democracy agenda. At the very least, these Republicans understood that the scare tactics had to be dressed up in the finery of something resembling a positive vision for the country.

But that was then. Now the scare tactics are the whole package. The GOP of 2026 is stripped of all artifice. It’s down to its essence. The closing days of this campaign will feature three trajectories from the GOP. They’re going to try to cheat. They’re going to lie. And they’re going to try to win on grotesque and open bigotry.

First, the cheating. This is all about suppressing the vote and trying to convince Americans that noncitizens are going to be casting votes by the thousands or even millions (OK, this involves a dose of bigotry too). On Thursday, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sent a letter to California and Los Angeles County demanding that they prove—within 48 hours, mind you—that some 20,000 voters are citizens. Because Attorney General Todd Blanche, you see, suspects that they are not.

The Trump administration has tried this before. Very recently, in fact. Just last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged that there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada. He then whittled that down to 185 names (heck of a whittle!). DHS said it had confirmed that these 185 were noncitizens. Nevada looked into it. Every one—every single one—was a citizen.

It’s impossible to predict how else they’ll try to cheat between now and November 3. At Democracy Docket, which you should be checking between now and Election Day if you aren’t already, they’re tracking dozens of voter suppression lawsuits. And Axios reported on Friday that MAGA activists are pushing the Trump administration to prepare to declare martial law. The president can’t send armed troops to polling places—or at least, the law says he can’t. But he can send them into certain neighborhoods. And the DOJ can send out more such orders, and to much swingier states than California. We can be sure that the administration has thought of things we haven’t.

Next comes the lying. Of course, cheating of the sort described above is lying, but I mean a different kind of lying. I mean here the kind of lying Trump does at his rallies, about how great the economy is, how “hot” America is; and the lying House Speaker Mike Johnson does, about this Congress being the most productive in 80 years.

All politicians from both parties offer up to voters their version of reality. But they rarely say the naked opposite of reality. Barack Obama in 2010, for example, implicitly acknowledged that the economic landscape was pretty barren, but he did try (to no avail) to highlight certain “green shoots” sprouting heavenward. But no one has ever done what Trump is doing. There’s no sign it’s working—in fact it’s probably making things worse because you just can’t tell people the sky is blue when it’s full of clouds.

What’s amusing is watching Republican candidates across the country try to walk this tightrope. Some gently break with him, as Maine’s Susan Collins and Michigan’s Mike Rogers have done on tariffs. But most defend them or try to change the subject. Some still blame the economy on Joe Biden. And all of them, having voted for the Iran war, just pray that that subject doesn’t come up.

And finally—the dividing. It’s JD Vance hinting not so subtly that James Talarico is gay. Rogers and others, including Trump, talk about Abdul El-Sayed being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. On a debate stage this week, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins slipped in a reference to Jon Ossoff’s “friend” El-Sayed, for no apparent reason other than to be able to scare viewers with a Moozlem name. And of course the flood of dehumanizing anti-trans ads continues apace and will continue through Election Day.

This is what they’ve got. And it’s what they’ve got because it’s who they are. Oh, plus they have hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars, much of it from a small handful of people—like real-life supervillain Elon Musk—who want to own the government. It’ll be pretty depressing if it works.

And if it fails? It will upend decades of conventional wisdom about how Republicans can win and about voters’ susceptibility to such campaigns. And that may mark the start of a new and at least marginally less cynical and less hateful and less stupid era in American politics. And it will be made all the better by the fact that it will have been brought on, ironically enough, by the stupidest and most cynical and hateful man in recent American political history.

The Israelis, masked and dressed all in black, beat the Palestinian villagers harvesting olives while chasing out a group of journalists there to document the work. The settlers descended from a nearby hilltop settlement, hurling rocks at the gathering before setting the grove aflame.

Levine was caught in the mix. She was in a vest that read “PRESS” on the front and the back, but the attacking Israelis did not care to differentiate her. Instead, they knocked Levine to the ground, kicked and beat her, and then stole her cameras and phone, reported the Post.

The settlers also threw tear gas into the crowd, according to video footage captured by independent journalist Andrey Khrzhanovskiy. Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces, were nearby in vehicles but did not intervene.

Levine told the Post that she was overtaken by the settlers. “They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” she told reporters.

Khrzhanovskiy said that settlers beat Levine with sticks while the villagers retreated. Levine was taken to a nearby hospital after the incident.

“This morning, a Washington Post photographer, Heidi Levine, was attacked by Israeli settlers while reporting in the West Bank. She was wearing visible markings clearly identifying her as a journalist,” the executive editor of the paper, Matt Murray, wrote in a statement Friday morning. “While we are relieved that Heidi has received medical care and is safe, we are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job and urge a thorough investigation and follow-through from authorities.”

Israel has attacked dozens of journalists throughout its assault on Palestine, violating international law in the process. The attack on Levine came less than two weeks after settlers assaulted AFP photographer Jaafar Ashtiyeh. Israel has also killed at least 247 media workers since the conflict began three years ago, according to a September report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 192 of those individuals were Palestinian journalists working in Gaza.

Leaders at the Department of Defense received an order from inside the White House to slow the Starshield satellite system that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations, two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters Thursday.

A Ukrainian military official claimed Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had interrupted functioning of the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals. Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian defense forces “did not receive warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions.”

Ukrainian officials said that the Starshield receptors mounted on fast-moving drones stopped working altogether. The receptors were working again Thursday, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, Reuters reported.

At first it seemed possible that Musk was directly behind the service disruption—but he claimed on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

A senior White House official denied that President Donald Trump was behind it, but did not respond to questions about whether another administration official might have made the order. “No such request was ever made by the president,” they told Reuters.

The disruption began just days after Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate financial strain ahead of the midterm elections. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current commitments are only a small drop in the bucket in terms of the diesel shortage that Trump’s monthslong war with Iran has created.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty Thursday, Trump was asked about reports that he was considering dropping the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB, one of the largest pieces of ordnance in the military’s arsenal, on Iranian nuclear and infrastructure sites.

“Well, the mother of all bombs is not nuclear,” Trump replied. “This is just an extremely large bomb. It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb. But the mother of all bombs is one big bomb but it’s not nuclear. No, I wouldn’t use nuclear.”

Sources told CNN earlier that day that using the 21,600-pound MOAB is unlikely to be effective in destroying any nuclear sites, nor would it tip the balance in the war, which is going abysmally as Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz.

As the conflict stretches on with no clear end in sight, Republican poll numbers keep going lower with the midterms less than a month away. If Trump thinks that dropping a big bomb would allow him to declare some sort of victory in a fruitless war, he is delusional, and his other recent remarks about the war seem to prove that. Meanwhile, the economy continues to flounder, and gas prices keep going up.

Appearing on Fox News’s Hannity, Zacharia was forced to answer for her train wreck first press briefing. “It’s been widely panned, I’m sure you’re aware. It only lasted 14 minutes. You only took three questions,” host Sean Hannity said.

Zacharia claimed that since being tapped as secretary last week, she’d been given “very little prep time” and had only received the press briefing materials earlier that morning—which is, you know, generally how the news works.

Then Hannity pressed Zacharia to respond to revelations that she lied about being an actual attorney. The former on-air legal analyst had confirmed earlier that day that she never passed the bar exam—just days after she’d told reporters that she had.

“You said you consulted with many people and they advised you that it was OK to call yourself a lawyer but not an attorney, correct?” Hannity asked.

“Correct,” Zacharia said. Hannity pointed to a CNN report that showed 15 social media posts she’d shared in which she was identified as an “attorney.”

“I think they were retweets and I corrected the record and said that [they’re] not endorsing the title, they’re retweets of a title that had been given,” Zacharia stammered. (That doesn’t quite explain why President Donald Trump would then announce that he’d appointed “an attorney” to be his new press secretary.)

“Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path, and I took the bar once and didn’t pass it?’” Hannity asked. “Why get into this long drawn-out definition between the difference between a lawyer and an attorney, ’cause I don’t think people see much of a distinction. Why didn’t you just say, ‘I never practiced law?’”

“Well, Sean, when I moved back from the United States I didn’t retake the bar, I had four kids in six years. It was never my intent to go into the practice of law,” Zacharia said.

“When I was at—when I went to go engage in media and give legal analysis, I consulted attorneys and legal professionals as to whether or not they agreed that I could be labeled a lawyer both because I had a valid juris doctor from a good law school, a reputable law school, Pepperdine law school, and in conjunction with the fact that I did have actual, substantive legal experience.

“I wasn’t providing any legal analysis, Sean—or, I’m, excuse me, legal advice. I wasn’t being paid for legal advice, I was giving a general review of the legal circumstances surrounding it,” she said.

Trump’s new press secretary better get her story straight. At best, Zacharia wildly misrepresented her credentials—at worst, she gave unlicensed legal advice. If she can’t defend her own lies, how in the world will she ever defend Trump’s?

Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest today. It’s G. Elliott Morris. People probably already know who he is, but anyway, he was at FiveThirtyEight and The Economist before, doing great analysis of data and politics. He’s now doing his own newsletter, Strength in Numbers. He’s also helping run a site called 50 Plus 1, which has some great forecast and modeling of the election. Elliott, thanks for joining me. Great to see you.

G. Elliott Morris: Yeah, Perry. Happy to be here as always. This morning I’m on my second cup of coffee during our call. You might see me pour a third.

Bacon: All right. So I’m going to go through a bunch of different races, because you’re the man to ask for this kind of thing. So I want to start off with the House. I’ll only ask this broad question first, which is, you’ve been discussing this a lot, but I don’t think we’ve had it on Right Now, and this is just asking very explicitly: my liberal friends, and most of my friends are liberal, are very nervous about 2016, 2020, 2024.

Their perception is the polls are always wrong and the polls are always inflating Democratic vote share, and they’re very nervous about being disappointed again. So should they be panicked by the polls showing Democrats leading by a fairly substantial margin?

Morris: This is a good question.

Bacon: Maybe panicked is—I framed the question poorly. Talk about—

Morris: No, I think you should be as panicked—so I was at an event with a senator recently, and they asked this question, “Are the polls right?”

Bacon: Like a United States senator asked people this question. That’s interesting.

Morris: Yeah. A US senator asked the polling nerds in the room, Hey, are the polls going to be right? And there were some people in the room that are like, Hey, we’ve made a lot of changes over the last couple years or the last decade. They should be more accurate than they were in 2016, for example, when they weren’t weighting by education, which was just, in hindsight, kind of a rookie error. It’s just one of those things that wasn’t necessary before, so pollsters didn’t do.

And I wasn’t super convinced by this. My response to the senator was, they’re about as good as they have been historically, which is to say you should expect them to be off by about three percentage points, potentially in every single race by about the same amount.

Which is the type of error that we would not have reacted so harshly to, first off, in a year where there’s a blowout, when it just doesn’t matter, or when people weren’t conditioned to expect so much precision from the polls.

So I think the thing that has changed over the last 15 years—and it was truer in 2016 and less so now, because there’ve been so many errors—is that people just expect the polls to be super accurate. And they’re not. But they’re not necessarily worse than they have been historically. There were some cases of some really huge errors in the 1980s. So if you want me to give some comfort to your super blue listeners, the comfort is they’re almost certainly going to win the House, and you can do a lot of things without winning the House.

Bacon: Let me stop you there for a second to ask that. Because you do these forecasts, so presumably you think the polls are not useless. So you’re saying the polls might be 3 percent off, but the forecast accounts for that, correct?

Morris: Yeah. So the reason why the forecasting is useful is that it explores what could happen if the polls are wrong. If they are off in the amount that they have been historically.

Bacon: Off in the past.

Morris: In my mind, we’re doing the hard work for you, the reader, or in this case the viewer, by taking the polls today and shifting them three points in one direction, count up the seats. Today Democrats lead in 54 states according to the polls.

If you shift all the polls three and a half points, 3.3 to be exact—that’s the historical error for Senate polling this far ahead of an election—you can get 49 seats for the Democrats if you shift in the Republican direction, or 56 for the Democrats if you shift in that direction. That is the range. Most of these outcomes include Democrats controlling the Senate, but not all of them.

Bacon: Let’s go through the details of that. Your estimate is the Democrats have a 99 percent chance of winning the House, on 50 Plus 1. The median outcome is 49 seats gained by the Democrats, so 242.

I looked up VoteHub today. They have it at 231 seats and an 84 percent chance. Split Ticket has it at 234 seats and an 89 percent chance. So in other words, the 84, 89, 99—the analysts agree the House, it would be an almost unprecedented error in forecasting and polling if—the Democrats are overwhelming favorites to win the House. Is that correct?

Morris: Yeah. And just to say, I think The Economist is at 95 and Nate Silver is at 93 or something. I don’t subscribe to Nate Silver so I can’t see, but I have someone who does subscribe tell me the number every Friday. So that’s as of last Friday. It could be even higher by now.

So it’s not hard to believe, like 90, 95, frankly not hard to believe. Democrats only need to pick up three seats. In the generic ballot today, the test of the House popular vote, they’re doing around plus eight or plus nine in terms of margin, which would be an 11 percentage point shift since 2024.

The last time there was a shift that large was 2018, and that year Democrats gained 42 seats. So they’re going to gain less because of gerrymandering. But maybe just 35. OK, they only need to gain three. So it would take a 9/11 style political event.

Bacon: We’ll pick a different analogy, but I get the point you’re making.

Morris: I know it can be toxic, but actually that was the last time—2002 was the last time the incumbent party in the White House gained seats in the House. That’s what I mean by that.

Bacon: I see. Got it.

Morris: So it would be two out of the last 100 years or so of House elections is what we’re talking about. And obviously we have a lot of leading indicators. There’s no signs of that sort of political environment. Like in 2002, it was easy to see this coming. Democrats weren’t leading by 10 points in the generic ballot.

Bacon: Senate, you have Democrats winning 71 out of 100. This is a 71 percent chance, I think, and you have a median outcome of 52 seats for the Democrats. VoteHub has it at 59 percent Democratic, likely to win 52 seats. Split Ticket at 65 percent and 52 seats as well.

So that’s around where Hillary versus Trump was. That’s in the range of Trump’s potential win in 2016 when he was the underdog. So in other words, people should not be banking on—the Republicans holding the Senate is a realistic outcome of the November elections, correct?

Morris: Yeah. The way to read the polls today is that if they have an error that is historically average, in the Republican direction, Republicans hold the Senate. If there is a larger than average miss, then Democrats might only be picking up two or three states, maybe even one. And those sort of errors happen, and they are basically impossible to predict ahead of time.

The reason I like the forecasting is that we are doing a lot of this hard number crunching for people behind the scenes to prepare optimistically, right? To prepare them for potential polling error that might happen on election day.

Instead of saying, “Just look at all these polling averages, look who’s up, look who’s down,” I think that leaves a lot of information on the table, since there’s a lot of uncertainty we can talk about with the election forecast that you can’t get by just looking at the polls. That’s the entire reason the forecasting exists in the first place.

Bacon: So the Senate, we should be looking carefully at, and that is something that, like you said, a normal polling error. I think that’s a good phrase, actually.

Morris: Yeah. And it’s not hard to see how this would happen. So Democrats are leading by three points in Texas. I think a little bit more, four points maybe, in Ohio. They’re leading by a couple of points in Maine, where Susan Collins has historically beat the polls, and they’re leading by one point in Iowa. They’re leading by two points in Kansas.

I don’t know if I believe that, but we are not in the business of putting our thumb on the table. We can come back to Kansas. So there’s one seat for Democrats that I think is a pretty sure thing. That’s North Carolina. Former Governor Roy Cooper is super popular in the state. He’s up 5.1 percent in the polls.

Bacon: One seat they’re going to flip, just to be clear what we’re talking about. Ossoff’s going to win, but one seat they’re going to flip, yeah.

Morris: So one Republican to Democratic flip. That gets them to 48, and then all these other states I’ve just listed, those are within three points. Those are within the historical average polling error for Senate races.

Don’t be surprised if the polls are wrong. They’ve been wrong before, and in this case, if they are as wrong as they have been on average historically, it means Republicans hold the Senate.

Bacon: Interesting. OK, so let’s go through some races specifically now. So I looked up Cook Political Report and went through some of their likely, toss-up, et cetera, and their breakdown. So let me go through these three. So Cook Political says likely—which, likely versus lean, we’ll come back to that. So likely Democratic Senate, Georgia, North Carolina, and they’re saying Minnesota is likely as well, but maybe not solid.

So talk about Minnesota. Do you think there’s an outcome—how likely is it? Because the Republicans are hinting Minnesota, there’s a lot of talk that the Democratic candidate is not particularly strong there. Do you see any realistic chance of an upset in Minnesota, where the Republican could win?

Morris: A lot of people tell me—

Bacon: Are you saying yes?

Morris: No, I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer, Perry. Nice try.

Bacon: Fair enough. I want to make sure—you said “Yeah,” so that’s why I was making sure.

Morris: Oh, OK. No, I’m not saying yes.

A lot of people tell me Peggy Flanagan’s a bad campaigner, she’s a bad fit for Minnesota. I think this is a lot of rationalization of the polling numbers. It is hard for me to know whether or not that’s—I don’t really think we can quantify what makes a good campaigner, a bad campaigner, very well.

So much of this is subjective. And also, it really doesn’t matter until people start counting the votes. So maybe it’s true, maybe that’s an explanation for her lagging poll numbers. I don’t really know.

The fact of the matter is, the polls in Minnesota are closer than you would expect. Peggy Flanagan’s leading her challenger, the former sportscaster there, by four points in the polls. This is a state where, in a year Democrats are leading nationally by eight or nine points, you should expect Minnesota to be two points to the left of that.

So you should expect Peggy Flanagan to be around D plus 11, and she’s at D plus four. So it is true that she’s underperforming, and that race could go the other direction.

However, what we know from studying polling accuracy historically is that usually when the polls are wrong, they err in the direction of the fundamentals. That would mean in a blue state, in a blue year, the polls have historically underestimated support for the Democrat. Or in your Kansases, your Iowas, your Ohios, your Texases, if the polls are wrong, typically in states like that, the Republican would tend to overperform.

And that’s because we have other information from the fundamentals that give us clues about elections that’s independent of the polling data. You want to average these two things together, historically speaking.

So our forecast model is around the likely Democratic zone in Minnesota. We have Peggy Flanagan at about an eight out of 10 chance. So slightly more optimistic than, to take your example, Clinton’s odds of victory in 2016. But a 17 percent chance happens one out of seven times. There’s 30 elections this year in the Senate, so it wouldn’t be totally surprising to see that race go the other way. And if it does, then the Democratic path to a Senate majority gets really hard.

Bacon: So lean—Cook Political lean Democratic, so less than likely. They have New Hampshire—

Morris: And by the way, lean means something around 70, 75 percent chance in Cook’s ratings historically. And likely is around 95.

