Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative October 2026 news and views
Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.
Oct. 31
Top Headlines
News Roundups
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying together at Mar-a-Lago, along with an artist's rendering of a birthday card that the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent Epstein in 2003 boasting of their shared secrets.
Oct. 31, 2026. Trump just lost his Epstein birthday letter lawsuit, and he lost it for good. A federal judge permanently threw out his multibillion-dollar suit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch, writing that it was “grasping at straws” and that his claims “lack merit.” His BBC lawsuit could be next.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Oct. 31, 2026. GOP is defending a majority of battlefield seats in run-up to Election Day. In total, Inside Elections has made a total of 64 race rating changes this week – 45 in the House, nine in the Senate and 10 for governor. All but one of those contests shift in a direction more favorable to Democrats.
Early Vote Turnout Is Huge, Need To Keep Working Hard!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 31, 2026. On this Halloween, let’s start the day by committing to be prepared, not scared. Here’s my morning early vote roundup.
Oct. 31, 2026. Trump basically admitted in Florida that he is old and tired, and it was his idea to cancel his remaining rallies, but he threw a fit and complained in public about having to go to Iowa and Kansas. More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
More On Epstein Files, Trump Teen Trafficking Coverups
Annie Farmer holds a photo of herself and her sister, Maria Farmer, when they were victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a press conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act outside the U.S. Capitol, Nov. 18, 2025. (Photos at right Francis Chung for Politico via AP Images). Inset right: Judge Aileen Cannon.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, News Analysis: Iran Braces for More War, No Matter the Outcome of the U.S. and Israeli Elections, Yeganeh Torbati, Oct. 31, 2026. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting to stay in power and President Trump facing a tough midterm, Iran’s leaders expect no major shift in policy.More News Roundups
Oct. 31, 2026. Here are the top headlines right now:Iran’s Supreme Leader orders a “geographically unrestricted” response to any attack and updates the military target bank; A U.S. official tells Axios that Trump may do “something bold” in Iran if Republicans lose badly…in other words, he may make a catastrophic decision in the war; The Pentagon quietly updates the death toll in the Iran war to 23; A federal judge orders DOJ to stop threatening election officials with prosecution; Democrats lead the generic ballot by 8 to 9 points and are spending big in Trump +20 districts; Trump keeps body-shaming a Reuters reporter and keeps posting about Obama; Raskin and Garcia demand Trump preserve his chats with Grok; The administration plans to deport Afghans and pays a Cameroonian unit accused of war crimes to take deportees; Carney says Canada will wait out Trump if needed, and North Korea brushes off sanctions.Oct. 31, 2026. Three days out, the president leading his party’s campaign sounds like a man who’s ready to be done. “I thought this was it. I thought I could relax,” Trump told a Florida crowd last night, calling his final push “28 days of this crap in a row.” When Republicans asked him to keep rallying, his response was, “Does it matter?” This came a day after he called a reporter “disgusting” for asking if he was tired.More Global News
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Edwards, Oct 30, 2026. President Donald Trump has the power to stop any criminal contempt case against Chicago federal prosecutors, the Justice Department warned a judge as it refused to cooperate with her investigation into possible criminal misconduct.More On U.S. Midterm Races
President Trump and his favored Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina, Darline Graham, at his left.
Oct. 31, 2026. Dr. Annie Andrews, below left, the Democratic South Carolina US Senate candidate, showed why the conservative state could turn blue for the first time since the 1990s, as voters may reject Darline Graham.Top Stories
New York Times, How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine, Christopher Flavelle, Oct. 31, 2026. The Trump administration’s attacks on universities, cuts to agencies and fight against “woke” have eroded the system that supports American scientific research. My colleagues and I wanted to understand what the lasting impact might be.
The warning, buried in an obscure government report this summer, was unflinching.
The Defense Department’s vaunted network of research laboratories — whose scientists helped develop satellite communication, radar technology, and even the computer mouse — was in trouble.
The labs lost a significant share of their staff last year, largely in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to thin the federal work force, the report found. Refilling critical positions was proving difficult due in part to President Trump’s demand that new hires be screened for their loyalty to his goals. The report, issued by the Pentagon, pointed to “potentially grave consequences for the future of national defense.”
The turmoil inside scientific research has extended beyond the Pentagon. The Energy Department, a key hub of nuclear and quantum research, has lost more than 1,000 scientists and technical staff. The National Science Foundation, for decades a primary backer of long-term, foundational research, has withheld more than $1 billion in funding. And at the National Institutes of Health, the biggest funder of medical research, officials delayed or canceled more than 2,000 grants to biomedical researchers focused on topics such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases.
Under Mr. Trump, the federal government is still spending roughly as much on research — about $200 billion this year — as the administrations that came before. Scientists across the country are still receiving grants; universities are still being funded. But beneath the surface, the system of federally funded science that helped make the United States a global superpower is under intense strain from Trump policies, jeopardizing the nation’s advantages in defense, medicine and technology, a New York Times examination has found.
The White House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and analysts and a review of documents and budgets.
The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.
One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.
A second is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands for ideologically driven policy shifts.
The third is a campaign by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further infusing politics into decisions around scientific research.
New York Times, Led by Trump, Republicans Close Midterms With Ugly Personal Attacks, Tim Balk and Sam Easter, Oct. 31, 2026. Facing backlash over inflation and anger with the president, Republicans have turned to an onslaught of baseless claims about Democratic candidates.
In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a vulnerable Republican, baselessly said his Democratic opponent “probably is grooming” children.
In Texas, Republicans have cast James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee, as a “freak” and insinuated he is gay, secretly a vegan, and obsessed with transgender children because he made statements supporting them in the past.
And in Michigan, Republicans have targeted the Democratic Senate nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, with Islamophobic attacks. Mr. Trump has described Dr. El-Sayed as a “vicious, violent jihadist.”
Facing a backlash over rising prices and working to overcome the president’s deep unpopularity, Republicans across the country have tarred their opponents with false, inflammatory and deeply personal attacks in the final stretch of the midterm election.
In many cases, they are following the lead of a president who has repeatedly rewritten the rules of acceptable discourse in American politics. Many of the attacks have drawn little pushback from within the party, but some Republicans say they are concerned by the trend.
“It’s awful,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and critic of Mr. Trump. Mr. Flake, who is backing candidates in both parties in the midterms, said Republicans had gone down a darker road in their messaging: “We’ve gotten progressively more crass and crude and vulgar. But this seems to be a new level.”
The strategy risks turning off some moderate voters who see the rhetoric as over-the-top or offensive, political observers said. But it could be effective at energizing the Republican base. Democrats, who have widely condemned the Republicans’ attacks, worry the lines will land with some voters.
Democrats themselves have at times used strikingly personal attacks, often accusing Republicans of corruption. And some Democrats have imitated the president’s crude approach: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, for example, made social-media posts this year suggesting that various conservatives were gay.
But in the midterms the Republican attacks stand out for their viciousness.
American political campaigns have long been awash in negative and dubious attacks by both parties — in debate lines, TV commercials and stump speeches — but this bitter, hard-fought cycle may set a new standard. Some political scientists said this election season had devolved into the most negative, dark campaign in modern American history.“I think it’s the worst,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University. She attributed the tone to candidates’ desire to package their message for social media, and to Republicans’ mirroring of Mr. Trump: “He’s opened a portal to the degradation of our electoral system.”
In Texas, Vice President JD Vance suggested at a rally that Mr. Talarico was gay, drawing gasps from the crowd. “A guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history,” Mr. Vance added, referring to Mr. Talarico’s past statements in support of transgender youth.
Mr. Talarico has a girlfriend. The attack was part of a broad effort by Republicans to portray Mr. Talarico as extreme. Mr. Trump has taken to referring to Mr. Talarico as “Talafreako.”
News Roundups
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying together at Mar-a-Lago, along with an artist's rendering of a birthday card that the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent Epstein in 2003 boasting of their shared secrets.
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump’s Epstein Lawsuit Tossed for Good, BBC Suit on the Brink, GOP Braces for “Bloodbath”—It’s Rough Today, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 31, 2026. Trump just lost his Epstein birthday letter lawsuit, and he lost it for good. A federal judge permanently threw out his multibillion-dollar suit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch, writing that it was “grasping at straws” and that his claims “lack merit.” His BBC lawsuit could be next.
Alaska’s own Republican government is shredding the election lawsuit he ordered. And three days out, his party is panicking, with Ted Cruz warning of a “bloodbath.” Plus, we spoke with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and you won’t want to miss it.
We’re going live all night on Election Night, Tuesday, Nov. 3, from 6 p.m. to midnight Eastern. Right after Election Day, we’re dropping major investigations designed to give Congress a roadmap to investigate Epstein, Trump’s ties to Russia, and more. Trump just learned in court that he can’t sue the press into silence. This reporting is going to ruffle some feathers, and the attacks on our work are only going to get louder.
That’s why I need you with me. Independent reporting like this only survives because readers like you support it, with no billionaire owner or corporate boss deciding what gets covered.
Here’s the news:
Judge Permanently Tosses Trump’s Epstein Birthday Letter Lawsuit Against the Wall Street Journal as His BBC Suit Faces Collapse
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying together at Mar-a-Lago, along with an artist's rendering of a birthday card that the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent Epstein in 2003 boasting of their shared secrets.
A federal judge has permanently thrown out Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its story on his birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed the suit with prejudice on Saturday, which means Trump can never refile it. Gayles ruled that Trump failed to plausibly allege that the Journal, Rupert Murdoch, and the other defendants acted with “actual malice,” the standard a public figure must meet to win a defamation case. It was Trump’s second try: the judge had already dismissed his original complaint, and he refused Trump’s request for discovery before amending it. Gayles wrote that the amended complaint was “grasping at straws” as it tried to “manufacture flaws” in the Journal’s reporting. The judge also said the court “agrees that President Trump’s defamation claims lack merit,” and gave the defendants 30 days to ask Trump to pay their legal fees under anti-SLAPP laws.
The judge rejected Trump’s core argument that his denial alone should have stopped the Journal from publishing. “In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,” Gayles wrote. “But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment.” If that were the law, he warned, “any time a public figure or his team denies an accusation, journalists would be immediately blocked from publishing negative or contradictory press.” He noted that the article prominently included Trump’s denial and called the Journal’s work “a thoughtful and detailed investigation.” Gayles called Trump’s focus on Ghislaine Maxwell “a red herring.” He also pointed out that the Journal’s later visual breakdown of the letter “contains several examples where President Trump’s actual signature and sketches are similar to those in the Letter.”
The ruling caps a saga that began when Trump personally asked Murdoch to stop the story. According to the order, Trump told Murdoch directly that he hadn’t signed or sent the letter, and when Murdoch said he would “handle it,” Trump thought the Journal wouldn’t print it. Two days later, in July 2025, the Journal published its story on a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name, framed by a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman and included in a 2003 album that Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump denied writing it, calling it “a fake thing,” and sued the next day. Weeks later, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Epstein’s estate and released the birthday book, which includes a page matching the Journal’s description of the letter. Gayles opened his ruling with a quote from the landmark free speech case New York Times v. Sullivan, warning that “fear breeds repression.”
Trump’s separate $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC could also be thrown out over missing documents. U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjolique Lett warned that the suit could be dismissed unless Trump hands 
over requested legal documents by Nov. 23, according to the Independent. The Florida court raised serious concerns about how Trump’s legal team collected paperwork, and ordered him to produce a full list of documents withheld under privilege by Nov. 5 or face sanctions that include dismissal. Lett also ordered Trump to sit for a deposition under oath by Dec. 11, after his lawyers canceled an earlier date so he could campaign for the midterms. The case centers on a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary about the Capitol riot, which the BBC admitted had an editing “error of judgment” that gave the impression Trump called for violent action. The BBC is pushing to have the suit thrown out, citing extreme prejudice from Trump’s discovery delays and arguing the Florida court has no jurisdiction over a program that never aired in the state.
Alaska’s GOP-Led Government Shreds Trump’s “Meritless” Election Lawsuit as DOJ Appeals Order Blocking Its Pressure Campaign
Alaska’s Republican-led state government is tearing into the election lawsuit Trump personally directed his Justice Department to file, calling it “meritless” and the plan to segregate ballots “disturbing and impossible.” The lawsuit seeks to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses and if votes for a second candidate with a similar name, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., could have changed the outcome. Trump has publicly acknowledged directing the suit, and Democracy Docket reports that he boasted about ordering it personally. In the state’s filing, Alaska’s lawyers called DOJ’s ballot proposal a “half-baked idea” and said the administration has no legal basis to intervene. “A political scandal does not support a federal claim without a viable federal law basis,” Alaska’s election board wrote. The state is asking the court to dismiss the case with prejudice so it can count the votes and certify the election without “unwarranted federal interference.”
The issues raised in the amended complaint are matters of state law administered by state officials. State law—as definitively interpreted by the Alaska Supreme Court—put Daniel J. on the ballot months ago. And state officials carefully designed the ballot to minimize voter confusion. The Court should immediately dismiss this lawsuit with prejudice and allow state officials to conduct the general election—including ballot counting and certification—free from unwarranted federal interference.
Alaska says DOJ is trying to use a voter registration law to take over a dispute that has nothing to do with voter registration. The Justice Department is relying on the National Voter Registration Act, but the state says the law covers voter registration, not voter fraud, and that DOJ can’t cite a single court case, or even a law review article, supporting its reading. Echoing the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alaska argued that DOJ can’t explain “how its federal-authority elephant could possibly fit into its NVRA mousehole.” The state also says the ballot plan makes no sense, because separating ballots can’t reveal why someone voted for a candidate, and matching voters to their ballots to question their intentions would violate the secret ballot. It warns that discarding votes or reassigning them differently from how voters marked them would be more likely to violate voters’ constitutional rights than to protect them. “If Congress had intended for a few words from the ‘Findings and Purposes’ section of a 1993 voter registration statute to give the federal executive imperial oversight over all matters of election integrity in the States, how are we all only learning about it now?” the League of Women Voters of Alaska and other pro-voting groups wrote in support of dismissal.