Bacon: OK. That’s not what they say. That’s what you’ve calculated, right?

Morris: That’s what I’ve calculated based off their historical ratings. I don’t think they give the probabilities like this.

Bacon: I don’t think they say that.

Morris: Yeah, I don’t think they agree with the quantification of the ratings in general.

Bacon: They have lean, which is, like I said, less than likely, as you’re saying. Lean Democrat, New Hampshire. So do you see that as a place also where we could get an upset? What’s your sense of New Hampshire?

Morris: Yeah, New Hampshire is a weird one. The polls were really close there about a month ago, but—sorry, I’m blanking on Pappas’s first name. Help me out here.

Bacon: Chris.

Morris: It’s not Chris. Oh, are they both Chris?

Bacon: I think—

Morris: Chris Sununu is John Sununu’s brother. Yeah, Chris Pappas. I was like, surely they couldn’t both be Chris.

Bacon: Yeah.

Morris: They could. It was a really close race earlier in September, for example, back when the primary was going on. It’s possible that there were a lot of Democrats that would end up voting for Chris Pappas that were supporting his challenger, that wouldn’t admit that, and now they’ve come around.

But the race isn’t looking nearly as close as it was previously. And the quantitative forecasts like ours at 50 Plus 1 that were hedging on those close polls and saying, this state looks like a state that would be more favorable to Democrats—I think that hedging was right, and the race raters weren’t saying this race is a toss-up, I believe, even though there was a lot of conversation online about maybe New Hampshire is going to fall to John Sununu again. It doesn’t look that close.

Now, again, seven-point lead in the polls—leads of that size have evaporated with about a 5 to 10 percent chance, this close to an election. So it’s not impossible that John Sununu could win. But yeah, this is one of those states I think people got a little out over their skis on a month ago. It’s not as close as it seemed.

Bacon: So toss-up. They list seven states: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas. So the ones I want to talk about right now are Michigan and Kansas as toss-ups. What’s your sense of Michigan and Kansas?

Morris: Michigan. If you ask someone from the Cook Political Report this question, or from election Twitter posting universe, they’re going to say, “Oh, Abdul El-Sayed is too progressive to win in Michigan,” or maybe he’s more progressive than your moderate candidate in Michigan, so he’s underperforming expectations. I think we could save the hand-wringing in the moderation versus progressive debate until the actual votes are counted and we see how much he underperforms by.

There’s also a lot of other descriptive factors about Abdul El-Sayed that might be making him underperform in Michigan. There’s other experience factors that could also be factoring in here. So I don’t want to anchor us to any particular explanation now, especially one that is exclusive of other explanations, like your first Muslim senator winning in Michigan. That seems like, maybe some white voters in Michigan might not be so happy about that. Let’s at least leave that on the table as a possibility now.

But this is slightly surprising to me in terms of the Mike Rogers of it all, rather than the Abdul El-Sayed of it all. Mike Rogers underperformed by a couple points in 2024 when he ran and lost to Elissa Slotkin.

Bacon: Let me ask you. What’s surprising is the race is close, or you’re saying that Cook is calling it close? Because those are different questions.

Morris: So it is surprising that Cook is calling it a toss-up, given the polls show consistently that El-Sayed has, I think, a three to four-point lead, four-point lead. So they’re saying, “Oh, these polls are...” The literal read of that is that they’re betting on some amount of polling bias. Which, they have their right to. Maybe they’re seeing some internal data that we’re not seeing.

But from a 30,000-foot perspective, I would have also expected Mike Rogers to be doing worse, as someone who recently lost an election in Michigan. He underperformed Donald Trump in Michigan in losing the state.

And that is a state that has been hit hard by tariffs and, just like everywhere else, by price increases and the affordability crisis that Donald Trump has publicly taken basically a lot of credit for, in pushing for inflationary policies over the last 20 months.

So if Abdul El-Sayed loses there, it’ll be a combination of factors. Maybe he was too progressive for some members of the Democrats. Maybe he was too Muslim for other swing voters. Maybe Mike Rogers did better in the debate, right? We can add up all those factors. But yeah, it’s close enough that it could go either way. That’s the state where a normal polling error means Mike Rogers wins the race.

Bacon: Kansas. I’ve not read all these polls. I’m just very dubious of calling Kansas a toss-up, but I’ll be open to your perspective, and if I’m wrong, I’m open to being told that.

Morris: Our model says Kansas is a toss-up. I wouldn’t put on the internet Perry Bacon is wrong about Kansas. You can disagree with the polling error, or you can disagree with the polls in a state that red, with that many working class white voters. You could make the case that the polls are undercounting Republicans there. My whole point is that we don’t know about that until the election.

Bacon: But your look at the data suggests it’s a toss-up, though. The polling is close, is your point.

Morris: The polling suggests a toss-up, with Hamilton—I’m just looking up our polling so I can give you the precise numbers for your audience. Hamilton leading by two points now on average against Roger Marshall. Some polls have it at one. New York Times has it tied.

Bacon: Hamilton’s the Democratic candidate.

Morris: Yeah, Adam Hamilton’s the Democrat. So, like I said, these are the types of people who haven’t been answering the polls in recent elections, so maybe those polls are wrong.

I am surprised that Cook calls it a toss-up, because the whole point behind the qualitative race handicappers is that they take a holistic view of all the indicators, that they don’t hew so closely to the polls. So that makes me think that they are seeing some other internal data, or with candidate interviews, that also suggests that the race would be close.

And typically your best predictions for elections come in averaging the polls and the handicappers and the fundamentals. In the case of Kansas, these are all suggesting basically a tied up race in an environment that’s this Democratic. So maybe it actually does make sense. This is not the type of state we would have all expected to be competitive a year ago, though. So I understand the hesitation from people, the skepticism.

Bacon: So Texas is called a toss-up here. My sense of looking at the polls—

Morris: Cook is calling it a toss-up, just to be clear.

Bacon: Toss-up. What I’m asking is, because in this case, you’re saying a three to four-point polling miss is typical. My sense is the polls are showing Talarico ahead by more than three or four points.

Are they just assuming Texas is Republican, just the way I would? Is there some reason to think this is a toss-up beyond the history of Texas? Because the data would seem to be in the Talarico-is-the-favorite zone, as far as I can tell.

Morris: Yeah, exactly. And our forecast had Texas at lean, right? A 60 percent chance for Talarico yesterday. And today it says toss-up, because he’s gone from 60 percent chance to 59 percent chance. There’s really no difference between these takes in terms of the numbers of it all.

But your read is correct. If Cook is seeing the same data we are, Talarico up three on average, and they’re calling it a toss-up still, then they are averaging it with the fundamental indicators. That would be stuff like Ken Paxton holds a statewide office. This is a state that’s really red. Maybe you would consider that Ken Paxton has been plagued by some amount of scandal, although it’s not rising to the level of, he’s sleeping with his staffers, right? The type of scandal that does typically rock the campaigns.

These recent leaks of him talking about how bad his campaign is doing does not help. You should probably not be allowing so many donors in the room with their phones at that point, I would think.

Bacon: But you’re saying that your polling average in Texas is about three, and if it’s three, then that gets in the normal polling error. That makes sense. I’ve seen polls saying the poll rates higher.

Morris: But to call it a toss-up, you have to bet on the polls being biased in the Republican direction by about that much. Which is not a bet that historically would have worked out. So Cook is saying, “We actually will take that bet. We do think the polls are maybe overestimating Talarico because of some other data we’re seeing, campaign finance, whatever.”

There is a lot of money being spent on Ken Paxton’s behalf. And you know what? People wouldn’t spend a billion dollars in elections if it didn’t matter. So maybe we can expect that to have a difference in the last two and a half weeks, three weeks, wherever we are.

Bacon: How do you see Maine?

Morris: Yeah, Maine’s great. It’s a good example of the tension where the polls and the fundamentals disagree. In Maine in 2020, Susan Collins beat the polls by about eight percentage points against Sara Gideon in that race. This is one of the larger polling errors of recent time in a Senate election.

So it’s notable that if you’re expecting that level of polling error again, the polls to underestimate Susan Collins—and she has beaten expectations four elections in a row—that’s a fair enough expectation. Let me just get to our Senate forecast here for Maine. Then you would be expecting her to be leading in the fundamentals view of the race, right?

Let’s just unpack that for a second. If Susan Collins typically beats the polls by eight points, and historically she’s beaten the average challenger by more like 12 or 13 points above what we would have expected based on how blue the state is in presidential elections, you would be expecting her to win by four or five points this year.

So the polls then showing Troy Jackson up three points, that’s an example where, contrary to in Texas or in Kansas, the fundamentals and the polls really disagree.

So like I said earlier, those fundamentals—you should expect polls typically to miss in favor of the fundamentals, for the election results to be somewhere between the polls and the fundamentals. And that argues for a more skeptical view of the surveys in Maine. So they show Troy Jackson up two points.

Maybe you can mentally adjust this in your head and say, if you’re a Democrat, always two points behind. I typically tell people just always subtract two from the side you’re betting for in the polls, and then you’re prepared for if they’re wrong. You can make your campaign decisions in the world that you’re behind, that can prepare you for victory better.

But I really have no idea on the ground. So I’ll just say a couple things about the issues. I know you have more questions. ICE and immigration have been a huge issue in Maine. Jackson has been dogging Susan Collins for her votes for ICE and DHS funding in these debates, and there’s some high-profile incidences of violence and death at the hands of ICE in Maine.

So this is one of those states where immigration is maybe more on the minds of voters than it is elsewhere. And affordability, and especially gas and diesel prices, matters in a state like Maine in the winter, where most people heat their homes with oil.

So I would expect, based on the issues, that Troy Jackson comes out ahead. The fact that it is so close suggests, maybe our storytelling about Susan Collins as the enduring moderate has some staying power in 2026.

Bacon: OK. So Cook likely Republican—I’m going to go through these three states quickly. Likely Republican: Nebraska, South Carolina, Florida. Do you think there’s any chance Democrats win, or I guess not Democrats in the case of Nebraska—is there any realistic chance Republicans lose Nebraska, South Carolina, or Florida?

Morris: Yeah, there’s a chance for sure. Our model thinks that there’s about a 20 percent chance that Democrats take either Florida or Nebraska, and maybe closer to 30 or 40 percent in South Carolina. Just based mainly on the surveys in South Carolina, that is.

And this is maybe a word about the forecasting models here. One of the reasons why the quantitative forecasts are so optimistic is that they’re simulating different elections. In one election, they take the polls and they add five points. In one simulation, they take the polls and they subtract five points for the Democrats.

Sometimes they also will explore state by state errors in the surveys. And if you do that enough, then on average in these states, South Carolina, Florida, and Nebraska, in these simulations, you should expect the Democrats to pick up one of those in many of these simulations.

I think on average these are adding about a third of a seat to the Democrats’ total. So that pushes up their expected seat number on average, which increases their probability of victory. Because it’s, oh, there’s some edge cases in these states. We don’t really know what’s going on in South Carolina. So maybe Democrats pick up that seat in this simulation.

If you do that 40,000 times, like we do at 50 Plus 1, like Nate Silver does, then these models are accounting for surprises in these edge likely seats. And so that adds to their total. Whereas if you’re just taking a straight count of the qualitative race raters, you would basically wipe all these likely Republican states off the map.

South Carolina’s a really interesting one. I don’t have to tell you, this is a really Republican state. Annie Andrews seems like a type of Democrat that might be able to win in South Carolina, and maybe one dynamic here is both of the nominees are women.

So there’s potentially less latent sexism fueling voters’ decisions in a Southern state, because both of the nominees are women. Also Lindsey Graham wasn’t exactly beloved for his support of the war in Iran at the time of his demise, and that could be weighing on his—I’m sorry, is it his sister or his sister-in-law? It’s his sister, right?

Bacon: Yes.

Morris: Yeah. It’s not implausible that in a super Democratic year where there’s a lot of anti-incumbency bias, someone like Annie Andrews could win there. I am personally, after seeing the polls, a lot less optimistic on behalf of Angie Nixon in Florida than I am for Annie Andrews in South Carolina.

Bacon: OK. So governor, Cook toss-up: Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio. Talk about Wisconsin and Georgia, because the sort of Twitter, Bluesky discussion assumed that Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms is in big trouble because she’s being outspent by a lot, and assumed that Wisconsin, the Democrats picked the quote unquote “normal candidate” and they’re going to be fine. So do you see Wisconsin and Georgia as toss-ups?

Morris: I see them as toss-ups. Yeah. In Wisconsin the Democrat is ahead by two points in the polls. That’s within that historical polling error range we’ve been talking about. In Georgia, it’s the opposite. Bottoms is behind by one and a half or two points in the polls.

These are both states where if the polls are wrong, they could go the other way. Toss-up seems reasonable, especially in states that are—and Georgia’s definitely to the red of the nation as a whole.

Wisconsin, at the state level, is a little redder. But a weird thing about Wisconsin is that it gets so much investment that it doesn’t tend to move as much as the overall national popular vote does. So I’m just going to say two sentences about this. In between 2020 and 2024, the national popular vote moves six points to the right.

Wisconsin moves a point and a half to two points to the right, if you’re generously rounding on Donald Trump’s behalf. And it was similar from 2016 to 2020, it moves a point, whereas the nation as a whole moves by about two and a half.

Bacon: So it’s been very divided and very polarized, or something like that.

Morris: Very divided, yeah. And it gets a lot of investment, so there’s a lot of voter contact that helps the Democrats reach the people that they’re always trying to reach, who can fall into the sort of low engagement category in other states.

So Republicans that have been talking about, “Let’s just get Trump out, and we’re going to activate all of our low turnout propensity Republicans”—there’s a lot fewer low turnout propensity Republicans, in terms of composition of the population, in Wisconsin, because it gets so much investment from the parties. The voters there are really high turnout propensity just in general.

So it’s kind of a weird state. I would expect it to be close, even in a big blue kind of year.

Bacon: Every election there is close.

Morris: Every election in Wisconsin is close. Yeah. I had the former chair of the state party, Ben Wikler, on the Strength in Numbers podcast a while ago, and he lays out a much better explanation than I’m giving you here, in terms of how the party actually makes its investments in voter contact. That explains why it is less elastic, why vote choice there is more stable, and why it’s always close, regardless of what the nation as a whole looks like.

Bacon: OK. Lean Republican governor’s races, Florida and Texas. And the reason I brought this up is because those would be earth-shattering. Like, Talarico beating Paxton is explainable in part because Paxton seems like a corrupt, crazy person. But either one of those races flipping at the gubernatorial level would be really big news on the map. How do you see those races?

Morris: I think those ratings are good. I’m from Texas, and it’s not going to be a mystery to your audience, I lean to the left. So I think that Greg Abbott has done a bad job as governor. And this isn’t super punditry, there’s some good examples of this. There’s a lot of dissatisfaction on two policies in particular, data centers and the education system, which both cross party lines.

So in the Texas education system, the public schools have been closing, which really impacts a lot of those lower engagement, maybe lower turnout propensity voters who aren’t super high income and can send their kids to—

Bacon: And he’s pushing vouchers very hard in rural—rural voters often like their schools even though they’re conservatives on other issues.

Morris: Yeah, they do like to go to public school, especially if there’s not a Christian academy in their tiny town of 2,000 people, which is where I’m from. So that is potentially an issue that crosses party lines, and it’s an incumbent performance issue.

You don’t want the schools to be closing and people to be mad at you for not having the schools open. This was a chief criticism of Joe Biden and his response to COVID, was that the schools were closed. That’s potentially bad for him.

The big one is data centers. Greg Abbott has seen how toxic the data center push has become and completely flip-flopped on this. The issues here might be enough. They might be anti-incumbency enough, anti-leadership enough, for him to not get that fourth term. And four terms in a row, that is a lot. Even in a state like Texas. I think Rick Perry only had three, although he bowed out, so maybe he’d go to four. I don’t know.

And basically the only way to get enough Republicans to vote for Gina Hinojosa, his challenger, is for that anti-incumbency bias to sway a lot of Republicans either to vote for Gina Hinojosa or to not turn out to vote.

The other factor you might ask me about next is, does Ken Paxton’s bad campaign weigh on Abbott? It’s interesting, Ken Paxton is saying that’s going the other way around, that Greg Abbott has been bad for his campaign, in some of this leaked audio, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s like a fun blame game being pushed around here by both of the Republican nominees.

It’s possible that there’s some voters who just won’t turn up at all because they don’t have a Senate candidate to vote for. I think the likelier thing is that there’s an undervote. That there’s a good number of Republicans that turn out to vote in Texas, and they vote for Greg Abbott, and he gets in, but they leave off voting for Ken Paxton, because they don’t find it morally justifiable, or for whatever reason they don’t like the guy.

This is what a lot of voters said that they would do in, I believe, a New York Times focus group of Texas last week. So there’s some anecdata that this might be brewing, an undervote in Texas.

Bacon: Last thing, I’ll make my own comment here, which is, it looks like Roy Cooper and Ossoff are going to probably win by more, and Cooper particularly is more a center moderate. He might win by more than the Democrats in Minnesota, Maine, or Michigan do. So I think you’ll hear a lot of commentary, “This proves moderation is coming.”

Morris: Oh my God.

Bacon: And you’re already seeing that.

Morris: Yeah, the groundwork is being laid for this. People are sending me stuff about this morning.

Bacon: I do want to say one thing I’ve been thinking about. I’m on the progressive side, I wouldn’t hide otherwise, so that’s part of it. But I do want to note that it looks like one of the biggest gaps is going to be between Keisha Lance Bottoms and Jon Ossoff, and Keisha Lance Bottoms is very close to Joe Biden, quintessential moderate.

So my view is, different candidates do better. Roy Cooper has been elected like 1,000 times in North Carolina. He’s a very good candidate for reasons that are not just about ideology. Keisha Lance Bottoms has the same ideology, but maybe is not necessarily as popular, has not run statewide.

So my point is only, elections are more complicated than just ideology, not that ideology might not matter. I’d be curious how you respond to that. And also, this sort of micro fixation on who won, comparing individual states and so on, is a little bit tricky. But I want to just see how you respond, and we’ll close there.

Morris: So there’s another great reason why Democrats might be doing poorly in Michigan and Minnesota. Or in—oh, the New Hampshire governor is a Republican. Kelly Ayotte, right?

Bacon: A Republican in this case, yes.

Morris: Yeah. So definitely this applies to Michigan and Minnesota, however. They have Democratic governors.

Bacon: New York too.

Morris: New York’s definitely—this also applies to New York. They have Democratic governors.