The emergency order Judge Trina Thompson issued Friday night is even broader than first reported, blocking both DOJ and DHS from pressuring election officials in every state. Under the order, neither agency can demand that election officials segregate ballots, purge voters from the rolls, or halt ballot processing, according to CNN. “Although Defendants claim that their actions are designed to halt unlawful voting by noncitizens, their actions are likely to have the effect of interfering with election administration and disenfranchising lawful voters,” Thompson wrote. She also barred threats of criminal prosecution and any other actions that “threaten, intimidate or coerce” officials into changing how they process ballots. Election workers following the law “do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs to a registered voter alleged by Defendants to be ineligible to vote,” she wrote, rejecting threats the administration has made for months. Thompson is also requiring the administration to tell her about any search warrant applications, grand jury subpoenas, or other demands for election materials tied to its lists of supposedly ineligible voters, and the order runs through Nov. 16.
The Justice Department appealed Thompson’s order on Saturday, as its effort to pressure election officials keeps falling apart in court. The case was brought by a coalition of labor unions and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens, which allege the administration’s conduct violates the Voting Rights Act and unconstitutionally intrudes on state control of elections. At the center of the fight is a DHS data-matching operation comparing state voter lists with federal records, and election officials say the resulting lists of suspected noncitizens are unreliable and include U.S. citizens. Despite the lawsuits, DOJ has sent letters to 29 states and Washington, D.C., threatening investigations and demanding they preserve 2024 records, even though federal law already requires them to keep those records for 22 months. In California, the 9th Circuit has already ruled that the administration has no right to intervene in how states verify citizenship. As CNN puts it, the administration’s aggressive efforts have “increasingly run aground in the courts.”
Republicans Panic in the Final Days: Paxton Cancels Stops, Cruz Warns of a “Bloodbath,” Salazar Fights for Her Life, and Graham’s Seat Slips
Ken Paxton, Trump’s hand-picked Texas Senate candidate, has canceled three stops on his final bus tour as his rallies draw small crowds. The cancellations on his “Come and Take It” tour include a rally in El Paso, a meet-and-greet in Texarkana, and an appearance in Tyler, according to the Daily Beast, as reported by the Mirror. The Daily Beast also reported that Paxton’s campaign was caught busing attendees into an Amarillo rally on Oct. 26, and the crowd was still small. Two days later, at a stop in Odessa, Paxton paused after a single audience member clapped and said, “Thank you. Thank you for that one clap.” At a Beaumont event, a speaker went viral begging the crowd not to leave while Paxton ran late, saying, “I don’t want the media to turn it into saying ‘people don’t like Ken Paxton.’” Paxton has two days left to make his case against Democrat James Talarico, and his final stop on Monday is still expected to go ahead.
Sen. Ted Cruz is warning that if the election were held today, Republicans would suffer a “bloodbath.” “Overall, I am deeply, deeply worried,” Cruz said in an interview, though the Mirror notes it’s unclear which outlet it was with. “What we’re seeing across the country is massive Democrat turnout,” he said, adding that Democrats are showing up “energized” because “they hate, hate, hate Donald Trump.” “If the election were over today, if just the early votes that have been cast so far were counted, Republicans would lose massively,” Cruz said. “It would not be close. We would lose both the House and Senate.” It’s a stunning admission from one of Trump’s closest allies, coming from a senator whose own state’s Senate race is in trouble.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, once the most popular Republican in Miami, is now fighting for her political life over Trump’s mass deportations. Salazar won more votes than Trump in her Miami district in 2024, but the administration’s crackdown has upended the city’s immigrant communities, and Miami registered the highest number of ICE arrests of any field office in 2025, according to POLITICO Magazine. Salazar says she privately called Trump political director James Blair and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to warn them that the party is at risk of losing Latino voters. In a viral September ad filmed in front of the White House, she told Trump that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far” and that Hispanics who backed him “feel betrayed today,” and Trump later shared Truth Social posts calling for her to be replaced. A new FIU poll found that 76% of Cuban respondents disapprove of the crackdown on Cuban nationals, though 68% still plan to vote Republican. “They’re not switching parties, and they’re just simply not going to show up,” FIU’s Eduardo Gamarra said of many Latino Republicans.
Republicans are panicking over South Carolina’s Senate race, which a New York Times/Siena poll shows tied between Sen. Darline Graham and Democrat Annie Andrews at 48%. “It’s a f***ing train wreck,” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace told MS NOW. “If MAGA doesn’t show up to vote on Tuesday, she loses.” The poll found just 80% of Republicans backing Graham, compared with 97% of Democrats backing Andrews, and the poll was taken after Trump had already rallied in the state twice. Graham was appointed to finish her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term at Trump’s urging, and Mace said voters “don’t believe in nepotism,” while Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost the primary to Graham, refused to say her name three times and asked, “What position does she have other than she likes Donald Trump?” South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998. As Norman put it when asked whether Graham is in trouble: “Do you think he’d be coming down here for the second time to South Carolina if she wasn’t?”
Even in deep-red Kansas, Trump loyalist Sen. Roger Marshall is fighting to save a Senate seat Republicans have held for more than a century, as recent polling shows him in a statistical dead heat with Democrat Adam Hamilton. When a Topeka business owner told Marshall that Trump’s tariffs were hurting his family’s company and his employees, the senator replied that “most of them are expanding and business is great,” and at another stop he said, “There are things more important than money to Kansans,” according to the New York Times. Marshall is also facing a Times investigation that found he sued more than 700 former patients over unpaid medical bills, with some arrested after failing to appear in court, which he calls a “hit job,” along with an ethics complaint alleging he used taxpayer funds for campaign staff and trips. Hamilton, a Methodist pastor who founded one of the country’s largest congregations, has been endorsed by two former Republican governors, while the Kansas Livestock Association’s PAC, which backed Marshall in 2020, declined to endorse him this time over tariffs. Trump rallied for Marshall in Wichita and openly tied a policy Kansas farmers care about to his survival: “With Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.” Trump carried Kansas by about 16 points in 2024, but privately, many Republicans believe Marshall assumed his seat was safe and waited too long to take the challenge seriously.
Other news:
The Ebola outbreak in Congo has now killed more than 5,000 people, making it the second deadliest in history. Congolese Health Ministry data released Saturday shows the disease has killed 5,026 of the 10,351 people infected, a fatality rate of nearly 50%, according to the Associated Press. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, which has no known vaccine or treatment, and only the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed 11,000 people, was deadlier. About 80% of new cases are coming from outside the chains of contacts health officials are tracking, according to the Africa CDC, and a third of deaths happen before victims are ever tested. Armed conflict in eastern Congo, attacks on health workers, and strikes over months of unpaid wages have all hampered the response. Kenya and Nigeria confirmed cases this month, making this the most geographically widespread Ebola outbreak in the continent’s history.
Evacuees from Russian-occupied Oleshky were reunited with their families in Ukraine on Saturday, under the most significant truce since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Evacuees wrapped in Ukrainian flags stepped off buses at the Ukrainian-Belarusian border after traveling through Russia and Belarus, as residents of nearby villages lined the highway with flags and torches. “It was very difficult. There were a lot of drones,” said 48-year-old Ivan Yevhenovych, who said landmines or drone strikes were killing residents every day and that staple food had run out since spring. The White House said First Lady Melania Trump helped broker the localized ceasefire in the Kherson region, and she posted that the convoy could safely evacuate more than 750 people. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said evacuees ranged in age from just over one to 94 and brought pets including dogs, cats, a parrot, and a raccoon. Even as the evacuation went on, Zelenskyy said Russian drone attacks overnight left 280,000 households in the Dnipro and Kyiv regions without power.
Virginia and Washington, D.C., have sued to stop Trump’s 250-foot memorial arch as the administration prepares to begin construction as soon as next week. The arch would rise on a patch of grass by the bridge connecting the city to Arlington National Cemetery, making it 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Attorneys general Brian Schwalb of D.C. and Jay Jones of Virginia argue the three-year construction project would “snarl traffic,” pollute the Potomac, and “interfere with emergency services.” It’s now the third lawsuit against the project, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is already weighing whether to halt it while an earlier suit by three Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian plays out. The administration says it will seek final approval at Thursday’s Capital National Planning Commission meeting and could break ground that same day. Its 106-page plan calls for a giant winged bronze Lady Liberty with an eternal flame, an observation deck, offices, and a “fire command center.”
The Trump administration has propped up nearly half of America’s coal plants with taxpayer money and “free passes to pollute,” according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund. The analysis found that 90 of the 184 grid-connected coal plants received help through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates.” The administration handed $950 million in taxpayer dollars to 24 plants and gave 70 plants exemptions from Clean Air Act limits on toxic pollution, the Guardian reports. One exempted plant, WA Parish outside Houston, was found in a 2018 Rice University study to cause as many as 177 premature deaths a year. “It’s like Americans are getting hit twice,” said EDF’s Surbhi Sarang, pointing to both higher electricity costs and more pollution. The White House says Trump has “saved more than 100 coal plants” and praised “beautiful, clean coal.”
Riot police clashed with masked protesters across France and Germany on Saturday as a third wave of cost-of-living protests swept Europe. About 320,000 people marched across France, down from an estimated 410,000 last weekend, including 70,000 in Paris, many in Halloween costumes, according to the interior ministry. In Paris, “a hardcore of several hundred rioters” pried up paving stones and hurled projectiles including a Molotov cocktail at police, who responded with tear gas and baton charges. “We’re being run by a group of incompetents who juggle billions while families are struggling with a few cents,” one Paris protester said. In Germany, police fired water cannons in Cologne and protesters set barricades ablaze in Hamburg after youth-led marches organized by a group called “Gen Z regelt!” Students in France have vowed new school blockades this week ahead of a major union demonstration on Nov. 5.
British defense officials privately said police should “absolutely” not have handed the case of a U.S. fighter pilot who strangled a British woman over to the American military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Cambridgeshire police let U.S. military police take over the investigation of Capt. Jacob Wulfson, who was accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat in December 2023 while he was off duty. Under a long-standing U.S.-U.K. agreement, British police have the primary right to investigate such crimes, and Ministry of Defence officials called that agreement “pretty unambiguous.” Instead, Wulfson was tried at a court-martial on a U.S. airbase by an all-male jury of his fellow officers, where Steele faced what the Guardian describes as invasive and aggressive questioning. He was convicted of strangling an intimate partner but acquitted of sexual assault, and he served six months in a military jail. The U.K. government has now launched a high-level inquiry into why police keep handing serious cases involving off-duty American personnel to the U.S. military.
The task force searching for Nancy Guthrie, the mother of “TODAY” co-host Savannah Guthrie, traveled to Florida to meet with DNA scientists as the case nears nine months. The 84-year-old vanished from her Tucson, Arizona, home in February, in what federal authorities have described as a kidnapping-for-ransom case. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said the task force met with lab scientists “to see what more could be done to advance the case,” and that “a number of ideas were discussed.” Updates have been rare, and in July officials said hair found during the investigation wasn’t linked to any potential suspects. “There is a hole inside us that can never be filled,” Savannah Guthrie wrote in August, vowing to find out what happened “so that we can give her the dignity of a proper goodbye.” Authorities say “no tip is too small” and ask anyone with information to call 88-CRIME or 1-800-CALL-FBI.
Newly released police records show multiple other women came forward with allegations against Packers running back Josh Jacobs after his May arrest. Jacobs pleaded no contest in September to misdemeanor battery and criminal damage to property after a woman said he threw her to the ground, and the new records add that she said he pinned her on a bed and covered her mouth and nose so she felt she couldn’t breathe. One woman told police that in 2022, Jacobs slapped her, threw her phone into a pool, pinned her down, and said, “I should kill you right now.” Another said he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, and that she didn’t report it because she wasn’t a U.S. citizen at the time and he told her she could be deported. Jacobs’s lawyers called the allegations “uncorroborated, old, and previously unreported,” noting that prosecutors had them for months and still pursued only two misdemeanors. The NFL said it will review the allegations as part of its ongoing investigation.
A federal judge ruled that McDonald’s must face a lawsuit claiming the McRib misleads customers into thinking it contains actual rib meat. The proposed class action accuses McDonald’s of shaping the patties with ridges to look like pork ribs while actually using lower-grade pork products, which the plaintiffs claim include shoulder, heart, tripe, or stomach. U.S. District Judge April Perry in Chicago dismissed some claims but rejected the company’s argument that no reasonable consumer could expect a McRib to contain rib meat. “Plaintiffs’ proffered understanding of ‘McRib’ is not unreasonable or fanciful,” Perry wrote, adding that customers need not do research before buying a $7 fast-food sandwich. McDonald’s says it doesn’t use hearts, tripe, or stomach in the McRib and called the lawsuit “meritless.” The chain has sold the McRib on and off since 1981.
Mexico is coming alive for its annual Day of the Dead celebrations, though overtourism is creating new tensions in some places. Streets, markets, and homes are filled with orange marigolds, which are believed to light the way for the souls of the dead returning to reunite with their families on Nov. 1 and 2. Families build altars with food, mezcal, and photos of loved ones, and gather at cemeteries across the country on the night of Nov. 1. Mexico City even set a Guinness World Record this week for the world’s largest “Catrina,” the elegant skeleton figure that has become a symbol of the holiday. But on the island of Janitzio in Michoacán, authorities closed the cemetery to tourists for the first time after crowds caused tombs, crosses, and part of a wall to collapse. In Mexico City, many locals remain skeptical of the city’s big catrina parade, which was invented for the 2015 James Bond film “Spectre.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
CQ / Roll Call, Analysis and Opinion:Final rating changes: 63 races move toward Democrats, 1 toward Republicans, Nathan L. Gonzales, Oct. 31, 2026. GOP is defending a majority of battlefield seats in run-up to Election Day.
In the closing days of the midterm campaign, the fight for the House and Senate is taking place on traditionally Republican turf, including states and districts that would have been unthinkable Democratic targets at the beginning of the cycle.
In total, Inside Elections has made a total of 64 race rating changes this week – 45 in the House, nine in the Senate and 10 for governor. All but one of those contests shift in a direction more favorable to Democrats.
While President Donald Trump’s negative job approval rating is mostly to blame for Republican woes around the country, the rating changes don’t all fit a single mold. Some of the shifts are in swing districts, where it’s clearer that the Democratic nominee has at least a narrow advantage. But GOP candidates are struggling to pull away from their Democratic opponents in red districts and states as well.
Now, there’s a chance that the polls are underestimating Republican support or that GOP-leaning undecided voters will turn out and reluctantly support GOP candidates. But as I wrote two months ago, 2026 feels similar to 2006, when an unpopular Republican president and war in the Middle East created the conditions for a Democratic wave election. The final results could be remarkably the same. Twenty years ago, Democrats flipped both chambers, gaining six Senate seats and 30 House seats.
House battleground grows
Democrats appear well on their way to winning the House majority. While they only need a net gain of three seats, Inside Elections’ latest projection is that the party will gain between 20 and 30 seats.
That’s the most bullish projection for Democrats at any point this cycle and a byproduct of the president’s standing and a shifting House battleground. In March 2025, when Inside Elections debuted its House ratings for the cycle, there were 64 races rated as competitive, including 30 Republican-held seats and 34 Democratic seats. Now the battleground has expanded and shifted into GOP territory, with 82 competitive races in all – 55 seats held by Republicans and 27 by Democrats.
In the latest batch of rating changes, 10 GOP-held districts have been added to the House battleground, with the races moving from Solid Republican to Likely Republican. They include Colorado’s 4th District (held by Rep. Lauren Boebert), Kansas’ 2nd (Derek Schmidt), New Jersey’s 2nd (Jeff Van Drew), North Carolina’s 3rd (Greg Murphy), North Carolina’s 9th (Richard Hudson, also the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman), North Carolina’s 13th (Brad Knott), Oklahoma’s 5th (Stephanie Bice), Washington’s 5th (Michael Baumgartner) and Tennessee’s open 9th. The race for Ohio’s 10th District, held by Rep. Michael R. Turner, jumped from Solid Republican all the way to Lean Republican.
Three Democratic-held districts moved off the battleground, going from Likely Democratic to Solid Democratic: California’s 45th (Derek Tran), Virginia’s 7th (Eugene Vindman) and New Hampshire’s 2nd (Maggie Goodlander). In different political circumstances, including if there had been an unpopular Democratic president in the White House, all three districts would have been hosting competitive races.
At the core of the battleground, a dozen races moved out of Toss-up status and are now rated Tilt Democratic: Arizona’s 6th District (held by Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani), Colorado’s 8th (Republican Gabe Evans), Florida’s 14th (Democrat Kathy Castor), Florida’s 25th (Democrat Jared Moskowitz), North Carolina’s 1st (Democrat Don Davis), Ohio’s 7th (Republican Max Miller), Ohio’s 9th (Democrat Marcy Kaptur), Pennsylvania’s 10th (Republican Scott Perry), Texas’ 15th (Republican Monica De La Cruz), Virginia’s 2nd (Republican Jen Kiggans) and Wisconsin’s 3rd (Republican Derrick Van Orden) and North Carolina’s open 11th District.
And five House races shifted to Toss-up from Tilt Republican: Colorado’s 5th District (Republican Jeff Crank), Michigan’s 4th (Republican Bill Huizenga), Florida’s open 22nd, Kentucky’s open 6th and Montana’s open 1st.
While Republicans mostly drew the new congressional maps, Democratic prospects continue to improve in a handful of races in Ohio, Texas and North Carolina.
While both statewide races for governor and Senate in Ohio shifted from Toss-up to Tilt Democratic, a batch of Buckeye State House races moved toward Democrats as well: The races for Kaptur’s, Miller’s and Turner seats; the 1st District (Democrat Greg Landsman) moved from Tilt Democratic to Lean Democratic; and 15th District (held by Republican Mike Carey) moved from Likely Republican to Lean Republican.
In Texas, at least three of the seats Republicans were counting on winning through redistricting are not looking easy for them. The race for the open 9th District shifts from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, the 28th (Democrat Henry Cuellar) moves from Tilt Democratic to Lean Democratic, and the open 35th goes from Lean Republican to Toss-up.
And North Carolina is developing into a migraine for the GOP as well. Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper is running a strong Senate campaign, and GOP chances in certain House seats are diminishing. In addition to the newly added battleground races, the contests for the 1st and 11th districts are no longer Toss-ups and are now rated Tilt Democratic. CQ Roll Call’s Daniela Altimari was recently on the ground in the 3rd District. Some Senate surprises
The Senate landscape has changed as well, with the latest rating changes all favoring Democrats. The party needs to flip four seats for a Senate majority, and Inside Elections now projects Democrats to gain between four and six seats.
Two races moved out of Toss-up to Tilt Democratic: Ohio and Texas. Even though Texas Democrats haven’t won statewide in more than 30 years, state Rep. James Talarico has a serious chance to break that losing streak. Polls have shown him narrowly leading GOP nominee Ken Paxton for five months, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in spending against him. Paxton, the state attorney general who defeated GOP Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, could still pull this off, but Talarico has the edge.
Ohio is another extremely expensive race, and Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown is benefiting from a dramatically different political environment compared with two years ago when he lost reelection. Polling shows him with a narrow edge over appointed GOP Sen. Jon Husted.
Senate Republicans are also at risk of losing the Iowa and Kansas seats, even though Trump won both states by double digits in 2024. The races could end up reverting to the states’ Republican roots, but for now, Democratic nominees Josh Turek in Iowa and Adam Hamilton in Kansas remain in the hunt. Both races shift from Tilt Republican to Toss-up.
It’s a somewhat similar story in Nebraska (Pete Ricketts) and South Carolina (Darline Graham), two typically Republican states that appear ripe for a Democratic takeover. Both of these races shift from Lean Republican to Tilt Republican. And there’s even enough data and party spending to warrant moving the races in Louisiana (Bill Cassidy’s open seat) and Mississippi (Cindy Hyde-Smith) out of Solid Republican to Likely Republican.
Overall, the latest changes are a continuation of a remarkable shift in the Senate battleground into GOP territory. In January 2025, Inside Elections rated just five Senate races as competitive: three seats held by Democrats (Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire) and two by Republicans (Maine and North Carolina). Now there are a whopping 16 states on the Senate battleground, divided between 12 Republican-held seats and four by Democrats. Governor’s races are important too
The four gubernatorial open races previously rated Toss-ups – Alaska, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin – have now shifted to Tilt Democratic.
In Nevada, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has had a consistent advantage over Democratic state Attorney General Aaron Ford, but the national environment could bring him down. That race shifts from Tilt Republican to Toss-up.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s seeking a record fourth term, continues to be in a tight race against Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, proving that Republicans’ problems in the Lone Star State go beyond Paxton’s baggage. That contest moves from Lean Republican to Tilt Republican.
And GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn appears to be in a surprisingly closer-than-expected race for governor in Tennessee, where a conservative independent candidate is drawing GOP support. Her race moves from Solid Republican to Likely Republican.
Oregon offers a glimmer of hope in what could otherwise be a rough night for Republicans. GOP state Sen. Christine Drazan narrowly lost the gubernatorial election four years ago, but she’s within striking distance in her rematch against unpopular Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek. Oregonians’ frustrations appear centered on the decades of Democratic control at the state level rather than Republican control at the federal level. The race shifts from Lean Democratic to Tilt Democratic.
Here’s the full list of the latest rating changes by Inside Elections:House races moving toward Democrats
Senate races moving toward Democrats
Gubernatorial races moving toward Democrats
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: 3 Days To Go - Trump/DOJ Keep Getting Thwarted, Olivia Rodrigo Hearts Amy Acton, Early Vote Turnout Is Huge, Need To Keep Working Hard!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 31, 2026. On this Halloween let’s start the day by committing to be prepared, not scared. Here’s my morning early vote roundup:
Lots in here but note the overall turnout -- people are voting in very large numbers right now all across the country, and I promise you this intensity is not being driven by Trump’s repeated admiration for Jon Husted’s ass.
To go deeper into the early vote and this incredible surge we are seeing among young, Black, and Hispanic voters we have three great new discussions for you:
Tom Bonier came by yesterday to share his insights into what has become an encouraging early vote across the country
Maria Cardona, Leon Krauze, and Johnny Garcia (TX-35) came by to for a deep dive on the huge Hispanic/Latino voter surge we are seeing everywhere
Harvard’s John Della Volpe dropped by to brief us on new Institute of Politics youth poll that showed Dems with a jawdropping 63%-26% with 18-29 year olds heading into Election Day.
Lots of data and insights in these three new discussions, great stuff for this final weekend of the 2026 Election!Subscribed
Another great way to dive into the battleground this weekend is by watching our recent interviews with state party leaders who are the helm of all of our GOVT operations in these closing days:
Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Dem Chair, President of the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC), DNC
Here’s out latest poll roundup. There’s nothing new but there’s lots of blue!
The video at the top of our post today is of pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo leaving stage last night in Columbus, Ohio and delivering flowers to Dr Amy Acton who was in the audience at the concert. Try not to cry watching it, and note Rodrigo also wore an Acton t-shirt on stage. What an inspiring boost in the home stretch, particularly what Dr. Acton has had to endure these past few weeks…..Screenshot 2026-10-30 at 1.53.09 PM.png
As his powers ebb and he grows more tyrannical and impulsive opposition of all kinds are likely to grow. Trump suffered consequential losses in court yesterday:
This morning the governments of DC and Virginia joined together to sue to block his ridiculous arch. In his equally ridiculous effort to turn a vital public park into a luxury golf course for him and his friends to play a judge has not only blocked the construction but she also ordered an inquiry into whether DOJ lawyers lied to the court. More like this please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally, I want to strongly recommend reading this new, powerful article by global security analyst Molly McKew, An Alaskan election lawsuit, an illicit Arctic gas project, and an American president caught in Moscow’s gravity well. It is long, but worth every word. For it helps explain why Trump has become so obsessed with the Alaska election in recent days.
Now, my friends, it is that time, one more time! Time to…..Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Blow Out The Midterms, And Prevent Their Neverending Fuckery From Winning The Day
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Throws A Fit And May Have Cost Republicans Senate Seats In Kansas And Iowa, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 31, 2026. Trump basically admitted in Florida that he is old and tired, and it was his idea to cancel his remaining rallies, but he threw a fit and complained in public about having to go to Iowa and Kansas.
Donald Trump canceled his final two rallies, which were meant to help Republicans hold endangered US Senate seats in Kansas and Iowa. The cancellations came at the same time that it was reported that the president had been complaining about his travel schedule in the month of October.
The White House has sold Trump as this tireless ball of energy who never stops working. The reality is that Trump barely works 3-4 days a week and spends nearly every weekend or long weekend at one of his private clubs at the expense of taxpayers.
Trump is also eighty years old and has developed some health issues.
Until the midterm election campaign, Trump’s rallies had virtually vanished during his second administration. Trump would reportedly complain about traveling to help any Republican in an election because he isn’t on the ballot, so he doesn’t care.
Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t care about the results of the midterm election, because he will still be president, even if Republicans get swept out of power elsewhere.
It all finally broke loose as Trump held what was supposed to be his final rally on his way to Florida for a weekend at his private club, and the president’s little fit may have cost Republicans more Senate seats in the Midwest.
Just in case there was any doubt that Trump did not want to do the rallies in Kansas and Iowa, the president told his audience in Florida:
“I thought this was going to be my last one. I thought this was it. I thought I could relax. 28 days in a row of this crap is lot. It’s a lot. My voice is about operating at about 49.2%. They called me in Iowa, and they called me in Kansas, and they said, ‘Sir, would it be possible to do a little rally of about 50,000 people each?’ And I said, ‘Does it matter?’ They said, ‘We just want to make sure that we win.’”
Trump calls his rallies crap.
Could he have done anything more besides telling Republican voters not to vote?
The real story circulating out of the White House is that Trump or someone in the administration did not like the negative press that came with the rally cancellations. They thought it made it look like Trump was quitting, which he was, so the rallies were hurriedly put back on the schedule.
If Trump thinks that his rallies are crap, then why would voters pay attention to a single word that he has to say?
The president also disrespected two Midwestern states that are already enraged with him over tariffs, the Iran war, gas prices, and diesel prices.
It is as if Trump has been doing everything that he can think of to sabotage the midterm election for his party.
Trump doesn’t want to go to Iowa and Kansas. Voters in Iowa and Kansas don’t seem to want him there. The only people who should be happy about this are Democrats, because Trump may have flipped two Senate seats blue.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
New York Times, Alina Habba’s Husband Ignited a White House Drama. Now His Background Is Under Scrutiny, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Tyler Pager and Declan Walsh, Oct. 31, 2026. Turhan Mildon, who married Alina Habba this summer, presents himself as a 29-year-old billionaire with ties to global leaders. His story has inconsistencies.
President Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba Mildon stormed into the White House this month and set off an explosive, deeply personal battle by accusing another Trump ally of skimming money from a philanthropic donation.
The donation, she claimed, had been made by her husband, Turhan Mildon, a Turkish businessman she had met and married this year. But now it is Mr. Mildon who is coming under scrutiny in the United States and abroad.
After hearing out Mrs. Mildon’s account several weeks ago, Mr. Trump directed his aides to investigate her accusations against Richard Grenell, who had served as the president’s special envoy to Venezuela and president of the Kennedy Center. The result has been a soap opera-like showdown that has exposed both the intensity of behind-the-scenes feuding among Trump confidants as well as their efforts to profit from their affiliation with him.
White House officials concluded that a key element of Mr. Mildon’s story, as relayed to Mr. Trump by Mrs. Mildon, did not add up.
In particular, they said they found that the money in question, $17.6 million, came not from Mr. Mildon but instead from a government account in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mr. Mildon has built ties to leading politicians and won business contracts.ImageAlina Habba in the Oval Office last year. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
That finding in turn cast doubt on Mrs. Mildon’s accusation that Mr. Grenell had diverted millions of dollars of Mr. Mildon’s money meant for the Kennedy Center, according to people briefed on the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. The payment seems to have gone to a Texas company with ties to Mr. Grenell for what U.S. officials say appears to be a software contract for Congo.
Mr. Mildon has declined to comment on any aspect of the White House investigation. Mr. Grenell’s role in the transaction remains unclear. He has denied the accusations and had no further comment.
Why Mrs. Mildon made such a provocative accusation remains unclear. But the ensuing scrutiny of the couple is now exposing other inconsistencies in how Mr. Mildon, a self-described billionaire who has aggressively pursued business deals in Africa and Venezuela, has portrayed his background and wealth.
More On Epstein Files, Trump Teen Trafficking Coverups
Annie Farmer holds a photo of herself and her sister, Maria Farmer, when they were victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a press conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act outside the U.S. Capitol, Nov. 18, 2025. (Photos at right Francis Chung for Politico via AP Images). Inset right: Judge Aileen Cannon.
Law & Crime, Judge Cannon quietly found 'good cause' to take Epstein victim's lawsuit off her plate, and the DOJ isn't thrilled, Matt Naham, Oct. 29, 2026. A federal lawsuit filed by dozens of Jeffrey Epstein victims in Florida, where Attorney General Todd Blanche is fighting a subpoena to testify, may be consolidated for discovery purposes with another high-profile civil negligence case — thanks to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
Maria Farmer and her younger sister, Annie Farmer, are two of the earliest known and most widely recognized victims of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's sex-trafficking crimes, with Annie playing a prominent role in testifying at Maxwell's trial.