If what we’re seeing is a broad anti-incumbent backlash at the federal level, anti-Donald Trump—and this is voters are really mad about prices, about the federal government still being involved in the war in Iran—and they’re just reflecting that anger at the party in power. Who’s the party in power in Michigan and Minnesota? It’s Democrat.

So maybe I’ll put it this way. That is a potential explanation for why El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan are doing poorly compared to expectations in Michigan and Minnesota, and why the Democratic nominee for governor of Michigan—I’m forgetting her first name. Is it James Benson, or Benson—

Bacon: It’s Jocelyn Benson.

Morris: Oh yeah, the Republican’s name is James.

Bacon: John James is the Republican. Jocelyn Benson is the Democrat.

Morris: Why she might be doing poorly compared to your expectations based on the national environment, and how left-leaning or right-leaning compared to the nation as a whole Michigan is. Actually, that race, the governor’s race, could end up being right on the dot. But that is a potential explanation.

And people have been asking about the moderation versus progressive thing for so long, because I have put myself on the side of the empirical political science on this, which is that we just don’t have enough evidence—in out of sample tests in the future—that a progressive or that a moderate would significantly outperform the average candidate that would be put up by the Democratic Party in these races.

Sure, of course you don’t want to run AOC in Kansas. That’s not my argument. But compared to the average type of candidate you might get in these places, there’s just not enough elections to really say either way, especially in our modern age of high polarization.

And what I’ve been trying to invite people to do is to see elections as products of multiple features of candidates, the way that voters see them, rather than just seeing politics in this one-dimensional moderate versus progressive, or thinking broader left versus right dynamic, that we just know from voter psychology, a lot of voters don’t possess the same lens or the same conceptualization of ideology.

Bacon: People voted for Obama and Trump in consecutive elections. That would tell you that they’re not thinking about ideology in some strict way, or even race, or even other things.

Morris: Or also that their ideology can change. That the features of ideology can change. What makes people a moderate or progressive changes over time. And just the very fact of that change means we should be less confident in our narration about, I think, why people are making their decisions and the ideological conceptualization.

But I would invite you, if Abdul El-Sayed loses, to view that loss not just as a, “Oh, he supported Medicare for All, he lost.” But like I was saying earlier, there’s a lot of other features of the man, Abdul El-Sayed, that might not be palatable to your average white Republican, potentially swing voter or low propensity voter in Michigan. And elections are multi-factor.

Bacon: That’s not reassuring either, but it is more complicated. The fact that he’s Muslim—we have some evidence that being Muslim is challenging, and that is not ideal for the country I live in, but it’s more complicated than just Medicare for All. Probably it’s more important than Medicare for All in some ways.

Morris: It’s also just truer. It’s just truer to the voter psychology and how voters are seeing these candidates. If you watch Fox News, the narration about Abdul El-Sayed is scary. His photo’s always up there. He’s generally brown looking, but they make him look super brown compared to really white Mike Rogers right next to him.

Bacon: It’s not a fixation on, Pete Buttigieg supports a public option and El-Sayed wants Medicare for All. It’s not really in that nuanced way.

Morris: Yeah, the way that you and I are placing candidates potentially on the left-right spectrum, we just know that’s not how many voters are engaging in politics. Actually, most voters.

I will leave you with one point of data, which is, in a survey that I have yet to release, about 30 percent of the public cannot name the party that is currently in control of the House of Representatives, and cannot say which party is the more conservative political party in America. They pick the wrong option. They either say Democrats are in charge or Democrats are more conservative.

Bacon: You said 30 percent of likely voters?

Morris: That’s just a political knowledge thing.

Bacon: It’s just a political knowledge thing. The likely voters number probably is better on that than this, which is all people, right? So many people don’t vote in this country.

Morris: This is all people. Yeah. Maybe the likely voters have slightly higher levels of political knowledge. We can check that. But there’s still going to be a significant number of people out there who lack these key concepts that we are all using in the commentariat to explain politics. So a lot of voters don’t view politics in that way.

Bacon: Elliott Morris, great to see you. Congratulations. MSNBC is going to start using some of your data and analysis on their website and on television. That’s a great coup for you.

Morris: MS Now.

Bacon: Yeah, MS Now. Glad you corrected me there. And also I encourage people to subscribe. It’s Strength in Numbers. It’s one of the best Substack newsletters that I can think of. I learn a lot from it. I encourage other people who do Substack letters to be as good and add information, not just opinions, the way Elliott does. So congratulations on all your work, and great to see you.

Morris: Oh, thanks, Perry.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

What happens if polls are overstating Democratic support, as they have in recent elections? Even if polls are fairly biased against Republicans, Democrats will flip the House, elections expert G. Elliott Morris says in the latest episode of Right Now. Democrats have such a large lead in the U.S. House generic ballot and need to gain control of such a smaller number of seats (three) that a Democratic House majority is virtually guaranteed, he argues. But Republicans have a very realistic chance of holding onto the Senate if the polls are off by a few points, according to Morris. Republican chances are particularly good in Iowa, Kansas, and Texas in such a scenario. Morris also discussed why election forecasts like the ones he does are better at projecting election results than polls alone. And he cautioned against interpreting results only through an ideological lens, arguing for example that Abdul El-Sayed’s Muslim faith may hurt him with Michigan voters more than the candidate’s support of Medicare for all. Morris is the author of the newsletter Strength in Numbers and also helps run the elections website FivePlusOne.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The new Fox poll is absolutely disastrous for Donald Trump. It has fresh data on his dropping approval, on the widening Democratic lead in the battle for the House, and many other things. But what if the polls are wrong? Republicans are betting on this, and there’s now a lively debate about it underway in polling circles that can’t be ignored.

So we’re going to work through both the Fox poll and the debate over polling accuracy with Natalie Jackson, a polling expert who has her own firm, Centerline, and just wrote about the topic well, as a columnist for National Journal. Natalie, thanks so much for coming on.

Natalie Jackson: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So just to establish something quickly: in your piece, you say that Democrats will win the House. You’re treating that as a foregone conclusion, not really in doubt, and that the only big question is whether Democrats have a big year or a really big year, as you put it, the latter meaning they win the Senate. Is that basically where we are?

Jackson: I think so, because it just takes so few seats to flip the House that it’s hard to imagine that not happening in this environment. Mike Johnson has to keep hope alive for Republicans, but the only way Republicans hold the House is if everything we know about this election cycle is absolutely, disastrously wrong. And that’s not happening.

Sargent: Right. You’re essentially saying that for Democrats to not have a pretty good night, at minimum, you’d need, like, a major systemic error that reaches into every corner of what we know right now, right?

Jackson: Right. We would need at least something like a 10-point error on the generic congressional ballot. We would need Trump’s approval reality to be far different than it is. It would just be a massive upset of everything we think we know.

Sargent: Right. So Fox News just dropped this poll that neatly underscores everything you’re saying here. The top lines are that he’s at a record-low approval of 36 percent, 74 percent rate the economy negatively, and Democrats lead by nine points in the generic ballot matchup, 54 to 45. If that proves correct, Natalie—and we don’t know that it will, which we’ll get into—but if it were, that would be the stuff of a wave election, right?

Jackson: Yes. This is kind of what I put in the good night. The really good night, I think, depends on the Senate polling, which I’m sure we’ll get into.

Fox’s numbers match up with mine. I ran a national poll just a couple of weeks ago. I had 35 percent approval among registered voters, eight-point Democratic advantage. So Fox is right there in line with what I’m finding and with what really everyone is. I believe the averages right now are around a nine percent Democratic advantage.

Sargent: Exactly. I mean, the Fox poll is in line with the New York Times poll, which is another gold-standard poll. It had Democrats leading by eight points in the generic ballot matchup.

And all the polling averages that you can look at, whether it’s Nate Silver or FiftyPlusOne, you find the generic ballot matchup to be at around eight or nine points, or somewhere in the middle there. I mean, that’s where we are right now, right?

Jackson: Absolutely. That is just what reality looks like. Nobody really disagrees with that.

Sargent: Well, OK, a little more from the Fox poll. It’s incredible stuff. Trump’s approval among independents is 21 percent, with 78 percent disapproving. Among Latinos, his approval is 21 percent, with 79 percent disapproving. He’s even underwater with non-college whites, which are critical to his base, and that’s at 44 percent to 55 percent.

Natalie, this is historically bad stuff. I mean, it does rival some of the worst presidential performances in the history of modern polling, does it not?

Jackson: It does. The only other president besides Trump in his first term that even comes close to this is George W. Bush when he was leaving office, really 2006 on. But he did not see numbers quite this low.

The averages were in the upper 30s, and the same with Trump’s first term. He did not really go below the upper 30s until January 6. And now we’re seeing numbers that rival, and even in a few cases go lower than, his post–January 6 numbers.

Sargent: Yeah. I mean, he is now rivaling the aftermath of January 6, and that’s just an incredible thing, considering that he essentially encouraged a violent attack on the seat of government.

But I want to point this out, too, as well. It looks like Trump’s approval is really translating directly into the generic ballot matchup as well. Democrats lead among Hispanics by 69 to 31, and among independents by 62 to 36. Democrats are in the 60s with Latinos and independents. And Democrats are doing better than usual with non-college whites. They’re at 44 percent to the GOP’s 55 percent.

Natalie, I think you can see a Democratic coalition kind of forming there. It includes winning back a ton of the Hispanics they lost to Trump in 2024, doing very well with independents, and keeping Republican margins down with blue-collar whites and rural whites as well.

That’s the recipe that they’re going to need in some of these tough states and districts, especially ones that Trump won by high single digits or even double digits. Your thoughts on all that?

Jackson: Right. The coalition that seems to be coming together is reminiscent of what we saw in 2020, when Biden won. We saw heavily Democratic Hispanics, heavily Democratic independents. It’s a really similar outlook. And absolutely keeping those margins down in the rural areas, among the non-college voters. That’s what Democrats have to do.

The issue that I would point to is they have to be able to do it long term. This is great for Democrats for 2026. But what we’ve learned in the last few election cycles is that Hispanics are really dealigning. They’re not really that attached to either party. It used to be a more reliable Democratic core.

Now, especially among the younger generations—which Hispanics are, they do tilt younger than the rest of the population—they are not attached to either party. And they are also very heavily affected, directly affected, by the economy, by virtue of where they live, the types of industries they’re in. And so this is a group that’s going to swing, and we’re seeing a really hard swing against Trump.

Sargent: I mean, it’s going to be a big challenge to try and lock down some of these demographics over the long term. So you’re absolutely right about this.

I want to get at what the Fox poll shows about the economy as well. Donald Trump’s at 22 percent to 77 percent on inflation. Twenty-two percent on what’s clearly the biggest issue on the minds of voters right now. That’s barely more than one out of five that approve.

And by the way, Fox also breaks out non-MAGA Republicans versus MAGA Republicans, and on his overall approval, he’s actually underwater with non-MAGA Republicans. That’s 47 to 53. Those are GOP voters.

And I’ve got to think that looms large in some of these Senate races where Democrats have to win some Republican voters. These are states where Trump prevailed by double digits. And the only way Democrats can get there is by winning a chunk of Republicans. So if you’ve got non-MAGA Republicans disapproving of Trump, there’s a path for them, right?

Jackson: There is a path. The approval numbers are one good indicator. Democrats really need two things to happen with these non-MAGA Republicans. They need them to stay home—some portion of them just don’t show up to vote. The other thing is they need them to be not super attached to the Republican Party.

There’s a contingent of Republicans that is very unhappy with Donald Trump. But on the other hand, they would—I’ve heard this said on cable news a couple of times—they would rather put their face in a wood chipper than vote for a Democrat. So it’s really a complicated picture, and we just don’t know what choice those non-MAGAs are going to make.

Sargent: Absolutely. Well, let’s get into your piece on how to understand the debate over whether the polls might be wrong. And again, we stress that’s always possible. The data could be wrong.

As you write, the big question is whether the polls are undercounting Republicans who aren’t that ginned up to vote, but might still end up turning out anyway and voting Republican. And maybe pollsters aren’t reaching those people.

But a lot of pollsters have taken steps to try to correct for this problem. Can you just walk us through what those steps are?

Jackson: Yes. So, brief background: In 2016, in key states, polls underestimated Trump support. Trump ended up winning. In 2020, we thought Joe Biden was going to win very easily. It turned out polls underestimated Trump even more broadly that year. Biden still won, but it took us four days to learn that after the election. It was so close.

In 2024, things were generally better. There was a slight overestimate for Harris winning. But the track record is that pollsters struggle with Trump support. It’s been better in midterms, with lower turnout different electorate.

But what we’ve done in the meantime is, we weight our data to education now. So that might seem like something fairly obvious, but it was not a practice that pollsters did before, because we didn’t have a precise number for the number of people with college degrees in the electorate.

So without a solid benchmark, we didn’t weight to it. That used to not matter, but people have polarized by education. College-educated people are more likely to be Democrats now, non-college more likely to be Republican. And so if we miss the balance on education, which we were doing, it skews toward one party or the other, and it was skewing toward Democrats.

We also started weighting more on partisanship and partisanship indicators. Some pollsters will use the prior vote. So they’ll ask, for example, who did you vote for in the 2024 election? And then they’ll make sure they have the proper number of people who voted for each candidate.

That’s tricky for a midterm, because your midterm electorate is very different. It works well when you have Trump versus Biden part two, or Trump versus Harris, who is essentially a representative of the Biden administration.

So we’ve done a lot of adjusting to the methods behind polling. There is an element that we’re always fighting the last battle, because we don’t know what is missing or what might be going on until the election happens.

Sargent: Well, OK. So looking at some of the polls that we consider to be high quality, like the Fox poll or the New York Times poll—they’re doing this weighting stuff, and they’re also trying to correct for the problem of not reaching Republicans. Those two things are related, I get that.

Can you talk about the fact that Fox and the New York Times are taking steps here to do what you’re talking about? Like, do you feel reassured? Can we look at their data and say they’re really trying to get to the right place on it?

Jackson: I believe they are. Fox and the New York Times are among the top media pollsters out there, the top any pollsters out there, honestly. They are very careful to make sure that they speak to enough Republicans. What I was talking about was adjusting the data on the back end, but those adjustments only go so far if you don’t talk to the right mix of people in the beginning.

And so one of the things that Fox and the New York Times do very well is they make sure on the front end that they have talked to a good mix of people. And those things take effort and they take money, which is why a lot of pollsters don’t do it. But these two are very reputable.

Sargent: Right. Fox and the New York Times both have the money. They are putting the resources in. It would be really, really a disaster for Fox to undercount Republicans, I think, given obvious reasons like who their audience is. And the fact that they’re constantly attacked by Donald Trump, by the way, I think that actually is a factor that could be playing in favor of accuracy.

Fox knows that they’re really on the hook big time if they screw this up. So they’re really going to put in the effort to get to those Republican voters, aren’t they?

Jackson: They are. And I have tremendous respect for Fox’s polling team, because you can imagine the internal and external pressures that they feel to show numbers that look better for Republicans than what they’re showing right now.

Sargent: I mean, Trump calls for the firing of the Fox pollsters pretty much every day at this point. Let me ask you, there’s also a scenario where Democrats could be undercounted. How would that happen?

Jackson: It’s always possible that error runs in either direction, you know? So, in our adjusting and trying to make sure that we’re getting enough Republicans, there’s always the possibility that we’re adjusting too much.

That’s kind of the thing that we don’t know: do these Republicans actually stay home? Are we going through all these hoops trying to get them to answer the surveys, and then they don’t actually vote? That would be where error would come from, making Democrats have an even better year than what we’re looking at.

Sargent: And is it possible that pollsters could somehow miss the level of energy among Democrats? Like it’s not an exact science to figure out how to screen the polling questions to try to be sure that the people who say they’ll vote are actually going to vote. Right? And so is there a scenario where you kind of undercount the number of Democrats who are actually going to show up? Is that a possibility?

Jackson: It absolutely is. We are trying to guess who’s going to vote. This is the only time that we don’t know who we need to talk to for sure. If we’re talking to registered voters, great, we know who that is. We can take a good sample of that. All American adults, great. We know who they are. We know who we need to talk to.

Likely voters don’t exist as a principle. The election hasn’t happened yet. So we are trying to cobble together several other things that predict how people vote. Some of that comes from using actual vote history. A lot of pollsters use the voter file and get their respondents’ information off of the voter file, which obviously tells you whether they voted or not the last time, the last few elections.

Some of us aren’t using voter files. So we ask a series of questions. How likely are you to vote? Some people say I’m certain to vote. Some say I’m probably going to vote. Very few will tell you straight up, I am not going to vote.

So that makes it tricky in a midterm, where turnout’s likely to max out 50, 55 percent usually. We know when we get 70, 80 percent of people saying they’re going to vote that it’s overshooting somehow. So when we try to cut that down and make it look more like the electorate, it is possible to trim too many Democrats out.

Sargent: That is just fascinating stuff. All right, just to wrap this up. What’s your best guess as to the range of outcomes in terms of polling error here? Is it your sense that the polls that we’re seeing now are pretty close to accurate?

Jackson: I think what we’re seeing from places like Fox and the New York Times are pretty accurate. I think some are kind of out there. I am less concerned about the House generic ballot. I think, you know, at most we’re looking at maybe two points, two to three points, in either direction.

Some of the Senate polling I’m a little more concerned about. Some of the specifics of each state are a little bit harder to deal with. Some of the polling that we have is not very high quality. So I do think there’s potential to see two to four points, maybe even more, in some of these Senate races off of where the polls are.

Sargent: And obviously those could flip the races in one direction or another. It looks to me as if the eight-to-nine-point generic ballot matchup kind of lines up with what the Senate polls are saying, because if you get to eight or nine points in the generic ballot matchup, you’re probably winning a bunch of those Senate seats in even Trump double-digit territory, right?

Jackson: Probably. I worry a little bit about some of the specifics in these states, and the candidates, and just the little things that can come into play in an individual environment. But overall, yes, things are very good for Democrats. And no one is arguing that Republicans are going to come out of this ahead.

Sargent: Natalie Jackson, thank you so much for all that. It’s really fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on.

Jackson: Thanks.

Why not? Because voters these days, both in the United States and abroad, just seem angry at whoever is in charge and eager to toss them aside. Incumbent parties and heads of states across the world are losing popularity and elections, whether they are leftist, center-left, center-right, or far right. That includes places where the economy is fairly good and the leader isn’t corrupt or inept like Trump. So Americans may hate Trump and the GOP simply because they are the incumbent party right now but be willing to return Republicans to power immediately after the next Democratic presidential victory. Democratic leaders should not treat the 2026 results as an indication that they have figured out American politics. Instead, they should continue looking for a political program that will keep voters in their fold even when Democrats are the incumbent party.

When Kamala Harris lost in 2024, it was part of a global trend of voters rejecting incumbent parties. From 2021 to 2024, incumbent leaders were defeated in 40 of the 54 elections in Western democracies, according to Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. In 2024 alone, 80 percent of incumbent parties in democracies lost seats or lost vote share compared to the prior election, according to an analysis from FiveThirtyEight. That included incumbent parties in Japan, Botswana, South Africa, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and many countries in Europe.

We don’t have such sweeping data yet for 2025–2026. But anecdotally, the trend seems to be continuing. Incumbent parties have lost five of the seven national elections in the last two years in Latin America, according to an analysis from scholar Daniel Schteingart. Brazil’s leftist Workers Party seems likely to be the sixth incumbent party defeated, with its candidate, incumbent President Lula da Silva, trailing in the polls ahead of the October 25 runoff there. In Europe, ruling parties in France (center), Germany (center-right), Spain (left), and numerous other nations are sagging in polls. Britain’s center-left Labor Party ousted its leader, Keir Starmer, after the party’s poll numbers plunged. Hungary’s Fidesz, led by Trump ally Viktor Orbán, lost power in April.

In the United States, the anti-incumbent trend arguably started well before the pandemic. Since Barack Obama’s 2012 win, every subsequent U.S. congressional and presidential election has been a rejection of the party occupying the White House.

I would love to think that American voters are simply punishing the GOP this fall for Trump’s authoritarianism, the reckless tax cuts for the rich adopted by the president and Republicans in Congress, the unnecessary war in Iran that has resulted in sky-high energy prices, and the numerous other misdeeds and mistakes of Trump and his allies. But the political scientist part of my brain would say that the Republicans were essentially doomed in the 2026 midterms the moment Trump was declared the winner in 2024. It seems like everybody everywhere just hates incumbents these days.

That makes interpreting the 2026 elections here in the United States very tricky. I suspect some voters are turning from Trump due to his actions. Some of them might appreciate the Democrats’ new focus on affordability and the young, charismatic candidates that the party is running, such as Texas’s James Talarico. But I worry that Democrats have largely just captured (and stoked) anti-incumbent sentiment by blasting Trump and Republicans for high gas prices and other societal problems. Voters here and abroad seem to be willing to blame everything on their country’s head of state.

If I’m right, Democrats are in trouble the moment they win the presidency again—even if the GOP remains antidemocratic and radical. After all, Americans, frustrated with the incumbent party, sent Donald Trump of all people back to the White House in 2024. Right now, a speaker of the House in 2031 even more conservative than Mike Johnson and another Trump-like president taking office in 2033 seems entirely possible.

Therefore, it’s imperative, with the 2028 primary about to launch, that Democratic operatives and officials start considering, “How can an incumbent president/party remain popular?” Liberal egalitarian multicultural democracy depends on pro-democracy parties here and abroad figuring this out. I’m not sure about the answer. Watching Lula, Joe Biden, Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and other leaders, I doubt that either the left’s strategy (focus on economic policy for the working class) or the center-left’s (break with minorities and marginalized groups on some issues, economic policy for the working class, economic growth) are sufficient. My thesis is that it’s some combination of economic policy for the working class, a charismatic leader, and relentless, savvy use of media and messaging. I suspect that Democratic officials should spend less time studying Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s decades-old political wins and more on the popularity of Zohran Mamdani and Mexico’s Morena Party.

But I’m less sure of the solution than the problem. It’s good that this incumbent American president is unpopular, but scary and dangerous that these days it seems like all incumbent presidents everywhere are unpopular. I’m very glad America will likely have a blue wave next month. But our democracy won’t be secure until we have a blue wave while a Democratic president is in the Oval Office.

The case, Salazar v. Paramount Global, has significant potential implications for targeted digital advertising and its long-term viability. If the high court concludes that the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, forbids companies from sharing or selling online video viewers’ personal information without their consent, it could unsettle one of the primary revenue generators for some major websites.

Congress enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, or VPPA, in response to a subplot of the Robert Bork confirmation hearings in 1987. The Senate rejected Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court after intense scrutiny of his stances on issues such as a constitutional right to privacy, a concept that Bork had often criticized. Michael Dolan, a reporter at The Washington City Paper, asked Bork’s local movie-rental store for a copy of the movies Bork had rented there as a commentary on his views on privacy.

The store’s manager provided it without qualification. The rental history contained nothing salacious or unusual—Bork had a taste for middlebrow fare and period dramas—and played no role in the confirmation battle. But it still prompted Congress to prevent similar disclosures in the future without the customer’s consent. Lawmakers last updated the law in 2013 to reflect the emergence of Netflix and streaming services.

At issue in this particular case is whether the law’s language covers the underlying acts. Michael Salazar, the plaintiff, received a subscription through a newsletter to a college sports website, where he viewed videos about college football. Paramount, the website’s operator, installed tracking software on its web pages known as a “pixel” that logged Salazar’s personally identifiable information and automatically shared it with Facebook.

Salazar argued that this violated the VPPA, which allows “consumers” to sue “video tape service providers” for disclosing their “personally identifiable information” to third parties without their consent. The law allows individual plaintiffs to obtain up to $2,500 in damages for the violation. Given how ubiquitous digital tracking software and targeted online advertising have become, those numbers can add up fast for businesses.

His lawsuit failed in the lower courts because they concluded that Salazar did not meet the definition of a “consumer” for VPPA purposes. The law defined a consumer as someone who obtained “goods and services from a video tape service provider,” by which the lower courts concluded that Congress meant only “audiovisual goods or services.” Salazar appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the law as written applies to any goods or services from a provider.

Some justices appeared to favor the lower courts’ narrower interpretation. “Wouldn’t it be natural to think that goods or services from a video tape service provider would be video-related services?” Justice Clarence Thomas asked Josh Hammack, who represented Salazar. Hammack argued that other portions of the law’s language indicated that the law’s scope was meant to be broader than that.

Justice Samuel Alito also suggested at one point that the law’s scope was limited to forms of technology that are no longer in widespread use. “It is not similar in the sense that you go to a Blockbuster store and get a VHS tape,” he told Hammack.

Other justices appeared to take Paramount’s concerns seriously about the impact on internet businesses and advertising, but saw opportunities to address them in future cases. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and some of his colleagues pointed out that other questions, such as what counts as “personal identifying information” or a “video tape service provider,” might still tip in Paramount’s favor in later litigation.

“So how do we think about, you know, the sky-is-falling concern in the [friend-of-the-court] briefs—and it’s part of your brief—when there are these two other arguments that you may prevail on?” Kavanaugh asked Paul Clement, who argued on Paramount’s behalf. “And why shouldn’t we just follow ‘consumer’ as written and worry about that in a future case?”

Among Clement’s concerns in response was that, in the meantime, websites would be forced to obtain consent in cases where they might not need to do so in the future. This did not appear to persuade some of the justices. “Going forward, you have two very simple solutions,” Justice Elena Kagan explained. “One is to get consent. Easy enough. People do it every day. And the other is to stop selling people’s private information. Take your pick.”

“Yeah, or put everything behind a paywall,” Clement countered. “That would be great.”

“What’s the problem with not disclosing private video views?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor chimed in. “I mean, it’s a business for you, and it might end your business if you don’t want to get consent, but if you want to stay in the business, get consent, or just don’t do it. Other than that, you have created a business model that might contradict the law, because we still have a lot of open issues, what’s the problem?”

Clement disputed the idea that user consent would be easy or clean-cut to obtain, noting that other lawsuits have challenged the validity of it once given. Again, the justices seemed unpersuaded. “Well, that’ll always be the argument,” Kavanaugh countered. “But it seems, just technologically, isn’t it pretty easy for you all to obtain consent going forward? It’ll be a little more hassle for all of us, but …”

“For everyone,” Clement replied. “It’s just one of those cookies boxes that comes up, right?” Kagan interjected. “Yeah,” Kavanaugh added. “Wouldn’t you do it the exact same way?” Kagan offered. “I mean, we do that a thousand times a day.” Clement, at this point outmaneuvered, fell back to other arguments instead, urging the justices not to decide the case “on the assumption that consent is absolutely easy.”

One potential wrinkle for both sides is the question of whether Salazar had standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place. Paramount argued in the district court that he didn’t but abandoned that line of attack on appeal. “But, you know, the funny thing about standing arguments, you can’t really drop them,” Clement noted. Since a court’s jurisdiction is always essential to deciding a case, it can’t be forfeited by one side.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed both sides on whether there was a standing issue here, with some friend-of-the-court briefs suggesting that the “pixel” tracking technology did not share what the law would understand to be “personally identifying information.” Clement did not make that argument himself, but he said he would be willing to submit additional briefs on the question if the justices were interested.

None of the other justices asked specifically about standing, and the case appeared to be headed toward a resolution on the merits. If the justices ultimately punt on this case, the recent surge in VPPA-related litigation means that the court will almost certainly address its scope and application for the modern internet at some future date. If no punt is forthcoming, a decision is expected by the end of June.

Musk declined to be interviewed for the film. Instead he called Gibney a “douche” on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk acquired for $44 billion in 2022 and promptly set about ruining. Gibney could have just relied on the abundant existing footage of his subject, but he went a step further, asking his research team to set up a database of all of Musk’s recorded interviews and then creating a computer-generated Musk avatar who appears to be responding to an interviewer using real statements Musk has made. It’s an unsettling gimmick, and would be objectionable in any other context, but it works here; as Gibney notes, Musk has repeated for years the popular theory that what we experience as real life is most likely a computer-generated simulation, essentially a videogame. Gibney makes this conceit literal throughout, portraying Musk as he sees himself—as the main character in a simulated digital environment in which other people are “non-player characters,” or NPCs, to be acted upon without conscience or scruple. It’s a sociopathic worldview, and what makes Musk so effective is that by the end of it, you feel as though you’ve personally been trapped in Musk’s simulation. And, well, aren’t we all?

We glimpse reality through more than a dozen unsimulated interview subjects, ranging from tech journalists (Kara Swisher, Wired’s Katie Drummond and Zoë Schiffer) to former business partners (Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, SpaceX co-founder Jim Cantrell) to former paramours and mothers of Musk’s many children (ex-wife Justine, the right-wing social media influencer Ashley St. Clair) to former government officials (Joe Biden’s USAID chief Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s deputy NASA administrator Lori Garver) to immediate family members (Musk’s brother, mother, and father). Most of the information Gibney presents in Musk has been previously reported, though it’s illuminating to see it all laid out here; what original revelations there are come from getting to know the various people Musk has collected, used, and discarded on his way to becoming the richest person in history.

The portrait that emerges is of an empty, hateful, emotionally stunted man whose two superpowers are shameless self-promotion and a remarkable ability to hack weaknesses in the regulatory state. These are both talents Musk shares with his erstwhile ally Donald Trump, of course, but Trump does have one other thing going for him: his undeniable borscht belt charisma. As awful as Trump is, it’s not hard to see how he won over a significant swath of the American electorate, and analogous right-wing populists have enjoyed similar success in other democratic systems around the world. Musk, by contrast, has always been a try hard, a loser at his core no matter how often he wins. Past acquaintances describe him as preternaturally confident, and while there’s no question he is ambitious, onscreen he comes across at all life stages as an insecure and awkward creep, incapable of joy or even of Trump’s campy schtick. How, Gibney’s film asks, did such a creature accumulate such immense influence, and what does it say about the rest of us that we allowed it to happen?

Part of the answer lies in Silicon Valley’s cult of the founder. The film shows Musk making a conscious effort to present himself as an engineer at SpaceX, an actual builder of reusable rockets, with a montage of him dressed in modest button-downs and khakis to fit in with his workers. In reality, he was the son of a wealthy South African who leveraged some family seed money into a series of ventures in the first Dot Com bubble. He also took pains to establish himself as the driving force behind Tesla and to downplay the contributions of co-founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. (In 2009, Eberhard filed a lawsuit against Musk for calling himself a “founder” of the company; in a settlement, Musk established the right to use that title.) Gibney astutely observes that Wall Street buys into this genius founder myth and has consistently overvalued anything Musk is involved in, further boosting his clout.

Liberal policy initiatives also deserve a share of the blame. As the first half of Musk reminds us, Musk built his empire largely during Barack Obama’s presidency, taking advantage of federal incentives to replicate NASA functions for private profit. Garver, the Obama appointee at NASA who worked closely with SpaceX, still seems to admire Musk’s work in that era even as she’s aware of his subsequent depravities, and as we see in news footage from the time, Obama himself was similarly impressed. So were California’s governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and later Gavin Newsom, who allowed Tesla to game the state’s climate incentives for additional free money. As Gibney shows, Tesla gained tens of millions of dollars’ worth of zero-emission vehicle credits by claiming to operate facilities in California that could swap out an electric vehicle’s battery in under three minutes; only one such station was ever opened, in a remote part of the state, and the general public was never granted access to see how this alleged battery swap miracle worked.

The friendliness of officials toward Musk is juxtaposed with an epic trail of destruction. Gibney talks to a lawyer in Florida who has taken Tesla to court over its misleadingly marketed self-driving cars, which have been involved in at least 60 deaths of both drivers and innocent pedestrians. He later shows Musk gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, starting in early 2025—dramatized in part by an original first-person shooter scenario in which our point of view is a DOGE agent rampaging through a government office. And he reminds us of the millions of people in the global south who have been cut off from life-saving assistance since DOGE dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. Samantha Power, the last head of USAID, chokes up on camera as she contemplates the gratuitous suffering Musk has inflicted on the world’s poorest people.

Sam Harris, the celebrity neuroscientist and New Atheist, suggests in an interview with Gibney that the pandemic and social media are responsible for his former friend Musk’s descent into egomania and his embrace of the far right. Early in 2020, Musk tweeted that Covid-19 was producing an irrational panic, and when Harris objected, Musk bet Harris $1 million against a bottle of tequila that fewer than 35,000 Americans would die. After that grim benchmark was swiftly cleared, Musk abruptly ended his friendship with Harris, and his behavior has only gotten more erratic and his politics more reactionary from there. Anyone who was on Twitter back then could see its algorithms and an echo chamber of millions of fans warping Musk’s brain in real time, and when he purchased the platform two years later, he recalibrated it, immersing those who still use it (including Gibney, and me) in racist memes, conspiracy theories, and worse. We’ve all seen social media and pandemic isolation distort once-rational minds, but Musk’s issues go back much further; though the film doesn’t cover his childhood in South Africa until after its intermission, it’s clear that his father Errol, whom Musk has called “a terrible human being,” left deep marks. At one point in the documentary, Errol describes in gruesome detail how he once apparently shot and killed three intruders in the Musk family home, covering it in blood.

Musk balances a critique of the wider structures that have empowered its subject with an attempt to illustrate Musk’s twisted subjectivity, which it suggests we are all now forced to share in. You can delete your Twitter account, but you’re nonetheless stuck in a world where Musk has enormous power. Gibney shows him cutting deals and developing warm personal relationships with Trump, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to globally expand his businesses—in particular Starlink, which controls thousands of satellites over all our heads, and with which Musk can sway the battlefields of Ukraine by denying or granting access. The gap between how frivolous Musk appears and what he is capable of beggars belief.

Some of the mystique that Musk markets to the public, Gibney demonstrates, comes from familiar science fiction tropes, from his oft-repeated promise to colonize Mars to his obsession with artificial intelligence (despite having warned of AI’s dangers, in the past few years Musk has gone all in on the technology; his trademark LLM, Grok, is responsible for the production of millions of nude images of real people). Searching for an analogy to Musk, Gibney lands on the 1937 British film The Man Who Could Work Miracles, based on an 1898 story by H.G. Wells, in which an ordinary man is granted godlike powers to reshape reality, and becomes increasingly autocratic and dangerous as he attempts to impose a utopian new order on the world; eventually, he stops the earth from rotating, effectively destroying human civilization.

Musk himself seems aware that calamities on that scale could lie ahead. For instance, he envisions a Darwinian civil war between the races in the United Kingdom in which only those blessed with what he considers superior genes will survive. According to Ashley St. Clair in the film, that’s one reason why he is frantically inseminating women in a bizarre natalist quest. Musk has 14 known children through four mothers, one of whom, St. Clair, refused to sign the NDA that she claims Musk has offered to numerous other women, some of whom she’s in touch with. (Much of this was reported in The Wall Street Journal last year; the reporter, Dana Mattioli, also talks to Gibney.) In addition to turning down millions of dollars in hush money by blowing the whistle on Musk’s bizarre behavior, St. Clair has endured harassment and intimidation, which she details on camera; she also seems to have become alienated from the MAGA movement she supported as recently as the 2024 election.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, born in 2004 and one of five surviving children from Musk’s first marriage, is a trans woman whom Musk has declared dead to him, killed by the “woke mind virus.” Gibney didn’t interview Vivian, but he includes footage of her saying that her mother Justine Musk has fought for her heroically, and we get to know Justine at greater length. It’s clear she is a formidable, intelligent, and humane woman who was charmed by Elon’s ambition and then casually abandoned by him. She was patient zero for how Musk has gone on to treat the whole human species. If there is any trace of hope in Gibney’s film, it’s in Justine’s obvious commitment to her children as real individuals whose lives have meaning and dignity, and who aren’t just NPCs in someone else’s video game.

The story went something like this: Wall Street and the big importers and manufacturers would never let Trump follow through with his sophomoric tariff regime, which would only raise costs and damage global economic relationships. Surely, they would step in and guide the president away via misdirection or, if necessary, sheer capital might if he took steps to devalue the dollar and stunt trade.

The Gulf states and their many proxies throughout U.S. politics and business would block potential sources of instability and insecurity in their region (such as, say, a sudden war with Iran that could throw oil exports into chaos and make them targets of Iranian hostilities). Agribusiness and construction would flex their considerable muscle to temper the most heavy-handed of Stephen Miller’s immigration efforts. Big Tech and Big Pharma would protect international talent pipelines and federal research funding, which had formed much of the backbone of their own growth and profits. The direst predictions of the Trump 2.0 era would not come to pass, if only because the richer-than-ever interests behind the scenes would simply say “no.”

Undergirding this view were a set of assumptions, which each seemed reasonable enough: These oligarchic pseudo-cartels were increasingly powerful and had in recent memory managed to brute-force their way out of accountability and protect their interests, even at the height of public discontent, most notably in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. The revolving door between government and industry meant that regulators were captured and agencies populated by past or future corporate personnel. And, while many of these actors are putatively in competition with one another, they could always set that aside and act in concert to protect their interests.

Above all, these interests valued some level of stability and predictability, in addition to their related goal of shaping policy to socialize risk and privatize profit. They had much to gain from Trump, the thinking went, in large part because they could achieve the latter without him blowing up the former.

Things didn’t exactly go according to plan.    