In May 2025, Maria Farmer filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., alleging that she reported Epstein and Maxwell to the FBI in 1996 — and yet, "the FBI, in violation of its mandatory obligations under regulations and DOJ policies, chose to do absolutely nothing," according to the lawsuit.Sign up for the Law&Crime Daily Newsletter for more breaking news and updates
But on Sept. 25, Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ruled that the case didn't belong in Washington and should be transferred to the Southern District of Florida — because it was "substantially the same as another case" that was transferred there: Jane Doe 1 et al. v. United States of America.
Five days later, the Farmer docket shows, the case was assigned to Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee. And one day after that, Cannon found "good cause" to transfer the matter to U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz, "subject to the consent" of the Joe Biden-appointed jurist.
Leibowitz accepted the related assignment the same day. A week after that, he ordered Farmer, the Doe plaintiffs and the DOJ to explain why the two lawsuits "should or should not be consolidated."
That has led to a situation in which Epstein victims Laura Newman, Sandra Ward and 32 Jane Does are hailing Cannon's reasoning as correct and the DOJ is opposing potential consolidation as "not appropriate."
"Upon a sua sponte review of the record, Judge Cannon determined that the present action and the Farmer action were 'of the same subject matter and arising out of the same circumstances' such that a transfer was warranted by good cause," the Doe plaintiffs said.
"As such, in response to the Court's inquiry to show cause why this action should or should not be joined with Farmer v. USA, all plaintiffs agree that these actions should be consolidated exclusively for discovery and pretrial issues," the filing added.
Farmer likewise supported consolidating the cases but "only" for the "limited purpose of procedural issues, discovery and other pretrial purposes."
To hear the DOJ tell it, "consolidation is not appropriate under the Federal Rules as the two cases, though arguably arising from similar circumstances, do not share sufficient factual or legal issues to justify consolidation."
"Further, the cases involve distinct legal theories, and are in materially different procedural postures, such that consolidation would prejudice both Parties and impede the fair and efficient resolution of both matters," the government argued.
The DOJ at the start of the week filed a motion to quash a subpoena for Blanche's testimony, claiming that forcing the AG to sit for a deposition in the Doe case would "threaten the separation of powers, chill agency decision making, discourage public service, and create potential for abuse or harassment."
A motion hearing on that issue has been set for 2 p.m. on Nov. 4, according to a Wednesday order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Ryon McCabe.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, News Analysis: Iran Braces for More War, No Matter the Outcome of the U.S. and Israeli Elections, Yeganeh Torbati, Oct. 31, 2026. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting to stay in power and President Trump facing a tough midterm, Iran’s leaders expect no major shift in policy.
Little is clear about the power dynamics that will govern Israel and the United States in the coming months after pivotal elections in both countries. But Iran’s leaders are watching the contests closely, analysts said, and bracing for a renewed round of conflict whatever the outcome.
In Israel, this week’s national elections showed that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right alliance nor the main opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, the country’s former top military official, won enough votes to form a government. That has set the stage for weeks of uncertainty.
In the United States, Democrats appear to be in a strong position to take control of at least the House in the midterm elections next week. But the exact size of their win, and whether they secure a majority in the Senate, will determine if they can put a brake on President Trump’s policies, including the war with Iran.
Tehran expects more attacks regardless of who takes control in Israel or of Congress, and has shown little willingness to make concessions demanded by the Trump administration to seal a peace deal.
On Saturday, Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said on social media that he had met with senior leaders of the armed forces and directed them to respond to any kind or level of threat with an immediate response in order to establish “maximum deterrence.” He also directed them to be prepared to target all types of U.S. and Israeli assets.
“They have been expecting a new round of war already for a few weeks, and they’ve been preparing accordingly,” Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said of the Iranian government.
In Israel, Iran would welcome the removal of Mr. Netanyahu from power, said Mohammad Saleh Sedghian, director of the Arab Center for Iranian Studies in Tehran. The Israeli leader helped persuade Mr. Trump to attack Iran this year and sought to orchestrate new airstrikes on Iran ahead of the election. But Iranian leaders believe that changing prime ministers would probably have an impact only in the short term rather than leading to a fundamental shift in Israeli policy, Mr. Sedghian said.
“Iranian and Israeli policies toward each other have remained consistent regardless of which government has been in power in Israel since the 1980s,” he said. “Any changes would likely be temporary rather than strategic.”
More News Roundups
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Unravels Heading Into Midterm Weekend, Ben Meiselas, right, Oct. 31, 2026. Happy Halloween! Let me just say, the SCARIEST thing I can think of today is if people don’t vote. So please, make sure to get to the polls!
Here are the top headlines right now:
A few important notes before we dive in:
Thanks for making our book WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy a New York Times Best Seller!!!
DOJ Tried to Scare Election Officials. A Judge Said No.
Let’s start with the threat to the vote itself. Three secretaries of state confirmed they got letters from the Department of Justice reminding them to preserve election records. That’s already required by law for 22 months. The letters went further and warned that willful noncompliance is “punishable by up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.”
Late Friday, Judge Trina Thompson of the Northern District of California shut this down. She ordered DOJ to stop threatening election officials with criminal prosecution, retract prior threats, and report to her every pending search warrant application and grand jury subpoena tied to so-called ineligible voters. The case was brought by SEIU, AFSCME, LULAC, and the NAACP against DOJ, Attorney General Todd Blanche, DHS, and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Judge Thompson opened her order by writing that “one of the hallmarks of a fair election is the freedom to exercise the right to vote free from threat, fear, or intimidation.” She noted ballots are already out, people are already voting, and workers are already processing ballots, so she saw no reason to wait. The court found DOJ and DHS officials had engaged in “a campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce” the people running this election. That’s what a desperate regime looks like days before it loses.SubscribedThe Blue Wave Is Building
Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by roughly 8 to 9 points in the major averages, with even Republican-leaning pollsters showing Democrats ahead. Forecasters give Democrats a clear edge in the House and a narrower one in the Senate.
And look where the money is going. A new FEC filing shows House Majority PAC (a major Democratic PAC) dropped more than $8.5 million into five Republican-held seats:
Republicans, meanwhile, are playing defense in Trump country. DeCalibrate’s data from last week shows GOP super PACs pouring money into Ohio ($12.75M), Iowa ($6.95M), Kansas ($5.24M), South Carolina ($4.69M), Nebraska, Alaska, and even Mississippi, a Trump +23 state. On the House side, they’re spending in TX-15, KY-06, AZ-02, and Trump +20 seats in Texas and Tennessee. You don’t spend money in Mississippi unless you’re scared.
Even Steve Bannon sees it coming. He told the Financial Times that Republicans will break out into a “civil war” after November 3, with “monster” legislative fights before the new Congress is sworn in.
We’ll be live all Tuesday night from our studio in Washington, D.C. Scott MacFarlane, Katie Phang, and Ben will be hosting, joined by our White House correspondent. Come watch with us. Set your reminder here.Iran Says Trump’s Threats Aren’t Working
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei met with his top commanders and ordered that any threat be met with an immediate response “without geographical limits.” Iran’s official readout says the target bank was updated so that “all types of material and immaterial assets of the American-Zionist enemy” are within range. According to the Hormuz Letter, Iran has previously defined those “non-physical” assets to include the seven undersea cables in the Gulf, plus U.S.-linked data centers and AI facilities across the region. Iran’s armed forces chief of staff also warned Iran won’t wait for an attack if it sees signs one is coming.
Barak Ravid of Axios reports Qatari mediators held marathon talks in Tehran trying to get a deal before the midterms. Then a U.S. official told him Trump might be more inclined to order a major military operation if Republicans get crushed. “If he feels embarrassed or disenfranchised he will do something bold,” the official said. Bold?! You mean the guy will throw a tantrum and potentially make catastrophic war decisions if his feelings get hurt?! The message to Iran is basically “help Trump now or he’ll throw a tantrum later.” That’s how a toddler negotiates, and it’s exactly why we need checks and balances in Congress, and why we need Trump and his sycophants out of the Oval Office
Meanwhile the human cost keeps climbing. Air & Space Forces Magazine’s Chris Gordon reports that two Air Force airmen assigned to CENTCOM died this month in “non-hostile” incidents, which only came out through an updated Pentagon database. No announcement from the Trump regime. At least 23 U.S. service members have now died in this conflict.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC to mock Iran’s currency collapse, saying you can be arrested for printing the exchange rate. We’ve heard “it’s almost over” for months now while Americans pay record prices for gas, diesel, electricity, and groceries. Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, speaking at the Manama Dialogue, warned that a “second round [of full-blown war] will be more dangerous, more destructive, and it will lead nowhere.”
Meanwhile, surface-to-air missile systems are now deployed at Mar-a-Lago and the Palm Beach airport at the Secret Service’s request, including a launcher on a barge across the water. He’s turned his club into a bunker.Trump’s Final-Weekend Meltdown
At his Daytona Beach rally Friday, Trump stopped mid-speech, said he had “a little thing” in his eye, dipped a towel in water, and wiped his face on live TV. He then went after rumors about his health.
Then he AGAIN went after a Reuters reporter on Truth Social with a photo and the line “Put yourself in shape. You look like hell!” We responded with a Reuters photo of Trump himself from October 29. I’ll let the picture speak.
He can’t get Obama off his mind, either. The guy is obsessed. He posted a “Life Before Obama” meme claiming there was “no TDS” before Obama and told Benny Johnson that Obama “doesn’t understand quality and cleanliness.” Obama is packing arenas and mocking him, and it’s clearly getting under his skin.
In that same interview, Trump said a Ukraine deal is close and claimed he hadn’t been saying that before. He has said literally nothing else since 2024. He also said making Nicki Minaj press secretary was “a good idea.” And around 12:30 a.m., he was reposting Ali vs. Frazier fight footage.Grok in the Situation Room
Per Politico, Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, who are positioned to lead House Judiciary and Oversight if Democrats win, demanded Trump preserve his conversations with AI chatbots, including Elon Musk’s Grok. They cited reports that Trump asked Grok how Venezuelans would react to Maduro’s capture before ordering a military operation. They’re accusing him of consulting AI instead of Congress. Expect subpoenas.Deportations at Any Cost
The New York Times reports the administration has detained dozens of Afghan immigrants in Louisiana, including relatives of people who helped the U.S. military, and plans to deport them to Afghanistan despite the risk of persecution. And per the Wall Street Journal, the administration agreed to give $35 million in military aid, including armored personnel carriers, to Cameroon’s Rapid Intervention Battalion, a unit that previously lost U.S. support over torture allegations, in exchange for taking deportees. Cameroon has accepted at least 36 people from third countries so far.
Quick Hits
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Admits He’s Tired, Wants to ‘Relax,’ Democrats Prepare Subpoenas and Mass Investigations, Courts Slap Down DOJ Efforts, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 31, 2026. Three days out, the president leading his party’s campaign sounds like a man who’s ready to be done. “I thought this was it. I thought I could relax,” Trump told a Florida crowd last night, calling his final push “28 days of this crap in a row.” When Republicans asked him to keep rallying, his response was, “Does it matter?” This came a day after he called a reporter “disgusting” for asking if he was tired.
His administration’s push to tilt the election keeps collapsing too. Last night, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute election workers, the latest in a string of losses DOJ officials are privately admitting they can’t win.
Between the Dan Sullivan saga in Alaska and now the Haley Stevens story in Michigan, large parts of the media are rushing to inflate every flicker of controversy into a five-alarm fire just days before the election. It makes for great cable chyrons, but it isn’t what’s on voters’ minds. You know what the folks I talk to every day actually care about? The price of groceries and the wars overseas. That’s what we’re going to keep focusing on here, no matter how loud the noise gets.
We’re going live all night on Election Night, Tuesday, Nov. 3, from 6 p.m. to midnight Eastern. Right after Election Day, we’re dropping major investigations designed to give Congress a roadmap to investigate Epstein, Trump’s ties to Russia, and more. I’ll be honest with you: this reporting is going to ruffle some feathers, and the attacks on our work are only going to get louder.
That’s exactly why I need you with me. Independent reporting like this only survives because readers like you support it, with no billionaire owner or corporate boss deciding what gets covered.
Here’s the news:
Trump is sounding tired of being president, admitting at his Florida rally Friday night that he’s exhausted and just wants to “relax.”
“I thought this was it. I thought I could relax,” Trump, 80, told the crowd in Daytona Beach, calling his final campaign push “28 days of this crap in a row.” “It’s a lot. It’s a lot. My voice is about, operating at about 49.2%,” he said. When Republicans in Iowa and Kansas asked him to hold more rallies, Trump said his response was, “Does it matter?” It’s a stunning admission from a president who, just a day earlier, called a Reuters reporter “disgusting” for asking if he was tired and insisted, “I feel perfect.”
Earlier this week, a hoarse Trump also conceded that “God didn’t make your vocal cords to do a rally every day,” after spending all or part of 23 days on the road this month. His comments come after he canceled his weekend rallies in Kansas and Iowa, then reversed course less than a day later, and a former White House official told the Independent the candidates didn’t even want him there.
Trump also claimed the rallies would draw “about 50,000 people each,” even as aides have reportedly grown uneasy about shrinking crowds and smaller venues. Three days before an election that could hand Congress to Democrats, with his approval at a historic low of 30% in a new Pew poll, the president leading his party’s campaign sounds like a man who’s ready to be done.
“That’s What You’ll See in January”: Slotkin Previews Democrats’ Accountability Plan for the Trump Administration
Sen. Elissa Slotkin says Democrats are preparing a list of “signature cases” to hold Trump administration officials accountable if they win control of Congress, according to an undercover video released by the conservative outlet Townhall. The video was recorded Thursday while the Michigan Democrat was campaigning for congressional candidate Sean McCann, after a voter told her, “I’m worried that we’re going to be too nice,” and asked about prosecutions. “I’m with you,” Slotkin responded. “Assuming we win both houses, even if we just win one... we have a list of, like, the ‘signature cases.’” She said those cases would focus on what is “so egregious, such a violation of law, such a corruption case,” and that “in every committee, there will be the ‘signature cases’... where we hold people accountable.” She pointed to examples voters “identify with,” including Trump’s East Wing ballroom, the Reflecting Pool renovation on the National Mall, and “$200 million” from the Defense Department. “So that’s what you’ll see basically in January,” Slotkin said. One note, the time stamp on the video is due to a camera error, it was taken this week:
Slotkin said Democrats are modeling their strategy on Hungary, which recently ousted its longtime authoritarian leader after 16 years in power. She said she traveled to Budapest to learn how the new government had approached years of corruption. “I’m like, how did you handle 16 years of corruption? We don’t have that much, but we have so much,” she said, adding that Hungary used a “signature cases” strategy. Townhall framed the remarks as “lawfare,” but Slotkin described it as congressional oversight, focusing on accountability for corruption and violations of the law. Her comments preview what Republicans fear most about losing power on Tuesday: subpoenas, hearings, and investigations into the Trump administration. Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who has been mentioned as a possible 2028 presidential contender, has become one of the administration’s sharpest critics.
Judge Orders Trump’s DOJ to Stop Threatening Election Workers as Experts Warn Trump Could Use Fake “Foreign Interference” Claims to Seize Ballots
A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute state and local election officials, days before Tuesday’s midterms. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in San Francisco also barred the administration from demanding that election workers remove voters from the rolls, refuse to issue them ballots, or set aside their ballots based on claims they’re ineligible. The order requires the Justice Department to contact every official who received a threat and tell them those “demands and threats of prosecution... have been enjoined.” “One of the hallmarks of a fair election is the freedom to exercise the right to vote free from threat, fear, or intimidation,” Thompson wrote. “Election Day is around the corner. Ballots have already been issued. Americans have already begun voting.” The temporary order expires after Tuesday, and a hearing is set for Monday.
The ruling strips the Justice Department of what the New York Times calls one of its most important tools for pressuring local officials: the threat of prosecution. It came just a day after the department sent letters to election workers in all 50 states hinting at possible prosecution and issued grand jury subpoenas to California election officials. The lawsuit, brought by unions including SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and AFSCME, accuses Attorney General Todd Blanche and other Trump appointees of a “coordinated campaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce state and local officials and employees.” It also claims DHS built its list of suspected noncitizens using data “from obscure and insecure sources” and “commercially available AI of questionable reliability.” “There has never been a threat like this, and there has never been an order exactly like this,” said Norman Eisen, a lead counsel on the case. “WOW!!” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote. “The Trump Administration just lost ANOTHER election related case.”
The ruling caps a string of court losses for the administration, which is now privately conceding its California effort is unlikely to work. Earlier Friday, the 9th Circuit rejected, 2-1, the administration’s bid to block California from counting 20,000 mail ballots, with Trump appointee Mark Bennett joining the majority in warning of “a material risk” of disenfranchisement. Another Trump appointee, Judge Patrick Bumatay, dissented, writing that the government “merely seeks to safeguard” California’s ban on noncitizen voting, and Reuters reports the case could still head to the Supreme Court. Separately, Chief Judge James Boasberg in Washington ordered the administration to hand its list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens over to an immigrant advocacy group. Justice Department officials have privately admitted their California efforts are unlikely to block any ballots from being issued or counted, according to the Times. A senior official also wouldn’t commit to continuing the legal fight after Election Day.
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read fired back at the Justice Department’s warning letter to election officials, and gave the Trump administration a spelling lesson. The letter from Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter, part of a wave sent to election officials in all 50 states, warned that Oregon must preserve ballots and election records for 22 months or face possible fines or prison time. But it was addressed to “Tobias Reed,” misspelling his name. In his reply Friday, Read said Oregon will follow state and federal law and urged the federal government to do the same. “As secretaries of state across the country know, effective election administration requires professionalism, competency and attention to detail,” Read wrote. “It is in that spirit that I will point out to you that my name is spelled R-E-A-D, as in ‘read the Constitution.’”
Election security experts and lawmakers fear Trump will claim foreign interference after a bad election night and use it as a pretext to try to seize ballots or stop vote counting, according to The Atlantic. In a July speech, Trump claimed China had “bought, stolen, or hacked” voter data in 18 states and suggested a foreign government may have stolen the 2020 election from him, but the intelligence reports he released didn’t back that up. “We start with the premise that the president is going to do that,” said Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Himes said the latest intelligence shows foreign adversaries haven’t changed votes: “We have never seen an operation to actually interfere.” Even former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico to test for tampering and found none. “The new threat in this election is the administration,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice.
Experts say there are real legal limits on what Trump can do, even if he tries. Voting machines aren’t connected to the internet, and nearly every vote in the U.S. now has a paper backup, so any attempt to flip votes could be caught. “A mere declaration by the president is not going to be enough legally to justify going in and trying to seize voting machines or ballots,” said NYU law professor Richard Pildes, adding that federal agents would need a warrant and probable cause. “There’s certainly no power in the executive branch to take over or nationalize the election process,” he said. Himes says he has told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton that if Trump makes such a claim, “you will answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening.” The White House insists Trump has done “more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Orders “Immediate” Retaliation With No Geographic Limits as the U.S. Weighs New Strikes
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has ordered his military to deliver an “immediate, effective response without geographical limitations” to any new attack by the U.S. or Israel. “If the enemies once again launch military or terrorist attacks, it is the armed forces of the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation that will determine the time and conditions for ending them,” Khamenei said Saturday after meeting with senior commanders. He also directed commanders to update Iran’s “Targets Bank” so that all U.S. and Israeli assets, “tangible and intangible,” are within reach of Iranian forces. Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tehran reports Iran is signaling that a new round of war would hit targets beyond those struck in earlier fighting. Khamenei also stressed mobilizing the paramilitary Basij to keep order inside the country, suggesting Iran is preparing for “all-out war” against enemies both abroad and at home. The warning comes as the U.S. tells Gulf allies to prepare for a “brief but intense” campaign after Tuesday’s midterms.
Iran says a supertanker carrying more than 2 million barrels of oil caught fire after hitting a mine in the Strait of Hormuz, the fourth tanker it says exploded on Friday alone. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed the ships had switched off their tracking systems and ignored warnings while using what Tehran calls an “unauthorized” route, the southern lane the U.S. promotes as safe. The Associated Press could not verify those claims, but Oman’s navy rescued 25 crew members from a Panamanian-flagged tanker that was attacked and set ablaze off its coast. Britain’s maritime monitor also reported that another vessel was hit by an “unknown projectile” near Iran’s Lavan Island. October has already seen more attacks on ships in the region than any other month of the war. All of this comes as U.S. Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper keeps insisting that the southern lanes are “free and clear” and that Iran’s navy is “all at the bottom of the sea.”
Trump says the war is “going to end soon,” but diplomacy remains stalled as regional powers scramble to prevent a new escalation. Qatari mediators were in Tehran on Friday delivering edits to a draft peace deal, and a source told CBS News there were “indications of progress,” with Iran’s response expected this weekend. But Iran is still demanding that the U.S. lift its blockade of Iranian ports and ease sanctions before any deal, and it hasn’t responded to Vice President JD Vance’s letter to a top Iranian official. “People in this part of the world want to bring peace back to the region,” Saudi Arabia’s vice foreign minister said at a security forum in Bahrain on Saturday, though he admitted no one can predict the outcome. Qatar’s prime minister also held talks with Kuwait on efforts to “de-escalate tensions.” Trump has said the U.S. won’t strike Iran before the election but has repeatedly signaled he’s weighing new attacks afterward.
The war’s ripple effects keep spreading across the region, especially in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Saudi air defenses intercepted a “hostile drone” near Riyadh on Saturday, a day after shooting down another drone and a ballistic missile. On Friday, two Houthi missiles targeted Yemen’s presidential palace in Aden, the seat of the Saudi-backed government, and witnesses saw ambulances entering the compound. The Houthis have escalated attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, including deadly strikes on Riyadh’s airport that shut it down for two weeks. More than 1,600 people have been killed and over 275,000 displaced in Yemen since fighting reignited this summer, according to the U.N. Yemen’s foreign minister on Saturday called the Houthis’ siege of the city of Taiz a “war crime,” accusing the group of using food, medicine, and fuel as “a tool for political pressure.”
Other news:
A manhunt is underway after a gunman opened fire inside a Spirit Halloween store at a mall in Fairfield, California, killing one person and wounding six others. The shooting happened around 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Solano Town Center mall, and at least three victims are in critical condition, Fairfield Police Chief Dan Marshall said. Police have not identified a suspect and say detectives are “diligently working to identify the suspect or suspects responsible for this horrific shooting.” One man told NBC affiliate KCRA that his wife heard “five big bangs” and escaped through an emergency exit with other shoppers. Hours earlier, another person was shot and killed inside a Spirit Halloween store in Madison Heights, Michigan, where bystanders tackled the 21-year-old suspect before police took him into custody. Police say the two shootings do not appear to be connected.
Massive protests over the cost of living are sweeping across Europe this Halloween weekend, with police bracing for violence after weeks of riots and looting. France is deploying 70,000 police officers on Saturday after some of the worst rioting in decades, which began as student protests over education and grew into a broader revolt over the cost of living. Police arrested 1,300 people last week after an estimated 410,000 people marched across France, and the U.S. Embassy has warned travelers to avoid demonstrations. More than 160,000 people are expected to join Gen Z-led protests in 34 German cities, while Italy’s government has deployed 500 army troops to Milan after masked protesters looted stores. Protests have also spread to Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, where police used tear gas and water cannons. “Wages do not keep up with the cost of living,” a 20-year-old medical student told NBC News in Rome.
Alaska’s top federal prosecutor has confirmed a criminal investigation into an alleged Democratic plot to recruit a second “Dan Sullivan” onto the Senate ballot. U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman said the New York Times report suggested that Mary Peltola’s campaign and national Democrats “orchestrated a sprawling conspiracy,” and that it has led to “a significant surge of law enforcement assets to Alaska.” It is highly unusual for federal prosecutors to publicly confirm an open criminal investigation, let alone discuss it days before an election. The Justice Department is also asking a judge to set aside every ballot that ranks the second Sullivan and to block certification if the incumbent loses. “I knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent,” Peltola told supporters, adding, “I am not interested in tricking voters.” Trump said Peltola “actually should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted” and cast doubt on whether she would even be seated if she wins.
Luigi Mangione’s lawyers are again asking a judge to throw out his New York state murder charges, arguing that his federal guilty plea means he can’t be prosecuted twice. Mangione pleaded guilty in August to two federal stalking charges in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. The U.S. Constitution allows both federal and state prosecutions for the same crime, but New York law says a person may not be “separately prosecuted for two offenses based upon the same act.” “The core misconduct of the federal and state prosecutions is the same: the intent to kill and the killing of Brian Thompson,” his lawyers wrote. Manhattan prosecutors argue the case can proceed under an exception because federal stalking and state murder charges don’t overlap in that way. The judge has set the next court date for Dec. 10.
The U.S. canceled the traditional “family photo” at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in Atlanta after about a third of the countries refused to pose with Russia’s foreign minister. Secretary of State Marco Rubio scrapped the photo after the European Union, the U.K., and Australia made clear they would boycott or walk out rather than stand beside Sergei Lavrov. “In no case will there be a family photo with European partners and Mr. Lavrov together because... there is no normality with Russia,” said Germany’s foreign minister. Australia’s foreign minister condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “brutal and unjustified” with Lavrov in the room. The Guardian calls it further evidence of the rift caused by the Trump administration’s push to bring Russia back into the international fold, ahead of a December summit at Trump’s Doral resort to which Putin has been invited. The U.S. also excluded South Africa, a founding G20 member, and did not invite Ukraine.
A 15-year-old boy from Ghana was chased down and fatally shot on his way to school in the Bronx on Thursday morning. Javits Frimpong was found with a gunshot wound to his stomach near Crotona Park and was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Police are searching for three teenage boys in connection with the shooting, and surveillance video appears to show Javits running as a person dressed in black follows him. His father, Thomas Frimpong, said his son had just marked one year in New York after arriving from Ghana, and that he was being bullied at school, where two students were recently suspended for harassing him. “I lost him,” his father told reporters. “I don’t know what to do now.” Ghana’s foreign minister vowed, “We will pursue justice and we will make sure that those who did this do not get away with it.”
A Louisiana appeals court has thrown out a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a mother whose 17-year-old son died by suicide hours after his Catholic high school expelled him. Sara Brannon sued the Archdiocese of New Orleans, arguing that Rummel High School acted arbitrarily in expelling her son, Devon Shelton, after what he described as a shoving match with a student who had been bullying him. The archdiocese argued that Louisiana law doesn’t allow damages for off-campus self-harm following school disciplinary decisions. A three-judge panel agreed, calling Devon’s death “tragic” but ruling that the facts “would not legally fit into any theory of recovery.” Brannon’s attorney says she plans to appeal. Devon was a member of the school’s marching band and varsity bowling team. (If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988.)
ICE paid nearly $500 million for a Minnesota prison that its owner had offered to sell to the state for just $75 million a year earlier, according to an investigation by KARE 11. The Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, which has been closed for 16 years, was sold to ICE in August for $495.6 million by private prison company CoreCivic, which donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee. Newly unsealed emails show CoreCivic had offered it to Minnesota in May 2025 for $75 million, including upgrades. “It’s unexplainable,” said Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell. “I don’t know how they could justify this amount.” Attorney General Keith Ellison called on Congress to investigate “why Trump paid almost half a billion to a Trump donor for a prison worth just $75 million.” CoreCivic says the federal government set the price, and it stands to earn about $75 million a year more operating the facility.
Nearly half of Americans plan to spend less than $500 on the holidays this year, even as total holiday spending is projected to top $1 trillion for the first time. About 44% of shoppers will spend under $500, according to a survey by In-Store Marketplace, while only 20% expect to spend $1,000 or more. A September Goldman Sachs study found that more than 60% of people earning under $50,000 are living paycheck to paycheck after a year of high gas prices and inflation. Shoppers say deals and promotions matter to them more than anything else. A Bank of America survey found 30% plan to shop only during sales and 27% will set a “firm” spending limit. Adobe also expects online spending on essentials like personal hygiene products to jump 150% this season.
Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is amplifying Elon Musk’s claim that Democrats will turn America into a “permanent one-party state” if they win. In a post on X, Musk claimed Democrats would expand the Supreme Court, make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, and “legalize everyone living in America illegally to cement a permanent majority,” calling it “the end of democracy.” “It would be game over for America,” Musk wrote, urging his 241.5 million followers to vote Republican. Leavitt reshared it on Instagram with the caption, “This is what’s at stake. Vote,” and Donald Trump Jr., Benny Johnson, and Dan Bongino also promoted it. While some Democrats have backed Supreme Court term limits or expanding the court, scholars say such changes are unlikely even if Democrats win both chambers. The posts come as polls increasingly point to a Democratic wave next week.