If there is one shred of silver lining from Trump’s total rolling of business and civil society, particularly in the first year and a half of his second term, it’s the pretty conclusive falsification of the idea that Big Money was going to be the ultimate arbiter of what policy was possible in Washington. There have doubtlessly been rewards for those who have sucked up to the president and his political movement, in the way that regime-affiliated oligarchs always find some spoils in authoritarian governments. But as for the money men who were ostensibly going to fly in and curb Trump’s wanton destruction, they either meekly acquiesced early on or they watched powerlessly as Trump tossed Molotov cocktails into the postwar economic order. As bad as the truth has been to witness, it’s good to shed ourselves of this myth.

The fact of the matter is that the so-called captains of industry have fully ascended into cloud-cuckoo-land. The markets have kept riding high on the fabled promise of some AI renaissance (or AI domination, as some investors are certainly hoping for), but outside of that bubble, the dollar is volatile and down despite short-term rallies, longtime trading partners are restructuring their exports and imports away from an unreliable U.S., and our once gold-standard attraction of global talent and scientific discovery is smoldering.

If the Al evangelists are wrong about the mass adoption and labor-replacement potential of their new god—and while indications have been all over the place, it is very hard to imagine that revenues can even reach immense spending on building out these technologies, particularly as public skepticism climbs—then not only will the market crash, we’ll feel the effects of underperformance in pretty much every other sector, from construction to manufacturing to the green energy industry that Trump’s cronies have attacked with particular gusto. The corporate kings have no clothes, and were certainly not able to operate as a unit to protect the systems that made them rich, even if their balance sheets are looking rosy for the moment.

If anything, they’ve been given to debasement, as comically demonstrated by the leaders of some of the nation’s largest corporations instantly switching over to the clunky descriptor of artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” just because Trump said so. The conventional retort is that these people will suck up to fascists but never play ball with a leftist government, but that’s loser talk. They might be more ideologically aligned with Trump’s authoritarian designs, but what these people respond to, ultimately, is power—power of the sort that Democrats have, in recent memory, been reticent to actually use when they win it.

Trump directly, materially impacted their business interests, with arson instead of feared regulation or taxes, but for the worse all the same. Despite all the mystique they’ve tried to build around their power and influence, they were utterly unable to stop him, not least because these are not particularly bright or tactical people. If and when Democrats win back the House and the Senate—which increasingly seems not only likely but inevitable—and eventually regain the presidency, part of navigating the wreckage will be not forgetting how easily the money men can be buckled through the raw exercise of power, which despite their immense success over the last decades, these players have not actually monopolized, much as that’s what they want us to think.

When increasingly irate voters return power to ostensibly liberal political leaders, they will expect the latter to use it—and forcefully so. There can be no “We have to work in concert with the job creators”; none of this “We can’t stare down all of Wall Street.” Defeatism is a dead letter. A popular mandate around improving lives with social programs, a resurgence of antitrust, a reassertion of privacy rights, and a corporate sphere that exists under regulatory scrutiny instead of the other way around will require going head-to-head with the moneyed and entrenched interests that nonetheless folded like a cheap suit before a single, now wildly unpopular narcissist and his cabal of misfit toys. It can be done. It must be done.

The 41-year-old White House press secretary told Wired Thursday that she used to be an affiliate marketer for Beachbody, a multilevel-marketing operation that sold fitness programs and supplements.

She shared that she was brought into the MLM by a friend and promoted one of the company’s nutrition shakes, labeled Shakeology. She eventually stopped drinking the shakes because of its vitamin A levels, which she told Wired concerned her while she was pregnant.

Beachbody rebranded to BODi in 2023. The company noted to Wired that Zacharia had never worked for them as an employee; she was one of Beachbody’s 300,000 “independent Team Beachbody distributors” in 2013.

A spokesperson for the company also told the magazine that it would be a “misrepresentation” to compare Zacharia’s time at Beachbody with the current iteration of the fitness brand, which has since moved away from the MLM structure in favor of a traditional direct-to-consumer pipeline.

Beachbody was the progenitor of the 90-day P90X workout regimen, an extreme home fitness DVD program that captivated the country when it first hit the market in 2005, and Insanity, another popular home fitness program that launched four years later. Since then, however, Beachbody has been plagued by a number of legal troubles, including lawsuits that accused the company of scamming coaches, lying about the benefits of an anti-aging skincare treatment, and making misleading and unscientific claims about its Shakeology products.

Zacharia, meanwhile, has faced her own mountain of problems this week. Despite her self-advertised legal credentials, it quickly became clear the Pepperdine Caruso Law graduate never actually passed a state bar exam. Zacharia fessed up on Thursday, telling Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec that she was never licensed to practice law anywhere in the country.

“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself ‘lawyer,’ and I consulted for a very long time many people in the field, ‘Is it OK and acceptable if I label myself lawyer? Not attorney at law … and provide legal analysis, not legal advice?’” she said. “They said ‘absolutely’ across the board.”

While some in the legal profession comprehend the semantic differences between the labels, the general public does not. Zacharia was branded as an attorney on Fox News and Newsmax dozens of times. Her P.R. campaign made a fool out of the president, revealing that Donald Trump doesn’t understand the difference, either. Announcing her hire in a statement last week, Trump similarly referred to her as an attorney. The snag: She’s not.

The FBI acknowledged an investigation into the letters on Thursday, though it did not state how many letters exactly were sent.

Election officers in Oklahoma and Louisiana reported receiving the letters in the mail, while federal officials reportedly intercepted others bound for New Hampshire, Ohio, and Connecticut. The U.S. Postal Service intercepted a letter to Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, while fellow Democratic Senator Chris Murphy reported receiving a letter in his Hartford, Connecticut, office.

“The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including Secretary of State offices and their related election offices,” the FBI stated. “Some of the letters contained an unknown substance and we are working closely with our law enforcement partners to respond to each incident.”

This comes as state election offices prepare for early voting and the November midterms. It also comes just a few weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, in which infected letters were mailed throughout the country in a similar fashion.

“Election officials should never have to fear for their personal safety while performing their duties, and there is no place in a peaceful democracy for violence, threats or acts of intimidation,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said in a Wednesday statement. “We have a duty to the citizens of Ohio to deliver secure and accessible elections, and these kinds of cowardly threats will not deter us from that mission.”

The brand-new White House press secretary appeared on the right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice Thursday for an interview with Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and attempted to put the whole “lawyer” thing to bed.

“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself ‘lawyer,’” Zacharia said. “I consulted for a very long time, many people in the field, ‘Is it OK and acceptable if I label myself ‘lawyer’—not ‘attorney at law,’ not ‘Katie Zacharia esquire’—but ‘lawyer,’ and provide legal analysis, not legal advice. And they said ‘absolutely’ across the board.”

Zacharia obtained her J.D. from Pepperdine University and took the California state bar exam soon after graduation, but she didn’t pass. She told Posobiec that she was distracted, overwhelmed, and excited by her upcoming marriage and plans to join her new husband in China, so the exam was not top-of-mind.

“We just said, ‘Let’s take this time, and I’ll take the bar and see what happens,’” the new press secretary said. “The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China, and we left shortly thereafter. After moving to China, I didn’t really think much of the bar results as something I needed to focus on.… There’s no Chinese bar, I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice.”

The question of Zacharia’s legal background has perplexed pundits after her bizarre response to reporters at the White House Tuesday asking where she had passed the bar exam, to which she answered: “When I moved to China.” Foreigners can’t take the Chinese bar exam. She later told The New York Times that she had misheard the question.

“The truth is I was very careful how I executed this and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law,” Zacharia told Posobiec. Never, except when she was repeatedly describing herself as a lawyer and working as “general counsel” for a California nonprofit.

Alexandros Paporakis, 19, was thwarted in his attempt to open fire on the Sri Venkateswara Swami Balaji Temple thanks to his rifle jamming, Krishnamoorthi said in a statement, citing Cook County prosecutors. Paporakis allegedly told his co-workers about what he did and said he planned to try again.

His co-workers contacted police, who arrested him at his home nearby. Investigators later found a manifesto that Paporakis allegedly wrote titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A. (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto)” showing support for white supremacist ideas, the Chicago Tribune reported. They also found weapons, hundreds of rifle ammunition rounds, body armor, a patch with a white supremacist picture on it, and tactical equipment.

“I am horrified that a white supremacist attempted to carry out a mass shooting targeting Indian Americans at the Hindu temple in Aurora where my family worships,” Krishnamoorthi said in his statement.

Racism against South Asians has ramped up in recent months, spurred on by right-wing politicians and media. Bo French, the Republican nominee to lead the Texas Railroad Commission, made a racist X post attacking a picture of several South Asian students at a University of Texas football game.

“The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” French posted.

The picture quickly became conservative fodder. It was the topic of discussion on a September 26 episode of the right-wing podcast Rufo & Lomez, hosted by right-wing ideologues Christopher Rufo (famous for pushing attacks on critical race theory and DEI) and Jonathan Keeperman. The pair discussed what they called the “Indian Question” and defended French’s post, making the racist claim that the Texas students had not properly “assimilated” into American culture.

Krishnamoorthi criticized the episode in an X post, saying that “Indian Americans are not an ‘Indian Question’ to be solved.”

“Treating any American community as a problem because of their ethnicity is racist, xenophobic, and fundamentally un-American. We are a nation born of ideals, not bloodlines. No race, religion, or ancestry has a greater claim to America than another. Indian Americans are as American as anyone. This country belongs to all of us,” Krishnamoorthi posted.

Meanwhile, Rufo and Keeperman’s ideas are being amplified by their fellow travelers in the Trump administration, who turn a blind eye to incidents like the one in Aurora.

A lawsuit filed by two voting rights groups, the League of Women Voters Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund, alleges that a software update initiated by the Texas Department of Public Safety malfunctioned, leaving 600,000 new voters unprocessed. They also claim that the voter registration program had long had issues even before the software malfunction. The lawsuit names Republican Secretary of State Robert S. Howden, the Department of Public Safety, and DPS Director Freeman F. Martin as defendants.

“Since at least October 2025, Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit states that people who registered to vote while applying for their license between October 2025 and February 2026 were affected, with their information never actually recorded. The groups are requesting that a judge activate a 2021 settlement agreement that allows Texans to register to vote online with a driver’s license.

The Texas DPS has declined to comment.

The fact that this is all happening in Texas makes this situation particularly urgent. While voter registration issues anywhere present a genuine constitutional threat, it’s especially alarming in Texas—a state where a Democrat has a real chance to win the Senate for the first time in over 30 years. The race between embattled MAGA Republican Ken Paxton and populist Democrat James Talarico is incredibly close, and a win for Talarico would deliver a crippling blow to President Trump and the national GOP in the process. If this massive voter registration malfunction isn’t remedied by November 3, it will present any outcome with real issues of legitimacy.

MAGA donor and former congressional candidate Eric Deters announced in a video Thursday that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against the disgraced former U.S. ambassador to Greece and her lawyers.

“This might just bring down the entire Trump administration,” Deters said in the video.

Deters became ensnared in Guilfoyle’s fall from glory last week, when The Wall Street Journal reported that she had begged him to pay her $100,000 American Express credit card bill in exchange for special access to Trump administration officials who could take care of Deters and his personal tax problems.

“You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, that’s all that will show,” Guilfoyle wrote to Deters on July 3, 2025, ahead of her confirmation hearing for ambassador. “Please. And I have you down as one of my special guests for my hearing in DC on Wednesday.… I can get you in for a meeting on the matter we discussed please get back to me ASAP.”

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she added. Guilfoyle was once upon a time married to Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom, and later engaged to Donald Trump Jr. before they parted ways in 2024.

The bombshell Journal report, alongside evidence that Guilfoyle had boasted about her close ties to two Greek tycoons who were bankrolling her international travel, spelled the end of Guilfoyle’s tenure as a U.S. ambassador. She was publicly asked to resign from her position Tuesday during White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first ever press briefing, and officially stepped down only hours later. In her resignation, she wrote, “I also want to address the recent allegations against me. These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” setting the stage for Deters’s new lawsuit.

Following Guilfoye’s dismissal, she has reportedly been “spiraling” out of control and amassing evidence against the Trump family in a “burn book.” This lawsuit is unlikely to ease her state of mind.

“I possess a solid grasp of Greek mythology. Kim’s Greek goddess match is Apate, the goddess of deceit,” Deters said in his video. He demanded that Guilfoyle and the defendants “apologize to me, admit the texts are fake, admit I did not blackmail her, admit I do not owe Kim money, and with the payment of $1 million.”

Deters then said he had further evidence of wrongdoing: He claimed to be sitting on a “16-minute phone conversation I had from Greece” that “may end the JD Vance-Marco Rubio ticket.” He then promised to release the phone recording on Friday.

“President Trump and the defendants can do the right thing, or pay the price for not doing so by virtue of my never-ending cymbal-banging,” Deters continued. “This litigation will include subpoenas and documents from the Trump administration. I can assure you, by the end of tomorrow, I am going to play for you a phone recording that is the most explosive, most devastating, information about Kimberly Guilfoyle to date.

“It’s my opinion that I have brought down the Greek ambassador. It’s my opinion that Susie Wiles is gonna go. And it’s my opinion that this is going to be the Jack McCall—without the violence—the Jack McCall of the Trump administration. Google Jack McCall if you’re wondering who Jack McCall is.”

We did. He murdered American frontier folk hero Wild Bill Hickok in 1876. Weird.

The 41-year-old appeared before the White House press corps for the first time on Tuesday, whereupon she stumbled her way through a wordy briefing, took three questions, and fled out of the room after just 14 minutes. Donald Trump was the first to defend her, telling reporters after the conference that he felt Zacharia was “very good.” The White House took a similar position, describing Zacharia’s delivery as “commanding.”

But a series of leaked text messages obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that the newly minted Trump official was getting torched by her administration co-workers before she even left the lectern.

“She looked as if she was handed a sheet of paper at the last minute and wasn’t prepared properly,” one insider said.

A senior administration official told the Mail that Zacharia’s performance wasn’t good enough.

“She should have gone on longer and had substantive answers ready,” the official said. “She could barely read.”

A senior member of the administration’s communications team said that Zacharia’s first briefing was “terrible on so many different levels.” Another official called it “embarrassing.”

Another source told the tabloid that they felt “badly for her,” considering that Zacharia’s “kids and family [were] watching.”

But an aptitude for the job isn’t the only thing Zacharia lacks. The White House confirmed Thursday that, despite her résumé and self-advertised legal credentials, the Pepperdine Caruso Law graduate never actually passed a state bar exam. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after she obtained her law degree, but she did not pass.

For years, Zacharia made a name for herself as a legal expert on conservative airways. Her LinkedIn also lists her as “general counsel” for a California-based organization run by longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell. The caveat: She shouldn’t have been able to do either without passing the bar.

After rambling about the upcoming midterm elections and briefly thanking the first responders gathered there for lunch, the president quickly pivoted to describing his pet White House construction projects.

“It’s all perfect now. So we reskinned, basically. It’s a reskinning,” Trump said, looking around the Rose Garden like he’d never seen it before. “And that building is good to go for another 100 years, at least, actually. But even this, you see the, the top sections were—it was so bad I didn’t even like standing under it, the thing was all cracked and broken, all over the place. We put the sign up, solid brass, half-inch thick, as opposed to laminate. You ever see these laminate? They don’t want to spend the money on the brass so they have a piece of brass laminated, just about one-hundredth of an inch thick, and they put in on a piece of wood to save a lot of money.”

Trump, of course, has made no attempt to save money pursuing his vanity projects in the people’s house. Not only did he pave over the original Rose Garden to build a sterile patio (and to ostensibly make it easier for women wearing heels, he claimed Thursday), but he also renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway using white granite, covered the Oval Office in gaudy gold, gutted the Lincoln Bathroom, built and then rebuilt a new helipad, and demolished the East Wing to build a $600 million White House ballroom. The building has indeed been “reskinned”—in Trump’s own image.

A clinical psychologist recently signaled that the president’s endless obsession with his construction project might be a sign of cognitive decline.

The Miami Herald reports that the women allege that Gaetz, ex-Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, and former Florida state Representative Christopher Dorworth recruited young women and supplied them with drugs for sex between 2017 and 2019 while also transporting them across state lines. The two women filed a lawsuit Thursday in the middle district of Florida against all three men.

Gaetz denied the allegations in a statement.

“I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” Gaetz said. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”

The two women, named as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 in the lawsuit, were 20 and 22, respectively, when they met Gaetz in 2017. They allege that Greenberg, who is now serving an 11-year sentence in federal prison on multiple charges, including sex trafficking of a minor, recruited them at a time when they didn’t have a stable income.

Greenberg, Gaetz, and Dorworth had a system that preyed upon young women like them, paying for sex and plying them with controlled substances, the lawsuit alleges. Greenberg used the website SeekingArrangement.com (now just called Seeking) to find the women, introducing them to a circle of men that included Gaetz and Dorworth. The women were given drugs at parties and homes used for sex, according to the lawsuit.

Greenberg and Dorworth helped cover up Gaetz’s actions, according to the lawsuit, paying for trips to Miami, Las Vegas, the Florida Keys, and New York City for both of the plaintiffs, themselves, and other men.

“At the time of this venture, Gaetz was a sitting member of Congress, holding himself out to be one of President Donald J. Trump’s closest confidants and most loyal supporters,” the lawsuit states.

Jane Doe 1 says in the lawsuit that she saw Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old woman, fitting with the allegations that led to Gaetz’s resignation from the House and ultimately sank Gaetz’s nomination by President Trump to be attorney general months later. She also alleges that she was paid over $6,000, with Jane Doe 2 getting over $4,000 from Gaetz. The payment descriptions reportedly read “Being my friend,” “car deductible,” and “Love you.”

The Michigan Chronicle’s Sam Robinson spotted Rogers’s wife handing out the gift cards on Tuesday.

“[We’re just] talking to some folks that are struggling with this gas crisis. We’re all struggling with incredibly high gas prices,” she said. “And Mike knows this.” The $10 amount—a measly margin for someone trying to fill up their tank—is supposed to represent how much people would save with Rogers’s proposal to suspend the state gas tax.

This is straight-up bribery, and it has not been well received by those to Rogers’s left.

“Legalities aside, this is so ham-handed and cringy it cannot be the brainchild of any political professional,” Michigan political strategist Jeff Timmer wrote. “It screams ‘placating the panicked candidate and/or spouse’. Parks and Recreation Leslie Knope city council campaign optics.”

“$10????? Weak ass shit not even getting them to the westside and back,” a Detroit-based X account chimed in.

Gas in Michigan is $4.57 per gallon right now, nearly 25 cents above the national average. That high price is directly due to the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed because Trump and Israel started bombing Iran eight months ago. And yet Rogers—and virtually every other Republican running for Congress next month—cannot bring himself to solidly oppose the war, even as the majority of Americans do.

Most polls have Rogers slightly trailing his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed.

Donald Trump has reportedly called his allies to explore potential successors for his once-irreproachable “ice maiden,” Politico reported in its Playbook newsletter Thursday. The reviews of Wiles’s performance, apparently, are not good.

“She’s burned a lot of people,” a Republican operative close to the White House told Politico.

One senior elected Republican official who fielded Trump’s call told the digital newsroom that the president had raised “the first honest questions about Susie.”

Possible replacements include deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller or—as a left-field option—Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees, insiders told Politico. Other options extend to U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, real estate developer turned federal housing director Bill Pulte, and ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Still, Trump shied away from committing to the turnover, ardently defending Wiles in a statement.

“TOTAL FAKE NEWS Politico doesn’t care about facts, integrity, or honest journalism—it’s why I kicked them out of the White House!” the president told Politico. “Susie Wiles is my loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff—there is a reason for that. She has been with me since the beginning, is my trusted advisor, and has my COMPLETE confidence.”

Trump has resisted calls to fire his scandal-laden staffers throughout his second term, marking a stark contrast to the revolving door of his first administration. But people have come and gone, nonetheless.

By September, more than half of Trump’s original “A team”—approximately 56 percent—had departed, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. Four Cabinet positions have also turned over since Inauguration Day 2025, with former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard all being replaced.

The blue wave is so strong that State Navigate estimates Democrats will flip more than 400 state legislative seats across the country and win control of several state legislative houses and governorships. Currently, about 40 percent of Americans live in states where Democrats control the state legislature and the governor’s office, and about 40 percent of Americans live in Republican “trifecta states.” But State Navigate projects that Democratic gains will be so large that after November, only 30 percent of Americans will live in Republican-dominated states, compared to about 50 percent in Democratic ones. In the latest episode of Right Now, Chaz Nuttycombe, State Navigate’s executive director, breaks down his site’s projections. He says Democrats are likely to gain trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, and Minnesota and break up GOP trifectas in Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Nuttycombe says that he expects Democrats will win the governor’s race in either Georgia or Texas and potentially both states. These electoral shifts could lead to massive policy changes, as TNR’s Perry Bacon explained in a recent piece.

Perry Bacon: Hi, I’m Perry Bacon. I’m joined by Chaz Nuttycombe. He’s the executive director of State Navigate, which does a lot of interesting work analyzing state legislators and the races going on there. They have a lot of polling and a lot of projections and a lot of data about an underappreciated part of our system, which is state politics and how important they are. So Chaz, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Chaz Nuttycombe: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Bacon: So I think you guys do estimates the way a lot of forecasts do, the way that people know about Nate Silver and G. Elliott Morris. But you’ve done those things at the state level instead. So if I read this correctly, you’re projecting that Democrats across the country will gain about 400 seats in the state legislatures. Is that correct?

Nuttycombe: 410 right now, yeah.

Bacon: 410. So is that an unusually large number? Is that a small number? Is there any kind of comparison there? So 410 across the country, that seems like a big number. About how many state legislators are there in the country overall?

Nuttycombe: I think it’s 7,400 total. There are 6,152 up this year, although I think we’re missing like maybe five special elections that we don’t have in here. And those are in chambers like South Carolina Senate, New Mexico Senate, Kansas Senate, which are only happening presidentials. Maybe Louisiana and Mississippi Legislature too.

They think they’re all safe, although I know Mississippi has something coming up. I want to say they have special elections because of redistricting, so actually I should check on that.

Bacon: In other words, there’s a blue wave coming in. It’s also hitting state legislatures is what I think the broad story is here.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. 2018, the Democrats gained, I believe Ballotpedia’s count is like 308 or 309.

Bacon: Okay. So it’s going to be even bigger than that.

Nuttycombe: Yeah, a little bit bigger. Our forecasts, though, are plugged into a D plus 8.4 national environment right now. That’s based on our fundamentals modeling, which includes stuff like, of course, presidential approval and all that jazz. And then, of course, polling. Polling is about like 60 percent of that environmental estimate, and then the fundamentals are about like 40, if I recall correctly.

And waves move, especially in midterms, unevenly. As we, for anybody who remembers 2022, right? With maybe results in somewhere like Florida or New York compared to Michigan or Minnesota. So some of our states where Democrats are doing pretty well—and it’s very hard, it’s like an art and a science, I think, at the state legislative level, and I’ll get into that in a sec. But I would say with a D plus 8.4 environment, I’m surprised how well Democrats are doing in somewhere like New Hampshire and Washington.

And inversely, I think that they’re probably doing better compared to what our forecasts have at the state legislative level, I’m talking here, in Texas and Georgia. That’s just my take, though. The data is the data.

Bacon: Sorry, they’re doing better in Texas and Georgia, or worse, compared to the national? Say it again.

Nuttycombe: I think that they’re probably going to do better in Texas and Georgia than what we have in our state legislative forecast there. So that’s my hot take, and a little bit of that is based on polling and what we’ve seen particularly in regional polling, and some problems, I would say, especially in Georgia, in terms of the statewide polling there.

Bacon: Are these 400 seats pretty geographically distributed, or are there some regions or states that we should typically focus on where there are going to be big gains?

Nuttycombe: So that’s a good question. So the biggest ones—I’ve got our national forecasting here. I’m looking at coalition shifts, and this should be organized, I believe, by percentage change in the legislature. So New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Arizona, Washington, expected pretty big changes there. Minnesota, Maine, Hawaii.

Smallest changes would be, it looks like, Wyoming, Nevada, pretty gerrymandered states and really not much competitive. And also Wyoming is gerrymandered, but it’s still deep red. Alabama, Rhode Island, Maryland. And then Georgia’s also on the bottom, which, so I do think we’re undershooting there, but we’ll see. So those are the smallest ones in terms of change.

The Republicans, it looks like the only state where they’re making gains in our forecast is North Dakota.

Bacon: What was that count like?

Nuttycombe: Maybe three seats in the North Dakota House. So that’s what we got.

Bacon: So currently, Ballotpedia estimates about 39 percent of Americans live in a Democratic trifecta and about 42 percent live in a Republican trifecta. Trifecta, if people don’t know, is when one party controls both the state legislature and the governor’s office. That’s where you can really do policy. Like Texas and Georgia, and most of the South, are red trifectas. A lot of states on the coast are blue trifectas.

And you guys are estimating, if I’m reading this well, that right now it’s about 40/40, but you’re estimating that if this election goes the way you think it’s going to go, about 49 percent of Americans, almost half, will live in a Democratic trifecta, and only about 31 percent—so a big retrenchment in the Republican trifectas. Correct?

Nuttycombe: Correct. Yeah. And what’s big is, and I know Nate Silver is doing the same thing here, two-thirds of Americans are projected to have a Democratic governor right now, if our forecast holds up. And I don’t know what the percentage is for this currently.

We could probably calculate it for how many are represented by a Democrat on the state house level or a Republican, but we have 55 percent of Americans being represented by Democrats on the state house level. It’s lower on the state Senate, 52 percent projected, with 48 percent projected Republican.

Why is that difference there? State senates are like the US Senate. The vast majority have staggered terms, so only half of state senate seats thereabouts are up every two years. And there’s also a small percentage that’s only up every four years, next year in Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Perry Bacon: 49 percent projected in Democratic trifectas, 30, 31 percent Republican. So a big shift potentially coming. So let’s dig into that a little bit, because there were some numbers in terms of the states.

So you seem like you’re estimating—states people follow a lot, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, are states you’re projecting. I think all those places are places where the legislature is currently not Democratic, but might be.

A lot of things we’re seeing are potentially states with Democratic governors where one house is Democratic and now the other might be. That’s Minnesota, Michigan, and Arizona, right?

Nuttycombe: Not Arizona. Arizona, both chambers are Republican.

Bacon: Oh, okay. So they might have two flips. Interesting.

Nuttycombe: Michigan and Minnesota, the state senates, which have not been up since 2022, are held by Democrats. They’re up this year. And there is a tied chamber in the Minnesota State House. It’s the only tied chamber in the country as far as I know. And Michigan State House flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2024.

So in terms of the most likely states to have a trifecta created, Minnesota with a 94 percent chance of a Dem trifecta this year, Kansas with 81 percent—

Bacon: Kansas will become Republican, just to let people know. Currently they have Laura Kelly, the governor, who’s done a good job winning two terms, but a Republican’s likely to win this. That’s unusual this year, to have a state become Republican. Go ahead.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. And then Alaska is the second most likely Democratic trifecta. But put an asterisk there, because it’s a de facto Democratic trifecta, because Alaska is very unique in that both of its state legislative chambers have a coalition of Democrats, independents, nonpartisans, and a couple of Republicans.

So the Alaska state senate is pretty much not competitive. The coalition will hold it. And then the state house, the coalition is probably going to expand their majority by maybe one to three seats. I think that’s what we have right now.

So the big thing there is just, Dunleavy is not really on the side of the coalition. He’s out of office this year. Democrats are heavy favorites to win the governor race in Alaska this year because there’s three Republicans on the ballot. One of them is not really pro-team RCV, so they’re not really telling their candidates to rank, as far as I remember, unless that has changed in the last few weeks.

Everyone’s talking about what Silver has, and maybe not as much what we have, because our forecasts are behind a paywall. But yeah, to say lean Democratic would be generous to the Republicans in the Alaska governor race. Really it’s pretty likely, at 80-something or maybe 90-something percent chance, that the Alaska Dems win the governor race this year.

Bacon: Let me jump to Wisconsin, which is a state that is very close in all elections. You have it almost at 50 percent exactly that it might become a trifecta or not. So talk about Wisconsin a little bit. This is a state where David Crowley is the favorite for governor, I assume, in your models, but it’s more a legislature question.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. No, actually. So we have the legislature as more likely, a little bit. Especially the state senate. Wisconsin State Senate is, I would say, probably next to the Minnesota State House, probably just under it, the most likely chamber to flip in the country.

Just because it’s a staggered state senate, they have redistricting, and there’s a whole bunch of seats up that are very likely to flip. And then the assembly is less likely, but it’s still, Dems are a little bit favored.

I think we’re undershooting Crowley here. I would like to see more polling of this race. But it looks like the average poll has Crowley between three and five. I think Crowley’s going to win by eight, frankly. But I don’t know, because I checked—State Navigate was the number one pollster for governor races in the country last year.

Bacon: You had some great polls, and then you had the Wisconsin primary poll. But anyway, yes.

Nuttycombe: Primaries are very different, and everyone was in the same boat there. And we saw this in, we did statewide polling in Utah where pretty much we got one candidate’s exact percentage right, but all the undecideds went in one direction. So when we talk about punditry and vibes and momentum, that actually matters a lot.

But anyway, what I was getting at is, pretty much I did the same methodology for what we had for figuring out what was the electorate going to be in Virginia last year, right? That got us being number one.

And I did it for Wisconsin for, pretty much in these states that don’t have party registration, what should party ID be? And Marquette has it literally right on the dot for what that estimate is supposed to be on party ID for Wisconsin. And Marquette had Crowley up by three.

So maybe it’s just Wisconsin being Wisconsin and the race is closer than what I think. And that polling has been to Wisconsin there this year. But we will see. Just my take, I think that Crowley—I would be surprised if the race was within five points, but that’s just—

Bacon: You also estimate—the one that jumped out at me was Pennsylvania, because I think of Josh Shapiro as being very popular, and I think that is correct, that he’s going to win by a lot. I assume Pennsylvania is going to become a trifecta too, but you all have it right at 50/50 too. So talk about why Shapiro’s numbers may not translate in state legislature.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. So the House is almost virtually safe Democratic. They won that chamber in 2022, and they held it in 2024. It was the only super competitive chamber that the Democrats held. They held it because of a conservative Democrat in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Frank Burns, who represents a Trump plus 30-something or 40-something district and won re-election by I think three points. But they’re going to expand their majority this year.

The state senate is the big thing. So Republicans have really strong incumbents in some of these competitive state legislative districts. We’re talking about their previous performances when they were state representatives were outrunning Biden by 10, 20-something points. And they didn’t really get contested in 2022. Now they are. Democrats also are defending a seat that they flipped in a special election.

But here’s the fun part. So we have polled all the competitive races in the Pennsylvania State Senate. We have our follow-up polls coming out tomorrow, which—I have some interesting stuff for when we talk about, I think, a problem in polling this year that’s under-discussed. Because these state senate districts are much larger than your congressional districts, or even state by district polls. So we’ve polled a lot of people in Pennsylvania, in the districts that decide the majority.

But anyway, so we did this one poll that—I put out an article, you can find it on our homepage on State Navigate, the top 20 most interesting, or strangest I should say, state legislative elections in the country. 10 are interesting and 10 are absolutely insane. And the number one most interesting race, I think, on the state legislative level this year is Pennsylvania State Senate District 46. It’s Southwest Pennsylvania. This is Conner Lamb territory.

Bacon: That’s like the Pittsburgh suburbs, right? Sort of Pittsburgh exurbs.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. Washington County, but also Greene County. And then a slight sliver of southern Beaver.

Bacon: For listeners who don’t know counties in Pennsylvania, I think we’re talking about outside of Pittsburgh, right?

Nuttycombe: Yeah, pretty much. On the border with the West Virginia panhandle.

Bacon: All right. That’s helpful. Thank you.

Nuttycombe: This district voted for Trump by 28 points, and I shouldn’t say the Democrats, because there’s an independent running against the Republican, and she is tied in our polling, which is really interesting. And the reason she’s tied—so to my knowledge, the same group running Dan Osborn in the US Senate is getting behind her. I don’t know what the group is called. But the reason why this race is tied, at least in our poll—

Bacon: Just to clarify for listeners, Dan Osborn is the person running in Nebraska who’s running as an independent, but is more left-leaning. He’s moderate, but he’s more of a Democrat, more left-leaning than conservative. He’s running as an independent to get away from the Democratic tag in a place where that’s unpopular. Go ahead.

Nuttycombe: Exactly. The reason this race is tied is because there was a brutal Republican primary, millions of dollars spent.

Bacon: Millions of dollars spent in a state legislative primary?

Nuttycombe: Yes. Gambling money, a lot of gambling money in that. Or gambling, gaming, whatever you want to call it.

So the incumbent is a normative conservative who got a primary from the MAGA right. And she only won re-election by six points in that primary, so it was very divisive, a lot of money spent hitting her. And so the conservative base is pissed off with her. So the independent is pulling a lot of Republican support.

And what’s interesting is, this was my favorite cross tab of the year, where we ask in all of our polls since we’ve done Wisconsin how people rate themselves ideologically, going from far right to Democratic socialist on a scale of one to 10, right? Where are you on a one to 10? And of all—so there’s center right, conservative, very conservative, extremely conservative, and far right for the right of center on this, right?

And the group where the independent is pulling best is with the far right. She’s getting a third of the far right vote. So it’s a really fascinating race, but that has changed the calculus of the Pennsylvania State Senate.

So that is the big thing this year, that pretty much the overall odds of a Democratic trifecta or whether it’s a divided government is a toss-up overall, when you include the odds in the governor race and the State House. So that’s going to be the thing. We have these Pennsylvania polls coming out tomorrow in three State Senate districts. All three of them are follow-up polls. And we will see.

The Democrats just need to gain two State Senate seats in order to have a tie, which would be broken by the lieutenant governor, although that’s not a very strong majority. I think with how the State Senate works is that they can’t—I forget what they can’t pass, but I think it’s revenue or something, or taxes. I don’t remember.

There’s some quirks like that that are on the state legislative level. But yeah. So Pennsylvania, toss-up on whether it’s a divided government or not. It’s all up to the State Senate, and we have those polls coming out tomorrow.

Perry Bacon: So one story is potentially a lot of Democratic trifectas being created. That’s one big story. The other story is about potentially Republicans losing trifectas. So you say in Iowa, that’s 93 percent chance—that’s essentially that Rob Sand is going to win the governorship. That’s the story there?

Nuttycombe: That combined—yeah, I would say mostly that.

Bacon: Ohio, you have 76 percent. Is that also mostly about Amy Acton as well?

Nuttycombe: Yeah.

Bacon: And then Georgia, 56 percent. That jumped out at me a little bit. I don’t perceive Keisha Lance Bottoms having much of a chance, but you do?

Nuttycombe: Yeah. So here’s the thing with Georgia this year. I think it has some of the worst polling in the country. Also with those odds, you have that slight chance that the Democrats could flip the Georgia House. But that’s extremely correlated with the governor result.

So polling overall in Georgia is only about—and this is for all polling throughout the year, keyword there—maybe like what, a point and a half at most, or maybe just a point to the left of 2024 in their recall. And that’s very unlikely to happen this year. And the other thing is, that’s the average throughout the year.

If I recall correctly, the average poll in Georgia, for at least those that asked about the governor race, is in line with 2024, or maybe actually a little bit to the right of 2024. The most ridiculous poll of Georgia is Mr. Big Data Polls’ poll, which I want to say was like 3.4 points to the right of 2024.

Bacon: Let me stop you there. I guess what I’m getting at might be, we do have a bunch of polls showing Ossoff running five to eight points ahead of his opponent, and it would make sense if Bottoms is not an incumbent, so she’s less popular. That makes sense.

There’s also the perception that she’s being outspent by a lot. So that’s why it would make sense to me that she lost, even if the polling was pretty good in an environment like that, because there might be candidate-specific factors here. Is that wrong?

Nuttycombe: Yeah. Ossoff is going to win by double digits. And the question is by what margin he wins by double digits. And I don’t think there’s enough ticket splitting typically in Georgia for that. What was the difference in 2022?

Bacon: So Warnock is like at 51, and Abrams is like 47, I think. Something like that.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. I think there was maybe an eight-point difference in 2022, maybe eight and a half on the high end. So Jackson would need more ticket splitting than what Kemp got as an incumbent.

And I don’t really buy that, especially the first day of early voting in Georgia, which, I don’t know, it’s one day, right? But the electorate looks like it’s going to be, in VoteHub’s estimate, three points to the left of 2024, or three point whatever. I don’t remember if it would round to four or not.

But yeah, the thing in Georgia is that the recalls in the polling in August and September through current—which are the only polls that have had that one to two-point Jackson lead, right—are just too conservative compared to what the actual Georgia electorate is going to look like this year.

We have a poll in Georgia that was done in July that I think was, on the recall and everything, probably too liberal. I think we had it being nine points to the left. When you look at Echelon, you look at Fox, I think they were five or six points to the left in recall of 2024. That would track, I think, with that. But those polls were in the spring, and those were similar to ours in what Bottoms led by, albeit, of course, maybe one or two points less, but still within—

Bacon: So this data here is like Brian Kemp in 2022 was at 53 percent and Stacey Abrams was 46 percent, so a seven-point win for the Republicans in that race. And then for Senate, Warnock was at 51 and Herschel Walker was at 49, so a two-point win for the Democrats. So just as a context, there wasn’t a ton of ticket splitting, but there appeared to be some.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. But the thing is, if Ossoff is at nine right now in the average, in polling that is definitely shooting conservative, he’s going to win by somewhere between 10 and 15 points. Is there enough ticket splitting?