An Arizona mother who fought off a man who broke into her home learned that police believe her own fiancé hired him to sexually assault her. Police say Zarian Dyer, 23, met Adrian Ayala, 20, on Reddit and arranged for him to go to the home of his fiancée, Bella Torres, on Oct. 16 while Dyer went to the grocery store. Surveillance video captured Torres fighting Ayala in the driveway while her two young children were inside, as Ayala told her, “Your boyfriend told me you’d be into this.” Ayala’s attorney claims Dyer presented it as a consensual “role-play scenario,” but police say messages on Ayala’s phone show the two men planned the attack. Ayala faces charges including kidnapping and sexual abuse and was released on a $25,000 bond. Dyer was arrested Thursday on charges including conspiracy and attempted sexual assault and is being held on a $500,000 cash-only bond.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Raw Story, 'Serious threats': Trump pardons threatened in court as judge's DOJ probe explodes, David Edwards, Oct 30, 2026. President Donald Trump has the power to stop any criminal contempt case against Chicago federal prosecutors, the Justice Department warned a judge as it refused to cooperate with her investigation into possible criminal misconduct.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr., a former personal lawyer to Trump allies, made the argument in a court filing on Friday, the deadline U.S. District Judge April Perry had set for the government to turn over records for her inquiry.
Woodward, the department’s third-ranking official, filed a sudden notice of appearance in the case Friday, court records show.ALSO READ:'The GOP deserves to suffer': Trump fan vows to destroy MAGA after realizing he was duped
Earlier that day, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Diane MacArthur and Nathaniel Whalen, who had represented U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office in the case, each asked to withdraw, saying only that they were “no longer assigned to this case.”
Perry is weighing whether to name a special prosecutor to investigate Boutros and others over a case against six people charged after a September 2025 protest during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
The case collapsed in May after Perry uncovered apparent misconduct before the grand jury, the newspaper reported.
Woodward’s filing rejected the agreement Perry’s request was built on. Her Oct. 9 order began, “Consistent with the Government’s agreement,” and asked for the office’s communications with anyone outside it about charging decisions.
“For the avoidance of doubt, the United States has not agreed to provide any information,” Woodward wrote, disowning an agreement Perry said the government had made with her.
The filing said the Justice Department's lawyer at an Oct. 1 hearing, pressed repeatedly on whether the department would “cooperate,” had made clear that “there’s a limitation in terms of what [he could] answer.”
“To be clear, the United States does not read the Court’s October 9 minute entry as a directive creating any obligation to produce any information,” Woodward wrote. “Rather, the United States reads the minute entry as inviting voluntary cooperation with a judicial investigation, as it uses the terms ‘ask’ and ‘request[].’”
If Perry meant her request as an order, Woodward wrote, she should issue an amended one, though the department believes “further proceedings would not be appropriate.”
Woodward also argued that Perry has not given the department concrete notice of what misconduct she is investigating.
The filing quoted Perry warning at the Oct. 1 hearing that the questions could affect “the individual law licenses of the [assistant U.S. attorneys] who have been implicated, but also the possibility of a criminal prosecution.”
It also quoted her suggesting “that people at a high level in the Department of Justice were involved in things that could constitute obstruction of justice.”
“These vague but serious threats do not sufficiently place the United States on notice of the concrete factual basis for the Court’s investigation,” Woodward wrote.
The filing pointed to a March statement Perry had questioned, in which prosecutors told her there were “no communications of any nature” with anyone outside the office about charging decisions, including “anyone in the White House and all components and offices of Main Justice,” meaning Justice Department headquarters.
At the Oct. 1 hearing, Whalen acknowledged that such communications might exist but said they came after the decision to file charges, the Sun-Times reported.
Woodward argued that the executive branch, which Trump leads, must control any prosecution of the department’s lawyers.
Federal rules let a judge appoint “another attorney” to prosecute contempt, the crime of defying or obstructing a court, when the government declines. Woodward wrote that doing so “would violate Article II,” the part of the Constitution giving the president executive power, when the target is an executive official.
“Like other criminal prosecutions, … a prosecution for contempt must be supervised by the Executive Branch,” he wrote.
“It is likewise well-established that the pardon power extends to criminal contempt,” Woodward wrote. “Allowing a court-appointed attorney to prosecute criminal contempt without executive supervision would thus infringe the President’s ‘indubitable’ power under the Pardon Clause to ‘direct that the criminal be prosecuted no further.’”
Under that argument, the president could halt any “criminal prosecution” of the department’s lawyers, the possibility Perry raised Oct. 1.
The filing points to a 2013 opinion on presidential pardons by Brett Kavanaugh, then an appeals judge and now a Supreme Court justice.
If the attorney general were unavailable to supervise such a prosecutor, the filing said, the job would pass to the deputy attorney general and then to the associate attorney general, Woodward’s own post.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) opposed Woodward’s nomination in an October 2025 Senate floor speech, warning that Republicans had opened the door to “extreme nominees” who are “blindly loyal to President Trump.”
“Mr. Woodward is not even close to qualified,” Durbin said. “He has never, never worked at the Justice Department before this Administration. What he has done is show his loyalty to Donald Trump by representing Trump associates for their roles in thwarting investigations into the President.”
Perry’s Oct. 1 order appointed University of Chicago law professor William Baude to argue against the department’s position on whether she can name a prosecutor to pursue criminal contempt, with his brief due Dec. 2.
New York Times, As Midterms Near, Top Law Firms That Capitulated to Trump Are on the Sidelines, Michael S. Schmidt and Jim Rutenberg, Oct. 31, 2026. None of the firms that struck deals to avoid crippling executive orders are publicly involved in the major legal efforts to check the Trump administration’s attempts to meddle in the midterm elections, a review by The New York Times shows.
Whenever Norm Eisen, a leader of the legal resistance against President Trump, wanted to try to hold Mr. Trump accountable over the last decade, one of his first calls was to Brad Karp, the chairman of the white shoe law firm Paul Weiss.
Without hesitation, Mr. Karp would give Mr. Eisen free legal counsel on how to best oppose Mr. Trump, and would then deploy the firm’s vast legal muscle — at no cost — to help.
“He was one of the greatest champions of voting and civil rights — and for democracy — in the country, and to have someone like that advising you, resourcing you and fighting for you was indispensable,” Mr. Eisen said.
Now, as Mr. Eisen prepares to lead a coalition that has vowed to stop Mr. Trump if he tries to interfere in the midterm elections, Paul Weiss, one of nine firms to strike deals with the administration to avoid crippling executive orders, is largely on the sidelines, according to Mr. Eisen and a lawyer with direct knowledge of the matter.
The void left by Paul Weiss is only a sliver of the impact of the deals the nine firms made with Mr. Trump early in his second term. In exchange, they pledged to do nearly a billion dollars in free legal work to causes Mr. Trump champions, casting doubt on whether they would be willing to stand up to the president.
Measuring the consequences of the deals is difficult, but the lead-up to the midterm elections offers new clues. Few of the nine firms are publicly involved in the major legal efforts to check Mr. Trump and his administration’s attempts to meddle, a review of public documents and interviews with democracy advocates, election lawyers and voting rights litigators shows.
The absence of the firms has raised serious worries about whether the legal profession is equipped to respond to the administration, which has already begun to file litigation intended to sow confusion about the outcome of the election. But lawyers like Mr. Eisen say that they are just as prepared and point to a string of recent court victories as evidence of their prowess.
Some of the firms have scrubbed their websites of their storied histories working on voting rights cases. At one firm that made a deal with Mr. Trump, several lawyers are quietly volunteering to help voting rights causes, hoping that their bosses do not find out, according to a lawyer at one of the firms who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The chilling effect, the interviews show, has extended to several of the top 100 firms in the United States that did not cut deals with Mr. Trump. Fearing being targeted, they have also avoided politically sensitive cases, according to interviews.
So many of them — including ones that have made deals with Mr. Trump and those that have not — have declined to help one longtime civil rights group, the Advancement Project, that it has started an internal tracker to stay on top of all the firms declining to team up on cases.
“I’ve been told, ‘We don’t do civil rights work involving the administration anymore,’ and, ‘We don’t do voting rights work anymore,’’’ said John Powers, the legal director at the Advancement Project, which often litigates voting rights cases by joining with better-financed private firms.
Most recently, when the Advancement Project filed suit with the N.A.A.C.P. against aspects of the Justice Department’s election-monitoring plans this fall, it had to set out on its own without a private partner. (On Friday, Mr. Powers said that it had received a new offer of help.)
“It’s been a sea change,” Mr. Powers said.
In some cases, Mr. Powers added, partners at firms working with the Advancement Project pulled back their support, dropped out entirely or agreed only to help on the condition that they not be named publicly.
“All too often we’re having to find workarounds because we don’t have the support,” he said.
Mr. Powers would not name the firms because he was hoping the private support would return in the future, he said.
“The pendulum is going to swing,” he predicted.
Law firms have played a key role since the civil rights movement in checking the federal government, even though suing the government over voting and civil rights cases typically pays far less compared with representing corporations. But the chance to work on those issues pro bono became a persuasive recruiting tool for firms. It served as evidence that incoming associates could not only make a lot of money assisting companies and wealthy people, but also do good.
During elections in recent decades, associates and partners have volunteered to be stationed in swing states where they could quickly initiate legal challenges on Election Day or if there was a contested counting of the results. Firms have pledged to represent poll workers while also bringing complex legal challenges against states encroaching on voting rights.
Paul Weiss repeatedly promoted its role in a landmark 1965 voting rights case. Dozens of articles and news releases on its website laid out its work during the Trump era on voting rights and election law.
“We remain steadfast in our commitment, supporting recent voting rights actions in several courts nationally as counsel of record,” the firm wrote on its website on a page dedicated to its pro bono election rights work.
But some time after Paul Weiss, which donated more money to Democrats in 2024 than any other firm, struck the deal with Mr. Trump in March 2025, the page for voting rights was taken down, along with 30 other pages related to its work on the subject.
A search of the firm’s website for the words “voting” and “voting rights” returns just two results.
New York Times, He Was a Rising Star at West Point. Then He Got His Girlfriend Pregnant, Santul Nerkar and Hurubie Meko, Oct. 31, 2026. Caleb Suh, a former West Point cadet and current Columbia student, pleaded guilty in June to forcing an abortion on another cadet in 2022. His ex-girlfriend is now suing him for assault and battery.
As a star cadet at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., Caleb Suh seemed to have it all.
He was near the top of his class and had his eyes set on a career in public health, with a passion for addressing festering inequities in the medical system while promoting diversity and inclusion.
But Mr. Suh was facing what he saw as a problem in early 2022. He had been dating another cadet at West Point and had gotten her pregnant. She wanted to bring the pregnancy to term; he did not, according to federal prosecutors and a lawsuit.
This year, Mr. Suh told a federal judge that he had given her a drink spiked with Xanax. When she became incapacitated, he shoved medical abortion pills into her vagina and mouth. He had gotten the pills from a pharmacy while pretending to be her.
Hours later, the woman was violently bleeding. She called 911 and was taken to a hospital, where she had a miscarriage.
The harrowing details of that night were described in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing Mr. Suh of assault and battery.
The trajectories of the two cadets appear to have diverged after that night. The woman, identified in the suit as Jane Doe, struggled to move on with her life after the traumatic episode, according to her suit, while Mr. Suh seemed to flourish as he pursued a career in public health at elite institutions.
But in June 2026, Mr. Suh was charged with one count of assault within a maritime and territorial jurisdiction. He pleaded guilty, and is expected to be sentenced to around two years in prison, according to the terms of his plea agreement.
While awaiting sentencing, however, Mr. Suh has been allowed to continue his education. In October, Mr. Suh asked the judge in his case, Philip M. Halpern, to push his sentencing to January, citing a desire to finish his academic term at Columbia, as well as complete a program aimed at rehabilitating felons. Federal prosecutors did not object.
Judge Halpern granted Mr. Suh’s request.
Columbia was unaware of Mr. Suh’s criminal conviction before The New York Times informed the university of it, according to a person with knowledge of Mr. Suh’s status who was granted anonymity to discuss a matter involving a current student. The university is taking “swift action,” the person noted. Applicants to the school are not required to disclose prior criminal convictions or charges, the person said.
At the time of the crime, Mr. Suh was competing to become the first captain of West Point, an honor earned by the top cadet in each graduating class, a federal prosecutor said at his plea hearing in June.
In March 2022, Mr. Suh and Jane Doe broke up. In May, she reported her experience on that night to the Army Criminal Investigation Division at West Point, according to her lawsuit. It is not clear what came of that investigation.
Mr. Suh would attend multiple Ivy League institutions, presenting himself as a champion of public health and launching an organization aimed at addressing systemic inequalities in America’s health care system.
Over the next four years, Mr. Suh graduated with a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, where he was a member of the school’s Center for Health Equity. He called himself an “educator committed to diversity, equity and inclusion,” according to his directory page. Cornell did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Suh was also a research coordinator at Cornell’s medical school. He co-founded an organization that sought to address health disparities through advocacy, according to its website.
Following his graduation from Cornell this year, Mr. Suh received a scholarship to attend Columbia for a master’s degree at the Mailman School.
Russell Kornblith, a lawyer representing Jane Doe, said that any parent would be “haunted” by the facts of his client’s case.
“Our client was committed to carrying this pregnancy to term, and it was taken from her,” Mr. Kornblith said in an interview. “And it was taken from her in a place where she should have been safe.”
Mr. Suh and Jane Doe began dating in October 2020, according to the lawsuit. And by around January 2022, she learned that she was pregnant. He repeatedly pressured her to terminate the pregnancy, but she resisted, the suit said.
Mr. Suh even told Jane Doe that he “would commit suicide if she did not get an abortion,” according to the suit.
Unable to sway her, Mr. Suh hatched a plan to deceive her, according to the lawsuit.
During his guilty plea in June, Mr. Suh outlined the details of the plan to a judge in federal court in Manhattan, according to court records.
Without Jane Doe’s knowledge, Mr. Suh created an account with an online pharmacy using her name, personal information and identification. He then used the account to purchase abortion medication and ship it to West Point. He also obtained Xanax through a friend, he said.
According to the suit, Mr. Suh impersonated Jane Doe on the pharmacy’s online forum and asked questions about taking the medication, including whether she would “feel the pills in my vagina.”
Then, he said, he put his scheme into action.
“I led her to believe that I had come to support her pregnancy when, in fact, I did not,” Mr. Suh told the judge, according to the lawsuit.
On Feb. 4, 2022, Mr. Suh visited Jane Doe in her barracks, where he encouraged her to drink what he called a “prenatal protein shake,” the suit said.
According to the lawsuit, Jane Doe became sick and fell asleep. At one point she woke up and felt “an odd sensation in her gums,” the suit said. She found two pills in her mouth and spit them out.
But Mr. Suh grabbed the pills and tried to put them back in her mouth, the lawsuit claimed, telling her “eat this, it’s good for you.” Mr. Suh then moved closer “and began touching her vagina” while she was incapacitated, the lawsuit said.
He left her at about 11 p.m. and returned to his barracks room.
At around midnight, Jane Doe woke up in pain, according to her lawsuit. She “vomited and experienced diarrhea,” and then stumbled into the bathroom, where she discovered that she was “profusely bleeding from her vagina,” the suit said. Fearing a miscarriage, Jane Doe called Mr. Suh, according to the lawsuit. He did not respond.
More On U.S. Midterm Races
President Trump and his favored Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina, Darline Graham, at his left.
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Annie Andrews Shows Why South Carolina May Turn Blue, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 31, 2026. Dr. Annie Andrews, below left, the Democratic South Carolina US Senate candidate, showed why the conservative state could turn blue for the first time since the 1990s, as voters may reject Darline Graham.
Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC doesn’t seem to want to be a senator. Much like the man who put her in office, Donald Trump, she has complained about having to campaign for votes.
Graham is unqualified and only seems to have gotten the Senate appointment because her brother Lindsey died while in office. The problem, besides her distaste for campaigning, is that Darline Graham isn’t qualified to be a US Senator and looks to be in way over her head.
Republicans are outraged that they have had to throw resources into South Carolina to boost Graham.
Darline Graham also represents the sort of nepotism and elitism that Americans are sick and tired of under Donald Trump.
Some Republicans in South Carolina are concerned that Darline Graham is unqualified and not conservative enough. As a campaigner, Graham has been lackluster, as any unqualified novice might be.
When Lindsey Graham was still alive, Dr. Annie Andrews wasn’t given much of a chance to flip the seat, but all that has changed because of the political environment and the weakness of Darline Graham as a candidate.
With three days to go until Election Day, Annie Andrews appeared on MS NOW and spoke about the South Carolina election.
Andrews talked about getting the support of Ralph Norman’s son:
I've been talking to Ralph Norman's son, Warren, for probably a month and a half now, and he has endorsed me. He's told reporters he's voting for me, as are his siblings. So they're not behind the write-in Ralph Norman campaign, they're fully behind me, and it's not because Warren Norman and I agree on everything.
There's plenty we disagree on, but he recognizes that my opponent, Darlene Graham, is an empty suit. She was handpicked by Washington insiders. She's gonna do the bidding of the special interest groups and billionaire donors, and he sees in me someone that he respects, someone who will be an independent voice for South Carolina. So he's been on the trail. He's doing conservative radio interviews for us, supporting me, and it's been really great because it's just a symbol of this broad coalition that I've been working to build for 18 months that's gonna pull us across the finish line in three short days.
Later, Andrews added, “We're gonna sprint to the finish line, and there's just a lot of voters in South Carolina who recognize that Darlene Graham is not going to be a voice for South Carolina, and that we want someone who will wake up every day, work across the aisle, and fight for South Carolina, and address the issues that South Carolinians are facing, which are similar to the issues folks across the country are facing: high gas prices, high grocery prices, closing rural hospitals. And those are the things I've been campaigning on.”
If Annie Andrews wins in South Carolina, it will signal a historic shift and a Democratic election victory that will be nearly unprecedented in size.
A Darline Graham victory will be because the heavy Republican advantage in South Carolina was too much for Democrats to overcome.
It will be a tough lift for Democrats to flip South Carolina, but if it ever happens, 2026 is the year.
Politico, Trump doubles down on Max Miller endorsement despite abuse allegations, Samuel Benson, Oct. 31, 2026. President Donald Trump on Saturday doubled down on his support of embattled Rep. Max Miller, who is fighting to hold onto his seat amid allegations of domestic abuse, calling him a “fantastic champion” for the state.
“Max Miller has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election. GET OUT AND VOTE FOR MAX — HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
The renewed backing follows allegations of domestic abuse involving Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller has denied the allegations.
Miller, a longtime Trump ally who worked on his 2016 presidential campaign and served in his first administration, previously received the president’s endorsement in May. But Trump privately expressed doubts about Miller’s reelection prospects in August, amid pressure from some Republicans for the congressmember to drop out of the race. Miller has remained in the contest against Democrat Brian Poindexter ahead of next week’s election.
Both parties have poured millions of dollars into a district that Trump won by double digits in 2024.
New York Times, Why Haley Stevens Can’t Stop Talking About Abdul El-Sayed, Reid J. Epstein, Oct. 31, 2026. In a frank interview, she described her disappointment and also said she was considering converting to Judaism. Her fiancé had thoughts, too.
Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan stood up from her dining table, where the tuna fish and matzo ball soup sat half-eaten, and let loose about the moment she grew disillusioned with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
It happened this month, during her state’s first Senate debate between Dr. El-Sayed, who defeated her in a bitter Democratic primary in August, and former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee. Dr. El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel, was asked if Iran or Israel posed a greater threat to the United States. He dodged the question, calling it a “ridiculous hypothetical.”
This was unacceptable to Ms. Stevens.
“He’s a good speaker,” she said during the lunchtime interview on Friday at her home in Birmingham, Mich., raising her voice and rising from the table. “He’s an orator. He is gifted. Then how does that happen? Come on!”
Since the debate, Ms. Stevens has sat for a procession of cable television interviews that have been increasingly critical of Dr. El-Sayed, her endorsement of him becoming shakier by the day. Their hug at a party unity brunch in August has faded into distant memory.
On Friday, Ms. Stevens announced that she would attend a Sunday church service in Detroit with Dr. El-Sayed, a peace offering brokered by Representatives Debbie Dingell of Michigan and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. But Ms. Stevens’s statement came with a caveat: a demand that Dr. El-Sayed publicly disavow an ad that one of his allies posted online. She called the ad antisemitic because it blamed U.S. support for Israel for high grocery prices.
On Friday, Dr. El-Sayed pushed back.
In a blistering statement, he offered a reminder that he beat her in August and an assertion that “Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”
Politico, Ex-Haley Stevens adviser: Fiancé is ‘vaporizing Haley’s future,’ Ben Johansen, Oct. 31, 2026. The public feud between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens took another personal turn Saturday morning, when a former campaign consultant for Stevens claimed Stevens’ fiancé is destroying her future career.
“Jason is vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment and it is sad to watch her participate in that,” Caitlin Legacki said of Stevens’ fiancé Jason Turkish in a social media thread, saying that during the primary he was “an extraordinarily toxic presence, was verbally abusive to staff and had some of the worst political instincts I’ve ever witnessed.”
Legacki, a longtime Democratic aide, was a Stevens strategist before parting ways with the campaign when her side work consulting for Big Tech and Palantir became an issue.
In an interview with POLITICO, she said she was dismayed by Turkish’s interview in The New York Times that was published this morning.
More Global News
New York Times, Evacuees Arrive to Safety From Besieged Ukrainian City, Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko, Updated Oct. 31, 2026. A few days of truce allowed the removal of remaining civilians from Oleshky, which continual Russian attacks have made all but uninhabitable.
Trapped for years by heavy fighting and threatened by starvation amid constant bombardment on the front in Ukraine, hundreds of civilians made it to safety on Saturday after the most ambitious evacuation operations since Russia invaded nearly five years ago.
“When the world pays attention, people are rescued,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement. “Further steps toward de-escalation and real progress toward peace are also needed.”
The dayslong operation around the city of Oleshky is now the longest localized cease-fire since 2022, said Dmytro Lubinets, a Ukrainian lawmaker and the parliamentary commissioner for human rights. He said it would remain in effect until 10:59 p.m. Sunday local time in Kyiv.
“Behind every stage of this operation are the lives of people who have been waiting and hoping,” he said. “The oldest evacuee is 94 years old, while the youngest is just over 1 year old! Another woman will celebrate her 49th birthday tomorrow!”
Both Russian and Ukrainian officials offered thanks to the U.S. first lady, Melania Trump, for helping broker the brief halt to the fighting around the battered city, in the Kherson region, which has been under Russian occupation for years.
“Oleshky proves we can raise humanity above war,” Mrs. Trump said in a statement. “Together, we can build a peaceful planet, a world of promise for our children.”
Yana Lantratova, Russia’s human rights commissioner, posted a message saying the mission was complete. Evacuees, she said, would be divided into one column of buses taking people to Ukraine and another staying in Russian-controlled territory.
Ukraine-bound evacuees had to make an arduous 19-hour journey from Oleshky to the Russian city of Anapa, on the Black Sea, and then through Belarus to Ukraine. On Saturday afternoon, they reunited with loved ones after years apart.
One man had survived 16 attacks by Russian drones and four missile strikes on his home, said the Ukrainian lawmaker, Mr. Lubinets.“One of the explosions occurred just one meter from the wall of his house,” he said.
Russia and Ukraine have imposed restrictions on media reporting from the scene and have declined to give numbers of evacuees. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi of Ukraine announced in Parliament on Friday that 527 people were being evacuated to Ukraine but swiftly retracted the statement.
The issue is sensitive because Russia’s ombudsman has said not many people wanted to leave, and Ukrainian officials have expressed concern that people have been living under Russian coercion. A Russian military blogger, Vladimir Romanov, posted on Telegram that 17 buses were heading to Ukraine and four buses to Russia. Soon after, he deleted his post.
Oleshky’s plight has drawn international attention. Pope Leo XIV, just three days after surgery for lung cancer, spoke with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and called for a cease-fire to enable evacuations, and Mrs. Trump announced the local truce last Friday.
After both sides declared a localized cease-fire that started on Tuesday, Russian and Ukrainian officials traveled together, on the first mission of its kind, to evacuate civilians.
The Russian military spent two days demining access roads Then Mr. Lubinets and Ms. Lantratova set off Thursday night with a fleet of 25 buses that could carry 750 people, as well as ambulances and trucks of humanitarian aid.
The agreed-upon route for the evacuation was through Russian-held territory, so only Russian forces were involved.
New York Times, Poland Deploys Riot Police in Standoff Over Country’s Top Court, Andrew Higgins, Oct. 31, 2026. After years of legal wrangling, judges backed by the current government suspended the chief justice, as a feud escalated with the right-wing party that last held power.
Poland’s centrist government deployed riot police at the country’s Constitutional Tribunal late Friday, amid an escalating confrontation between the prime minister, the president and allies of the previous right-wing government.
The police intervention followed an effort Friday by a group of government-backed judges to take control of the tribunal, the nation’s top court, from its chief justice, who is aligned with the previous government of Law and Justice, a hard-right nationalist party.
Ever since its election in 2022, the centrist coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been feuding with Law and Justice, which lost power in that vote. Among the most critical issues in the feud is the composition of the Constitutional Tribunal, which Law and Justice stacked with right-wing judges under the previous government.
Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, who was elected last year with support from Law and Justice and President Trump, interrupted a trip to Senegal to rush back to Warsaw. His plane turned around midair so that the president, a bitter foe of the current government, could join the fracas at the Constitutional Tribunal.ImageA man in a dark suit speaks into two microphones.Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s president, on a recent visit to the Philippines. The post is largely ceremonial in Poland, but he is strongly opposed to the current government.Credit...Pool photo by Ezra Acayan
The situation at the court was murky on Saturday: Inside, Mr. Nawrocki was in a standoff with the pro-government judges, while protesters in support of Law and Justice had gathered outside, held back by the police.
Bogdan Swieczkowski, the chief justice who was suspended by the government-backed judges, was not in the building. He said he would meet with allied judges on Saturday to decide what to do, adding that if the tribunal remained surrounded by the police, “We might end up issuing rulings from other locations.”
Adding to the confusion and acrimony, while the pro-government judges took control of the tribunal’s website, Mr. Swieczkowski’s supporters still held the court’s social media account, which they used to accuse their rivals of “committing the crime of a coup d’etat.”
For supporters of Prime Minister Tusk’s government, the struggle for control of the tribunal is an essential part of an effort by a democratically elected administration to reverse Law and Justice’s capture of the courts and other nominally independent institutions during its eight years in power between 2015 and 2023. Their opponents see it as an authoritarian push.A person in a dark blue suit and bright blue tie walks forward, their hand near their jacket button. Another person is partially visible nearby.Prime Minister Donald Tusk. His government, elected in 2022, argues that the constitutional court is illegitimate because several of its judges were appointed improperly during Law and Justice’s time in power. Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The election last year of Mr. Nawrocki as president, a largely ceremonial post, turned what had been a slow-burn struggle into a full-blown crisis when he refused to invite five new Constitutional Tribunal judges appointed by Parliament to the presidential palace to take their oaths.
Mr. Tusk’s government argues that the constitutional court, which has repeatedly blocked legislation enacted by Parliament, is illegitimate because several of its judges were appointed improperly during Law and Justice’s time in power. European courts ruled that these appointments meant that the Polish court was no longer an “independent and impartial tribunal,” but Law and Justice argues that these outside courts have no jurisdiction.
Mr. Tusk, in a post on X, said: “Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of Law and Justice’s lawlessness, this is a difficult, sometimes painful process that requires decisive action. There is no other way.”
With elections for a new Parliament looming next year, Mr. Tusk has come under increasing pressure from supporters to break the deadlock over the court so that the government can deliver on its legislative agenda before its time in office runs out.
Judges backed by Mr. Tusk’s government used the tribunal’s website to announce on Saturday that the chief justice, Mr. Swieczkowski, had been suspended from his duties. The move followed years of legal wrangling.
Mr. Swieczkowski tried later to enter the building after supporters of Law and Justice, who have held demonstrations outside the tribunal for weeks, cut a fence with power tools.
Warsaw’s police department, in a statement, said that it had sent officers to the court “in response to information provided by a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal, which indicated the potential for threats to the life or health of the Tribunal’s judges and staff, as well as a risk of public disorder.”
Anna Korwin-Piotrowski, a judge with a long career in the judiciary and a recent appointment to the Constitutional Tribunal, issued an order late Friday that the chief justice and his deputy had both been suspended.