Bacon: I’ll believe that when I see it, but anyway, in Georgia. But I get the point. The polling is what it is.

OK, so let’s move to Texas, where you have only a 34 percent chance the Democrats will break the trifecta. Talk about that. Does that mean the governor’s race in your guys’ view is probably leans Abbott?

Nuttycombe: Yeah. This is another one where I think maybe we’re undershooting the Dem. I haven’t dug much into the Texas polling, but some of these polls are just—I think like Quantus, for example, but I haven’t dug much into Quantus, was definitely too conservative. The one that came out that had Paxton plus one.

No, here’s my thing, is that I don’t think a lot of people are looking at what these electorates looked like in 2018. I think this is the problem. A lot of people are looking at 2024 or 2022. We talk about demographics, we talk about partisanship and everything, and I think that’s going to be a problem in Texas.

So the only two polls that I think are actually in the ballpark in looking at what the Texas electorate is looking like this year was that YouGov something project, I think it was a university, that came out today, which had Hinojosa up like one, right? And the New York Times/Siena. Everything else is pretty conservative, and so Hinojosa has a very narrow lead in those.

So I don’t know. Right now, in our forecast, Abbott’s a little bit of a favorite. But I’ve seen those 30-some percent chances happen, like they did in 2016, right, with Silver’s forecast with Trump. I’ve seen that happen all the time, especially as someone who looks at 6,000 state legislative races every two years. But I would say I think Hinojosa wins right now.

Bacon: So I have not taken these possibilities that seriously. If Hinojosa and Bottoms won, I know they’re just governors, they’re just two of 50, but those would be wins that I think in a cultural, political sense—we’ve never had a Black woman governor.

Those would be big wins in a certain way, and I think surprise people if those both happen. Are you saying those are not necessarily going to happen, but realistic chances on election day?

Nuttycombe: Absolutely realistic chances. I think those are the most probable. I would be surprised if at least one of those two didn’t.

Bacon: I’d be surprised if one of them didn’t win. Wow, OK.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. Now obviously Bottoms is the more likely one, right? As the forecast has. So I think probably one of them wins at least. Which, I guess this is the equivalent, right? When you think about 2018, where, same races, right? Texas US Senate 2018, the Democrats came up short there, and they came up short in the governor race in Georgia.

But I guess you switch out US Senate this year for Texas with governor in Texas, in terms of what is looking like more of a toss-up race or something. Because Paxton looks like he’s going to lose by mid-single margins, or maybe he keeps it within five. I think there’s a good argument for that.

Bacon: So this is like 2018, but potentially bigger than 2018, is the overall picture here. And is that because Trump is more unpopular?

Nuttycombe: Yeah. Let’s think about 2018 here for a minute. Because I can’t wrap my head around anybody who’s at this point in the game—a couple months ago, sure, absolutely, right? But I would tell them why I think this year is going to be larger and worse for Republicans than 2018.

What did Republicans have in 2018? What did Trump have in 2018? They had a great economy, right? You would hear that all the time. What do they not have? They don’t have a great economy. The inflation report just came out, and inflation is up. Gas is up. Stock market not really growing as much as it was in Trump’s first term.

And also there’s no big—I don’t think it is vibes. When we think about 2018, remember how Kavanaugh, I think Kavanaugh really polarized the electorate. I think that whole Kavanaugh debacle helped Republicans in states like Indiana and Missouri. They’re already going to win North Dakota, sure. But they don’t really have anything right now. And yeah, Trump’s approval is what, 10 points worse at this point compared to 2018?

Bacon: Low 30s versus low 40s. Mid-30s to mid-40s, yeah.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. And then with independents, I think Trump’s approval is at minus 50 with independents, I saw, whereas it was like minus six in 2018. So I can’t really wrap my head around anybody who thinks that this will be a year that is anything less, in terms of generic ballot controlling for uncontested, like a D plus eight year.

I think that’s the conservative estimate. I think the scenario on the tail end would be something like plus 14 for the Dems. I don’t think that’s likely.

But personally, I’m in the boat that I think it’s going to be somewhere between 10 and 12. Virginia early vote would definitely imply something like 11 or 12, or maybe conservatively, if Virginia does just trend pretty leftward relative to the nation, probably 10. But the average is, what, almost rounding to nine. I think that kind of tracks if the undecideds, like they did in Virginia last year, just break in one direction.

Bacon: So last question. There’s been some conventional wisdom looking at state races a little bit, that when you get to the Senate races, the Dems aren’t doing great in New Hampshire or Minnesota, the Senate races themselves.

So this idea that maybe the blue wave is strong in red states and weaker in blue states. Is that what you’re seeing, or are you saying there’s a blue wave pretty much everywhere?

Nuttycombe: So New York, yes. New York, Oregon, yeah, absolutely right. Why? Because they hate their governors. I think this is the thing about governors. Also Rhode Island, right? I think there has not been a time in the 21st century where Americans have hated their governors more.

People can talk about Morning Consult, but Morning Consult, I’m sorry, is a garbage pollster when it comes to these approval ratings and everything. They always overshoot, and they’re always so rosy. I’m sorry, but who did they have? I think they only had Kotek’s disapproval at minus one. That dogged on, right?

There could be as many as half of governors across the nation who are underwater in approval. And some of these, yes, are blue state governors, and also probably some of them are, like, Abbott. And why is that? I don’t know, because usually people like their governors. Some of that is dependent on state.

So to your point on, oh, this is not happening in blue states, there’s some truth to that. But also Vermont, Phil Scott has pissed off a lot of people.

Bacon: Phil Scott’s a Republican, oddly, in Vermont, just for people to know.

Nuttycombe: He won by 50 points in 2020—

Bacon: Yes, he used to be very popular, yes.

Nuttycombe: And our poll has him up three. And so what Phil Scott did is, he did this education reform bill that he signed. There was a big red wave in Vermont in 2024, because people were pissed off with this Democratic super majority. So Democrats don’t have a super majority there, so Scott does have veto power.

But Scott put through this education reform bill that I think consolidates rural schools and whatnot. So rural schools are closing. A lot of the rurals are pissed off. I don’t know. I know I’ve got a green flannel on, but I don’t follow Vermont politics all that well.

But when UNH had Scott down—I still think Scott wins. We’re not going to do a follow-up poll. Hopefully someone will have a poll toward the end here. The undecideds in our poll do not look like they like Scott. That was the problem for him.

Some of these governors just have had their own missteps, like Scott. Although he’s a Republican in a blue state, right? Oregon is ungovernable, so they will always have an unpopular Democratic governor, in just the way that they have structured their state government, frankly.

Some of these governors I think have done it to themselves. So that begs the question, what does Josh Shapiro do right? Is it just that he’s at all these events where he’s cutting ribbons and whatnot? Because Josh Shapiro is going to win re-election by 20 to 25 points in Pennsylvania this year, which is crazy. So I don’t know.

So I still believe that there is some truth to all politics is local. I do think things are becoming more national, and of course you can see that extrapolated if you do correlations on how many seats Democrats gain on the state level with generic ballot environment. There’s absolutely truth to that.

But there is still truth to all politics is local. Phil Scott should not be in a competitive race this year. He’s put himself in a competitive race. Or that Pennsylvania State Senate district is only competitive because of that rural Republican primary.

And that’s what I like about state government, is just, the elections are far—and state government as a whole is far more interesting than Congress. They also get a lot more done.

Bacon: That’s a good place to end on. Chaz, tell people what State Navigate is and how they can follow you guys’ work.

Nuttycombe: Yeah. So State Navigate, we’re a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit organization. We do forecasting. We have district data for demographics, precinct-level maps. We only have some of this in some states, but we do have forecasts in every single state out now for state legislatures and governor races.

We also have campaign finance data in a lot of states, donor profiles, ideology of state legislators and how likely they were to vote for a bill or against a bill on the floor using DW-NOMINATE. We’ve got, man, I don’t know, aggregated news for states.

Bacon: Some of it’s free, some of it’s behind a paywall, right?

Nuttycombe: Yeah. Some is free, some is paywalled. So for example, we’ve got some interactives that are free, some that are paywalled. Like our Virginia early voting tracker is free. It is definitely our biggest traffic generator right now.

Bacon: Oh, that’s interesting.

Nuttycombe: So the best way to follow the early vote, which looks like it’s about three points bluer than the 2025 final result, which is crazy. So we’ve got a whole bunch of stuff, some free, some paywall. And so we are the website for state legislatures. We are the organization for state legislative data.

Bacon: OK. Chaz, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care. Good luck.

Nuttycombe: Yep. Thank you for having me.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

The Washington Post has reported that 57 companies donated $100,000 or more to the vanity project. Some of those companies are headed by individuals who have already donated to Trump in other ways—and have been rewarded for it in return, in the form of business contracts and dropped investigations.

NVIDIA Apple, the Adelson Foundation, and Dish Network co-founder Charlie Ergen each tied the largest ballroom donation: $25 million.

Google gave $22 million for the ballroom as part of a settlement in Trump’s January 6–related lawsuit against YouTube.

Other notable contributors include:

• Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation: $20.27 million (Isaac is the former CEO of Marvel)
• Lockheed Martin: $10 million
• Microsoft: $10 million
• Palantir: $10 million
• RHI LLC: $10 million
• Comcast: $7.5 million
• Amazon: $5 million
• BlackRock: $5 million
• Cisco Systems: $5 million
• Caterpillar: $5 million
• Coinbase: $5 million
• Meta: $5 million
• T-Mobile: $5 million
• Kelly Loeffler & Jeff Sprecher Fund: $5 million (Loeffler is the head of the Small Business Administration)
• ServiceNow: $5 million
• Altria Group: $5 million
• ExtremityCare: $5 million
• Baszucki Gift Fund: $5 million
• Paul Singer Fund: $5 million
• Jeff Yass DAF: $5 million
• Winklevoss twins: $5.1 million
• NextEra Energy: $4 million
• Booz Allen Hamilton: $2.5 million
• Continental Resources: $2.5 million
• HP: $2.5 million
• Micron: $2.5 million
• Parsons Corporation: $2.5 million
• RAI Services Company: $2.5 million
• Union Pacific Railroad: $2.5 million
• Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman Brandon Lutnick (son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick): $2.5 million
• Vantive US Healthcare LLC: $2.5 million
• Salesforce: $2 million
• Florida Crystals: $1 million
• Kraken: $1 million
• Vast Space: $1 million

At least $77 million for the ballroom was sent by anonymous donors.

Again, this isn’t the extent of these corporations’ ties to Trump, as many have donated in other ways, as well. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, for example, pledged $1 billion to Trump’s Genesis Mission AI project earlier this month and attended a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Google, too, gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and CEO Sergey Brin himself donated half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee last year. And this is just what we know about.

This is all extremely shady. These hugely influential business leaders donated to Trump’s ballroom to curry political favor and were initially able to move in secret, sending the funds to a White House account controlled by the most corrupt president of the modern era.

Inside Washington

Western Montana, home to one of the country’s most competitive House races, is witnessing a test: In a bare-knuckles political brawl, which one wins—economic populism or the culture war? Supporters of Democratic candidate Sam Forstag, a smoke jumper who looks the part of a working-class Montanan, are betting it’s the former. But as Forstag taps into Montanans’ economic frustrations, his Republican opponent’s personal attacks are getting more aggressive.

The race has drawn so much attention that President Donald Trump visited the state on Wednesday to campaign in Montana’s 1st congressional district with Forstag’s opponent, former conservative radio host Aaron Flint. “I’d be happy to take some time to sit down with him and share some stories about the pain this administration’s policies are causing people across this state,” Forstag said in a statement about Trump’s visit. “For better or worse, I look forward to passing bills for the president to sign into law once we win this race to help those Montanans. I’ll work with the president or whoever it takes to get that done.” Polling shows a tight race. Some polls show Flint up by one point, while others show Forstag up by three. The Cook Political Report in late September shifted the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” a move in Forstag’s favor.

Tuesday’s debate between the two candidates got heated. Forstag and Flint are similar in many ways—both are young white men, both were student body president at the University of Montana, and both emphasize aspects of their careers (Flint is a veteran). But while Forstag focused on economic issues, Flint seemed more eager to portray Forstag as a radical on issues of gender and sexual orientation. “Phony Forstag, unfortunately he pretends to be this poor, blue-collar, working-class guy,” Flint said at one point in the debate. “He was a high-paid LGBTQ lobbyist from Portland who lobbied for all the crazy stuff.” At another point, Flint used a line that other Republicans, like Maine’s Paul LePage, have deployed so far this cycle: “common sense versus crazy.”

Forstag was able to brush off Flint’s attacks, said state Representative Zooey Zephyr. “You know what they say: Don’t wrestle with pigs; you’ll wind up covered in mud,” she said about how Forstag handled Flint’s rhetoric. Zephyr, who is one of the state’s two transgender representatives, told The New Republic that anti-trans rhetoric isn’t the right strategy to win over Montanans. “In 2025, Montana was the only Republican-controlled state where half of Republicans joined us at times to vote down anti-trans legislation. We killed the majority of our anti-LGBTQ legislation. Only red state in the country to do that,” she said.

“He hauls an axe and a chainsaw in his real day job,” said state Senator Ellie Boldman about Forstag, who spends the fire season jumping out of planes to fight wildfires in remote places. Forstag also served as a union leader and a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union in the offseason. “His ability to keep the focus on everyday issues that really affect everyday Montanans and not some of the culture-war issues are what have been winning the day for Sam,” she added. And she, like Zephyr, thinks Montana’s voters aren’t going to buy Flint’s attempt to graft national identity politics onto this race. “In Montana, even Democrats have guns,” she said. “We voted for Donald Trump, and we also enshrined a woman’s right to choose in our constitution from ballot initiatives. We have a long history of rugged individualism.” Voters would rather hear a candidate address pocketbook issues than infringe on individual rights, she argued.

And those pocketbook issues—like the cost of housing and fuel—have played a major role in the race, as they have across the country this cycle. “The lack of affordable housing is [issue] number one, two, and three that comes up almost without fail,” when Forstag talks to voters, said Brandon DeMars, Forstag’s campaign manager.

During the debate, both candidates spoke about the need to make housing more affordable. Housing costs are a major crisis in the state, which has seen a boom in population in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic. New housing construction hasn’t caught up, and private equity buy-ups of existing housing units have made rent more expensive for everyone. Forstag argues that private equity firms shouldn’t be allowed to buy up mobile home parks, while Flint blamed the housing crisis on big government and inflation.

Forstag’s debate performance, Zephyr said, showed why he might be able to pull off a win this year. “What makes Sam an exceptional candidate is he is very clear in telling the story of how these politicians have picked our pockets, telling the story of how the rich have gotten richer,” she said, “while people like him, and the state employees, and the public lands employees have lost their jobs and lost their ability to afford homes.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

In case you’ve missed the significant political scandal that’s been playing out in Massachusetts in recent weeks: Regulators this week finally canceled the nursing home licenses for the RegalCare company—one of the largest nursing home operators in the state—following late September reporting from The Boston Globe’s storied “Spotlight” team, which alleged an appalling degree of neglect of the elderly residents. Owner Eli Mirlis had already had his license revoked in New Jersey in 2018, and he had been the subject of a whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Court for the District of Massachusetts in 2020. (The case that resulted from this complaint—over Medicare and Medicaid fraud—was settled mere days before the Globe report was published.)

Why all this didn’t result in a rapid investigation of the facilities is unclear. Patricia Jehlen and state Representative Thomas Stanley have sharply criticized Democratic Governor Maura Healey’s administration in recent weeks, particularly for having failed to implement a two-year-old law that requires the state to look at out-of-state complaints and other issues before approving new licenses. The Healey administration announced its intention to implement the new regulations shortly after the Globe report appeared and has defended Department of Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein, despite the Globe’s Kay Lazar and Neena Hagen finding “little evidence of meaningful vetting of nursing home operators in the past few years, including their performance within Massachusetts.” The state reportedly hasn’t denied or canceled a license in at least seven years.RegalCare’s Massachusetts nursing homes will apparently continue operating with enhanced oversight while the company appeals the decision. Demand for skilled and long-term nursing facilities is projected to rise dramatically in coming years, with some estimates suggesting a greater than 75 percent increase in residents by 2030. So getting oversight sorted is rather urgent.

Elsewhere:

• Don’t miss the Ohio Capital Journal’s piece about Cincinnati Public Schools’ “first-in-the-nation” program that offers a safe parking lot for families experiencing homelessness to sleep in their cars. Beneath the feel-good narrative lies a grim implicit indictment of the nation’s insufficient support for households facing precarity. The program, which was started in response to a noticeable uptick in unhoused students and families sleeping in cars, also helps get the families on a waiting list for a shelter spot and a hotel stay. However, it will cease operating for the season in November.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Public Citizen released a new analysis that found that the majority of super PACs active this cycle are funded by a single wealthy donor or very small group—the watchdog offers Elon Musk, George Soros, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Richard Uihlein as examples. “Super PACs have created a parallel political system in which a handful of ultra-wealthy people can pour unlimited money into elections and gain an outsized role in determining which voices can be heard,” said organization co-president Robert Weissman in a press release.On Thursday at 1 p.m., the Roosevelt Institute will host an online “book club” conversation with Paul Osterman about his new book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment. The Roosevelt Institute’s principal economist, Michael Madowitz, will talk with Osterman about his study of the erosion of “stability and benefits” for twenty-first-century workers.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Watch TNR’s Edith Olmsted unpack the speech in which Trump seemed to suggest it would be okay for Iran to nuke southern California.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

During World War II, a notable New York GOP congressman was credibly accused of having pro-Nazi sympathies. He was part of a trio of New Deal foes whom FDR liked to mock by repeating their names in a jocular way. Who was he? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The ex–U.S. ambassador to Greece (and Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-fiancée) was publicly asked to resign during White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first-ever media briefing Tuesday, following reports that President Donald Trump was preparing to give her the boot.

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia said to assembled media professionals in the White House briefing room. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.”

In the hours after Zacharia’s announcement, Guilfoyle was allegedly a mess, and even suggested that she attempt to stay on.

“Kimberly was spiraling, calling people and suggesting, ‘Maybe I don’t resign,’” an official familiar with the situation told PunchUp Wednesday. “I don’t think she was serious, but she was in her feelings last night. She was processing what had happened—but not very well.”

Guilfoyle is apparently too corrupt even for the Trump administration. She was unceremoniously asked to leave after a series of reports accusing her of threatening a host country official and offering MAGA donor Eric Deters access to the Trump administration in return for the payment of a $100,000 credit card bill. She was also caught boasting about her chummy relationship with two Greek tycoons who were bankrolling her international trips.

In the end, Guilfoyle posted her resignation to X. “I also want to address the recent allegations against me. These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity. I have dedicated my professional life to fighting for justice, standing up for what is right, and defending the values that make America exceptional. I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service,” she wrote. “I am proud of what we accomplished together, and I will always be a loyal supporter of President Trump and his mission to Make America Great Again.”

However, according to reports from the Daily Mail tabloid, Guilfoyle has been building a “burn book” full of incriminating Trump family secrets that she might use as leverage to get herself back in the president’s good graces.

The president claimed “genius” status at a Wednesday rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, for accomplishing the apparently gargantuan task.

“Five words, oh they mock me for this, oh, nobody up there could do any of these things,” Trump said, pointing ahead of him.

“They give me five words. They say, ‘Sir, we’re going to give you five words. We would like you to repeat those words, preferably in order.’ What they don’t say is, at the end of the test a half hour later, they do it again, so you don’t know the—” the president gently trailed off before barking: “Five words: Hat. Hair. Logo. White. Black,” insisting he “got them right.”

“A half hour goes by, they ask you 25–30 other questions—‘Sir, in the middle of the test we asked you about five words. Will you please repeat them again, ideally in order? You will get points if you get them all,’” Trump recalled, ruminating for a moment on how many “points” he acquired.

Trump said he repeated the words again, allegedly causing the testers to exclaim, “Holy shit.”

“Nobody can do that,” Trump insisted. “They say very few people can do that, but almost none can do them in order like that. But I can. You know why? Because I’m a freakin’ genius.”

At another point, Trump shared that he was asked to do some basic arithmetic as a part of the procedure. “I got it right. Nobody gets it right,” Trump insisted as his audience cheered him on.

Trump took his first publicly documented cognitive exam in 2018 to waylay concerns about his alarming mental state, but the simple tests have seemingly become a point of pride for the 80-year-old.

In the years since he first “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he said he received on the test, at times bragging that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. In years past, the test’s authors claim that none of the versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

But it doesn’t take much to impress crowds at a Trump rally these days. At a midterm campaign stop in Tennessee on Saturday, the president boasted to his supporters that he “could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.” Spoiler alert: They did.

President Donald Trump wants to renovate a local golf course on public land in his own image and tastes. To do so, he will need to clear an indeterminate number of trees from the landscape. A federal court asked the Justice Department—and, by extension, the executive branch—to provide notice before making any major changes to the course.

Trump administration officials agreed to that request and then ignored it. Bulldozers destroyed more than 400 trees at the golf course in recent days before Judge Ana Reyes, who oversees the case, intervened and issued an emergency temporary restraining order to block them. She concluded that “government officials raced to undertake the [tree removal plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign,” effectively forcing them to defy a federal judge’s wishes.

This chain of events does not technically amount to defiance of a federal court order. Reyes did not issue one until the damage had already been done, and there is no sign as of yet that the Trump administration is ignoring or sidestepping it. It nonetheless represents a disturbing trend in which executive branch officials treat lower federal courts, Congress, and the law itself as something to work around, avoid, and outright ignore rather than something to faithfully obey.

The East Potomac Golf Course sits on a riverside stretch of land in southwestern D.C. across from the Pentagon and just south of the Jefferson Memorial. Congress established the park in 1897 to be “forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.” It was converted into a golf course in 1910.

The 36-hole fairway has served as an affordable course for the capitol’s middle-class golfers, in sharp contrast to the tonied and exclusive golf clubs that ring D.C. in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. It also played a modest role in the desegregation of public spaces in D.C. when, in 1941, three Black golfers played on the course to jeers from white golfers and under the protection of federal park police.

The course’s history changed earlier this year when the Trump administration began publicly making plans to renovate it as part of Trump’s overhaul of the capital. Local golfers and a D.C. preservation group sued the Department of the Interior in federal court, alleging that the administration was violating federal environmental and rulemaking laws by moving forward without public input.

Initially, litigants asked for a temporary restraining order that would prevent the administration from making major changes to the golf course while litigation continued. But the Justice Department assured Judge Ana Reyes that this wasn’t necessary. “Instead of entering injunctive relief, the Court agreed to accept the Government’s repeated assurances that it would notify Plaintiffs and the Court of any major developments at the Course outside of ordinary maintenance,” she said in Tuesday’s opinion.

Things changed earlier this year when Trump personally claimed that he would be renovating the site. The president announced in July that his administration would be replacing “the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” with “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World” that would have “the ability to host Major Golf Tournaments” like the U.S. Open and the PGA Tour.

This drew some concern from the plaintiffs, but Reyes again demurred on setting hard limits on the administration’s actions. “If we get bulldozers on site and they start mowing down half the golf course, ... that’s irretrievable, which is why the one thing I have done is ask them not to do that before giving us all notice,” she said during a hearing later in July.

While other federal judges have abandoned giving the Trump administration any presumption of regularity, Reyes did not. “The only reason I’m not making an injunction order is because I don’t want to put people through contempt proceedings,” she told Justice Department lawyers during the hearing. “I want to trust that people are acting in good faith and have them acting in good faith until proven otherwise, and you have not proven otherwise to me in this litigation.”

Even after the National Park Service began removing dead and dying trees the following month, Reyes did not act. But she indicated to the lawyers that removing healthy, living trees would be altogether different—a red line of sorts, though she did not use those words. “The Court has given the Government ‘the benefit of the doubt’ that it would not ‘act first and ask forgiveness later,’” she wrote in Tuesday’s order, quoting from her earlier comment in litigation. “The Government then did precisely what Plaintiffs feared.”

There are an estimated 3,800 trees at the East Potomac Golf Course. Removing about 430 healthy trees may only amount to roughly 10 percent of the total foliage at the golf course, but that is no small amount. A person who lost 10 percent of the hair follicles on their head would almost certainly notice a difference.

The Trump administration, for its part, insists that it is merely implementing a “Cultural Landscape Report” that was drafted and published in 2019. Trump’s personal and public demands, in its telling, have almost nothing to do with the sudden defoliation of the East Potomac Golf Course. “It is a coincidence, the Government seems to suggest, that DOI cut down hundreds of trees at the Course weeks after the President asked DOI to cut down trees at the Course, and not, say, any other time in the last seven years,” Reyes observed.

Concerns about the golf course’s renovation are well founded. Trump’s changes to date in Washington, D.C., have not gone well. He turned the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall into a cultivation tank for green sludge. He demolished the East Wing of the White House, which belongs to the nation, to build an illegal ballroom and secret bunker for himself. He plans to build a 250-foot arch right in the middle of D.C. National Airport’s landing and takeoff paths.

As important as these outcomes are, it also matters how Trump and his underlings reached them. The administration’s apparent strategy on multiple fronts is to break the law and then make it substantively impossible for a court to address or remedy the damage. This has been most visible in immigration cases, where ICE has alternatively slow-walked or defied court orders in countless cases. It has also operated in ways that make litigation against it difficult, if not impossible.

ICE’s hostility to the legal system is unsurprising since it is a venue in which it often loses. By one analysis, the Trump administration has lost more than 10,000 separate cases involving its immigration-detention policies. One of those policies is to mandatorily detain immigrants without bond hearings in squalid conditions in the hopes that they can be coerced into self-deporting. More than 500 federal judges have ruled against this policy, and the Supreme Court will review it later this term. For untold numbers of immigrants, however, the damage is already done.

Now that hostility for the rule of law is bleeding into the rest of the federal government, with dire consequences for democratic governance. By recklessly ignoring federal law as written by Congress, the Trump administration has accumulated more power for itself by turning Trump’s executive orders and personal instructions into the ersatz United States Code. By treating federal judicial orders as optional, the White House and its subordinates have gravely damaged those courts’ authority.

Lawlessness also begets lawlessness. Imagine if the next Democratic president, frustrated by the Supreme Court’s past rulings on student loan debt relief, sent armed federal agents into debt servicers’ facilities and destroyed the records of who owes payments. Perhaps the next Democratic administration could flood the airwaves with illegal taxpayer-funded PSAs about Republicans’ links to Jeffrey Epstein on the eve of the 2030 midterms. A Democratic president might even be tempted to order the arrest Trump administration officials who orchestrated the illegal war against Iran, then drop them off at The Hague before anyone’s lawyer could write a motion to stop them.

The Trump administration may find all of these concerns to be tedious and pointless. They may simply regard federal public property as Trump’s personal property, as if he had acquired the United States itself in a leveraged buyout on election night in 2024. Trumpworld may tire of liberal judges and lawmakers standing in the way of Trump carrying out what they regard as the sovereign will of the American people. They would be mistaken to think this way. The American constitutional order grew over the course of centuries, watered by generations who hoped its canopy would cover future generations, as well. Trump’s allies can hack at its roots today, but they will miss its shade tomorrow.

Deputy Secretary of State Chirstopher Landau and State Department special envoy Paolo Zampolli have been trading insults and allegations for nearly a year, according to messages obtained by Politico. Zampolli, a former modeling agent who incidentally introduced Donald Trump to his wife Melania, has had some trouble “staying in his lane,” according to Landau.

“I am hereby ordering you—once again—to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy, including every one of the issues you mentioned in your recent emails,” Landau wrote to Zampolli in November 2025. “You have no authority to engage in ANY issues of foreign policy outside of cultural diplomacy, including all the issues you have named.”

Landau continued the email chain the following day, copying an additional 15 administration colleagues on the message. Landau wrote that Zampolli had “no intention of staying in the cultural diplomacy lane that you were assigned and accepted, and that you fully intend to continue undertaking unauthorized and possibly unlawful ventures in commercial and economic matters.”

In response, Zampolli spoke to Politico: “Definitely, he has a problem with me,” the special envoy said of Landau in an exchange reminiscent of a reality TV confessional. “It’s out of control what he’s doing, and I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States of America. The only person that can give me this job and can terminate me is the president of America.”

Since Zampolli introduced Trump to Melania at a party in the 1990s, he has remained on the coattails of the president’s political rise. Trump named Zampolli to the board of the embattled Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2020, and now, in Trump’s second administration, Zampolli is the U.S. special representative for global partnerships, a position whose primary objective is to “represent the United States at global cultural events and to form global cultural partnerships.”

A scroll through Zampolli’s Instagram will show that he has taken a liberal approach to his assignment, meeting with the energy minister of Romania, attending meetings for the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund, meeting the United Arab Emirates’ director of foreign direct investment, and engaging in discussions to send Argentine astronauts to space.

Zampolli has also accused Landau of leaking a story to The New York Times that he said “caused irreparable harm to the First Lady and to my family,” likely referring to reporting in March that he had asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain and deport his ex-girlfriend in an effort to win a custody battle over their son.

“Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email,” Landau replied in a message. “I have no idea what you are talking about and categorically deny being the source of anything.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Zampolli has been removed from his position at the State department, ABC’s Shannon Kate Kingston reports. “Paolo was notified today that his status as an envoy has been terminated and he is no longer a government employee,” a U.S. official said.

Another official familiar with the email exchanges called the back-and-forth “cartoonish and embarrassing.” It’s a fair review of the chaos in the backrooms, or in this case, the inboxes, of Trump’s State Department.

This story has been updated.

Inside Washington

Minnesota leaders are decrying the raid on Representative Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home as a blatant attack on their state ahead of the midterms. “The purpose is to animate their base, which is incredibly demoralized and deflated because we are in a war no one wanted to be in” said Minnesota state Senator Erin Quade about why HSI agents, who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raided Omar’s home just 22 days before Election Day. 

“Trump and his DOJ have a bizarre obsession with tearing down Minnesota, our leaders, and our communities,” Minnesota Senator Tina Smith said in a statement to The New Republic.

Several Minnesotans who spoke to The New Republic see the raid on Omar’s home as a continuation of the Trump administration’s anti-Somali racism and xenophobia, which has long been a part of the president’s playbook. The raid came four days after President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social and urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against the Somali community. 

“It’s not just xenophobic,” said Jay Young, the senior policy director of civil rights and civil liberties at the nonprofit watchdog Common Cause, about the rhetoric coming from the Trump administration. “It’s tantamount to almost a race war.”

In conversations with The New Republic on Tuesday, community leaders expressed concern about the electoral and political consequences of the raid, but some also spoke about their concern for Omar’s personal safety. “It was only months ago that a person attacked Ilhan during an event in Minneapolis,” said Minnesota state Representative Leigh Finke, who is the first openly transgender member of the state’s legislature. “These things are not abstract concepts in our lives. People want to kill us because of the things that are said by this administration.”

Republicans have attacked Somali Americans for political ends before. In the aftermath of a number of statewide fraud cases, some of which involved Somali American perpetrators, the Trump administration began repeatedly referring to “Somali fraud,” despite the fact that the main perpetrator of one of the most prominent fraud cases was a white woman. 

In Minnesota’s Senate race, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan is running against Republican Michele Tafoya, who has attacked Flanagan over her role in state leadership during the fraud scandals. The goal of Trump’s rhetoric and the raid on Omar, Young said, “is to chill all of his political enemies, to let them know that this administration is not above weaponizing all of the power at its disposal.”

Politicians, civil society groups, and everyday Minnesotans have rallied around Omar. On Monday night, Minneapolis residents and leaders held a rally in a city park to show support to the lawmaker, who has represented the city and some of its suburbs in the House since 2019.

Attacks on Omar are likely to backfire in Minnesota. Quade described something truly surprising to anyone who has been following politics lately: On Monday, she was knocking on doors in the suburban district that she represents and said that every voter she spoke to cited concerns about ICE and Trump as their top priorities for the election. That’s a marked shift from recent months, she said, when affordability concerns were top of mind. Suburban voters are exactly the demographic that Tafoya needs to clinch a victory in the state.

“It’s certainly stoking the same kind of unity feeling that people felt during Metro Surge more than it is anything else,” Quade said about the attacks on Omar and other Somali Americans. 

The best response to the attacks is to vote early, said Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh in a statement to The New Republic. “We endured collectively Metro Surge, and we continue to be the target for this administration. And it’s because that you know we are everything that they can’t fathom,” she said. “We’re an inclusive, loving state where we care about our neighbors, even if they don’t look like us, even if they don’t pray like us.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A new poll shows Democrat James Talarico still ahead of Ken Paxton—but not by much. In results published by ReconMR on Tuesday, Talarico appears to be up four percentage points in Texas’s Senate race, with a +/- 4.4-point margin of error; the polling outfit’s senior research analyst Lindsay Hendren notes in a press release that Talarico has lost some ground, specifically in the San Antonio area since ReconMR’s September poll. Gina Hinojosa’s numbers also appear to be slipping: In September, she led Republican Governor Greg Abbott by four points, while the recent poll shows her trailing him by one point.

The poll was conducted prior to new revelations about Paxton. Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the candidate attended a New Year’s Eve party in Dubai in 2024 “with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.” That Paxton has had extramarital affairs is not news at this point, but the “fugitives” in question had been indicted for health care fraud and had donated to Paxton’s campaign funds. In response to the Journal’s query, Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux said, “Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office.” Paxton voters do seem unfazed by a remarkably long list of imbroglios. In ReconMR’s press release, Hendren offered a succinct assessment of where things go from here: “The race for Senate will come down to three things: turnout, turnout, turnout.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Wednesday at 1 p.m., the Bipartisan Policy Center will host an online discussion about policies to reform the Food and Drug Administration—particularly adjustments to “processes that may safely deliver effective treatments to patients faster.” Speakers will include Zach Gaumer, Rohini Kosoglu, Andi Lipstein Fristedt, Ryan Long, Janet Woodcock, and Lauren Gardner.

The Center for Biological Diversity, CU Maurice River, Hackensack Riverkeeper, Delaware Riverkeeper, New Jersey Conservation Foundation, and Project Terrapin on Tuesday petitioned New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection “to require simple bycatch-reduction devices on blue crab pots statewide” to keep turtles from being caught in the traps and drowning. The groups are particularly worried about the state’s diamondback terrapins, a vulnerable species inhabiting brackish coastal marshes and estuaries. Current regulations only require these protective devices to be used in around 5 percent of the relevant habitat, the groups estimate. Diamondbacks have previously been something of a bipartisan cause in the state: In 2016, Republican Governor Chris Christie signed a Democratic bill sponsored by then-Assemblymembers Bob Andrzejczak, Bruce Land, Eric Houghtaling, and Reed Gusciora (now mayor of Trenton) to ban hunting of the turtles and require the state to monitor diamondback terrapin populations.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act

By Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris

THE GIST: Miller and Morris tell the story of how the U.S. got the landmark achievement of the Civil Rights Movement—and how decades of conservative political and legal activism tore it down.

PRAISE: “An American Problem is a must-read for scholars, practitioners, and anyone who cares about voting rights,” says University of California Berkeley professor Jake Grumbach.

CRUISING THE INDEX: The book’s second half, which traces the aftermath of the fateful 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, is particularly compelling (and extremely damning). The authors meticulously chronicle the return of discrimination in American voting.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Miller and Morris focus convincingly on “preclearance”—the idea that localities and states with a history of discrimination had to get federal permission before changing their voting laws—a requirement that was gutted by the 2013 Supreme Court decision. President Lyndon B. Johnson, urging Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, said: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” An American Problem is the story of how that particular American problem reared its ugly head again.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

 Who was the first woman to serve as White House press secretary?

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

“I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning. “That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose. They deserve to witness JUSTICE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s announcement last week that the military firing squad execution would be livestreamed set off a backlash from religious leaders and politicians from both parties. Even some of Trump’s staunchest supporters came out against the move.

Timothy P. Broglio, archbishop for the military services, said earlier this week that Catholic service members should not take part in the livestream execution, calling it “contrary to the teaching of the Church.”

“The US military generally enjoys a good reputation in the world. Is there really a value to throwing them in the same boat with terrorists by broadcasting the image of the execution of a man in a wheel chair to the whole world? Does this decision reflect the dignity of the human person?” Broglio said in a statement.

Republicans in Congress also voiced their disapproval. Representative Austin Scott said on X that “I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” while Senator Thom Tillis said the livestream would be “beyond disgusting.”

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America,” Tillis posted. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson, not one to clash with the president, said in an interview he was concerned “that it would create a video that would be a recruiting tool for future terrorists.”

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, opened fire at the Fort Hood military post in Texas in 2009, killing 13 soldiers and wounding 32 others. Trump supported livestreaming the execution only last week, but the backlash seems to have finally swayed him. About 80 percent of Americans oppose livestreaming the execution.

This story has been updated.