She did this in her capacity as the Constitutional Tribunal judge with the longest judicial tenure and announced the move on Saturday on the tribunal’s website, now controlled by her allies.
Oct. 30
Top Headlines
This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim refuted by other sources
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Top Campaign Issue of the Decade Has Vanished, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 30, 2026. Don’t worry, though, it’ll come back.News Roundups
Here are the top headlines: Trump’s rambling Iran interview as tankers get hit in the Strait of Hormuz; The rally cancellation and the rally un-cancellation; Trump insulting a Reuters reporter’s weight, and the White House piling on; A federal judge launching an investigation into Trump DOJ attorneys over the East Potomac golf course; Ted Cruz warning of a Republican “bloodbath”; A DOJ criminal probe into California voter rolls; JD Vance’s disastrous Fox town hall; The Pentagon telling Europe to go easy on Russia; Trump amplifying calls to court-martial a fired general; Trump relitigating the “Russia hoax” as his regime embraces Russia. Oct. 30, 2026. Four days out, Donald Trump is in panic mode. Last night, he canceled his rallies in Kansas and Iowa, insisted Republicans were “doing very well,” and then told a reporter who asked if he was tired that he was “disgusting” and “looks like hell.” By this morning, he has reversed course, and the rallies are back on. You don’t flip-flop like that four days before an election unless you don’t like what you’re seeing.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Four Days Out A Desperate And Rattled Trump Is Cancelling Rallies, Throwing DOJ At The Elections, And Getting His Ass Kicked All Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 30, 2026. 315pm Today: Tom Bonier is dropping by for a deep dive into what we are seeing in the early vote - join us! Whatever happens now Trump never thought it would get to this. A
Oct. 30, 2026. In 2022, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, turned abortion access back into a state-level issue, and seemingly ushered in a new era of abortion-centric politics. For years, the issue was hotly contested: Red states passed laws slapping new abortion restrictions in place, while voters in many blue and red states passed ballot referendums rolling those restrictions back.Oct. 30, 2026. Republicans who thought that their seats were safe are now begging for a last-minute bailout as they fear that a Democratic blue wave is coming to wipe them out.
Ohio’s data center boom. But that boom has since become a political liability. A September poll found that among likely voters, three-quarters oppose having a data center built in their community, and 78 percent support a temporary ban on new construction.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
More On U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs
New York Times, Binance Suspends Withdrawals After Crypto Hackers Steal $6.3 Billion, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ryan Mac, Updated Oct. 30, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was compromised in what could be the biggest crypto heist ever. One research lab attributed the theft to “North Korea’s elite hacking unit.”
Oct. 30, 2026. The billionaires promise a technological paradise while predicting the decline of human labor. But if their gamble collapses, who loses their jobs, who keeps their fortunes, and who pays the bill?More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, A Sailor Jumped From the U.S.S. Lincoln. The Navy Punished Him, Jan Ransom, Oct. 29, 2026. The case offers a rare look at the military’s handling of mental health issues during extended deployments. Nicholas McKelvey had been aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln for 255 grueling days.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Oct. 30, 2026. It’s starting. Accountability has reared its head for ICE agents who’ve been engaged in a terror campaign across the country for Donald Trump.More U.S. Political Comments
In January I posted a scorecard of the major warnings I’d made about a second Trump term. Ninety percent had already come true. The handful that hadn’t are getting close.More Global News
Top Stories
This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim refuted by other sources
New York Times, U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War, Rebecca F. Elliott and Keith Collins, Oct. 30, 2026. That was almost three times as much as what businesses producing and refining oil in the United States made in the same period in 2025.
The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel.
That is a conservative estimate based on the performance of more than 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies, most of them producers or refiners, in the six months from April through September. It does not reflect profits earned in March, the first month of the war, or in October.
These companies earned less than $47 billion collectively during the same period in 2025, a challenging stretch when oil was cheaper and companies were navigating the early fallout from President Trump’s trade war.
The blockbuster oil profits this year highlight longstanding concerns about who gains, and who pays the price, when wars interrupt the flow of energy. As of this week, Americans had spent an extra $147 billion on gasoline and diesel since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. That amounts to more than $1,100 per household.
Some companies are benefiting more than others. U.S. refiners have fared especially well because fuel-making plants have been badly damaged by hostilities in the Middle East and Russia. With fewer refineries available to meet global demand, profit margins soared for those that remain online.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Top Campaign Issue of the Decade Has Vanished, Andrew 
Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 30, 2026. Don’t worry, though, it’ll come back.
We’re nearly to the climax of Spooky Season: The midterms are just four days away. Happy Friday.
News Roundups
Meidas Touch Network, Friday Afternoon Updates: Trump Is Panicking Four Days Out, Ben Meiselas, right,Oct. 30, 2026. We made it to the end of another week. Here are the top headlines:
A few important notes before we dive in:
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Trump on Iran: “Minor Details”
Trump called into KCMO’s “Mundo in the Morning” in Kansas City and said that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, he’d be addressing them as “sir,” and he refuses to do that. This has to be the WORST message I’ve ever heard. Trump is telling the entire world if you want respect, get a nuclear weapon. That’s how you incentivize proliferation.
He also said the U.S. needs a guarantee Iran will never build a nuclear weapon. That guarantee existed. It was called the JCPOA, AKA the Obama nuclear deal, and Trump ripped it up. He then claimed that Iran’s leaders are “so gone, we don’t know who to negotiate with,” and called that a minor detail. He also claimed he didn’t start this war because Iran started it in 1979.
Meanwhile, the war Trump says is wrapping up keeps escalating. The IRGC says a supertanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz this morning, the third oil tanker hit today. A UAE-managed tanker called STONE was hailed by the IRGC Navy and slowed from about 14 knots to 4.5. Iranian state news agency IRNA confirmed Qatari mediators arrived in Tehran, led by a senior adviser to Qatar’s prime minister, as the regime scrambles for something to show before Tuesday.
CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper posted a video saying he flew over the Strait, saw no IRGC, and that the U.S. has helped Gulf partners export more than 1.5 billion barrels of crude. Diesel and gas still near record highs and there’s no plan to end this. Propaganda videos aren’t going to fix that.
Even worse, as we reported yesterday, the U.S. Army is training soldiers to dig mass battlefield graves for American troops for the first time in decades, something the Army says it hasn’t needed at scale since the Korean War. More on that here.
Sen. Chris Murphy said this week that after a briefing on the administration’s plan for restarting military operations, he considers the plan insane and expects it to cause devastating escalation. Murphy said the plan involves the destruction of civilian infrastructure: power plants, bridges, etc… In other words, blatant war crimes.
Voters are noticing. On MS NOW’s “State of Play,” a North Carolina Trump voter said it breaks her heart that Trump is starting wars that are destroying the economy. Another, asked for one word to describe the war, chose one I won’t print here. But you can watch for yourself:
Another 2024 Trump voter, asked what she would tell herself if she could go back to Election Day, said: “Don't [vote for Trump]. I didn't use my better judgment.”
The Rally Flip-Flop
Last night, Trump’s team scrapped in-person rallies this weekend in favor of “tele-rallies,” and MAGA Inc. announced phone rallies across 19 states. CNN reported Trump dropped a Kansas trip for Sen. Roger Marshall, who explained Trump was probably skipping him because Marshall is doing so well in the polls. Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.
When a Reuters reporter asked Trump why he was no longer going to Kansas, Trump snapped, calling the reporter disgusting and telling him to get in shape because he looked like hell. Then the official White House Rapid Response account posted images of a man, apparently that reporter, eating snacks in a car with the caption “Sloppy!”
By this morning, per CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Fox News, the Kansas and Iowa rallies were apparently back on for Sunday. Trump probably didn’t like the optics of him appearing to throw in the towel days before midterms. This comes after weeks of Trump speaking in small high school gyms, often to hecklers demanding the Epstein files, while Barack Obama fills arenas.
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Judge Launches Investigation Into Trump DOJ Attorneys
I wrote about this one today for MeidasNews, based on live courtroom reporting from our own Scott MacFarlane. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes will appoint a special master to investigate whether Trump administration attorneys misrepresented facts about closing and renovating the East Potomac Park golf course, including whether they advised a National Park Service official to leave details out of an October 9 declaration. She also ordered evidence preserved. Work at the park is already frozen by court order.
The core issue is simple. On October 18, Trump posted that the course would close November 15. The next day, DOJ said there was no such plan. Days later, the administration admitted there was.
Reyes opened by reading the rules against misleading the court. One DOJ attorney said he’d made no false statements “to my knowledge,” explaining he was new and they have lots of binders. An Interior official asked what Reyes meant by “involved,” so she pulled out a dictionary. When Assistant AG Stanley Woodward suggested interpreting Trump’s public posts implicated executive privilege, Reyes pointed out that Trump posted it and called that an extraordinary view of privilege.
Then the money. DOJ disclosed the seawall alone could cost $150 million to $400 million. No one has appropriated it. Asked for a total estimate, an attorney said there wasn’t one and asked why she’d assume there was. When Reyes said someone at Interior must have thought about the cost, the attorney called that “deliberative.” Reyes asked whether Interior doesn’t want the American people to know what this costs. As MacFarlane noted, Trump is poised to spend roughly half a billion dollars on a golf course on the eve of an election about affordability.Midterms: Four Days Out
More than 23 million mail ballots have been cast, per CNN/AP/Catalist data. In Texas, Ted Cruz warned Republicans could lose every statewide race and said that if the election were today it would be a bloodbath. At a Ken Paxton event, a speaker begged attendees not to leave so the media wouldn’t report that people don’t like Paxton.
I’ve been enjoying showing you these funny clips:
In Alaska, Trump claimed you need a 190 IQ to understand the ballot because people don’t know what “incumbent” means. He thinks so highly of the intelligence of his own voters, doesn’t he?
An Anchorage voter told CNN it was clear in black and white, without her glasses on. No confusion whatsoever. Alaska’s courts and elections board have already weighed in. This is a manufactured election attack.
In Ohio, pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo wore an “Amy Acton for Governor” shirt at her concert, a major endorsement for Acton ahead of the gubernatorial election.Image
Also in Ohio, Canton farmers Anita and Sam Smith told CNN a proposed data center next door will bring nothing but destruction to the life they planned at 70.
Also: The New York Times reports the DOJ has opened a criminal investigation and issued grand jury subpoenas to California election officials in its push to claim noncitizens are on voter rolls, days before the election.
Expect a lot from the Trump regime working to delegitimize and attack these elections. But don’t let them scare you. Ignore the noise and vote.
Vance’s Fox Town Hall
At Jesse Watters’ Fox town hall in Fort Worth, a TCU Turning Point USA leader asked JD Vance how her generation can afford homes and families. It was a genuinely good question, which demanded a serious answer.
Vance opened by noting he was disappointed he’d only been asked about Jon Husted’s ass once. He also attacked Obama as elitist over the Cheesecake Factory jab and fielded a question about Halloween costumes.
Here’s the Vance “ass” joke. Buckle up for second-hand embarrassment.
A Texas mom said her daughter received a letter about transitioning, and Vance said he wants DOJ to investigate. These fliers have already been found to be sent by a REPUBLICAN group in order to scare voters.
Quick Hits
Russia: Reuters reports Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby urged NATO allies to stop “poking” Moscow. Meanwhile, reports say Russia fired around eight Iskander ballistic missiles at Kyiv in minutes.
Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia: Trump reshared influencer smears that Hegseth fired Sylvia over alleged leaks, plus a Catturd post demanding a court-martial and Leavenworth.
“Russia hoax”: Trump was sharing posts from allies about the “Russia hoax” on the same day his Pentagon was asking Europe to be nicer to Russia.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Panics and Revives Canceled Rallies, Vance Mocked, Iran Strikes Readied, North Korea’s Record Heist, and Much More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 30, 2026. Four days out, Donald Trump is in panic mode. Last night, he canceled his rallies in Kansas and Iowa, insisted Republicans were “doing very well,” and then told a reporter who asked if he was tired that he was “disgusting” and “looks like hell.” By this morning, he has reversed course, and the rallies are back on. You don’t flip-flop like that four days before an election unless you don’t like what you’re seeing.
And Republicans don’t like what they’re seeing either. House Republicans are no longer debating whether they’ll lose the majority, only by how many seats. Even Ron DeSantis admits GOP turnout in Florida isn’t where it needs to be. Meanwhile, JD Vance answered a young voter’s question about housing costs with a joke about Sen. Jon Husted’s backside, then admitted that “most Republicans” don’t pay enough attention to affordability.
Meanwhile, the threats overseas are growing. Trump says the Iran war will be “wrapped up soon,” but the Pentagon is preparing strike options for after the election, tankers keep catching fire in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranian lawmakers are openly asking their new supreme leader for permission to build a nuclear bomb. And North Korea is accused of pulling off the largest crypto heist in history, stealing $6.3 billion from Binance, the exchange whose founder Trump pardoned.
Almost all of it points to one day: Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know today.
JD Vance Answers a Young Voter’s Question About Housing Costs With a Joke About Jon Husted’s Butt, Then Says “Most Republicans” Ignore Affordability
Vice President JD Vance opened his answer to a young conservative’s question about housing costs with a joke about Sen. Jon Husted’s backside during a Fox News town hall Thursday night. Kate White, a Texas Christian University student and vice president of her school’s Turning Point USA chapter, asked how Republicans expect young people to start families “when the average price of a home in America now costs more than $415,000, which just feels out of reach for us.”
Vance responded: “I want to point out that I think that I’ve been asked four or maybe five questions by my count, I’ve only been asked one question about Jon Husted’s a*s and it was by Jesse Watters.” Watters laughed, and Vance joked that the Fox host should run for Senate as a Democrat in Texas. The reference was to Trump, who has talked about Husted’s backside in at least three separate rally speeches. The clip quickly went viral, with critics calling it “tone deaf.”
Vance’s eventual answer wasn’t much better, and the backlash was swift, including from people who want him to be the GOP nominee in 2028 so he can be beaten. Vance blamed high housing costs on undocumented immigration and purchases by Wall Street and foreign investors, then told young people not to wait until they can afford a family. “It’s never the right time, so go ahead and do it, because you’re never going to regret getting married and having kids,” he said. Watters added, “Sometimes, you know, when you’re in love, you just get pregnant, and you figure it out.”
Former Trump White House aide Sarah Matthews wrote, “I genuinely cannot believe this is a real exchange between a voter and the Vice President of the United States.” Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau asked, “How is this real and how is he this bad at politics?” and Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan wrote, “If Vance is the candidate in 2028, he will be eminently beatable.”
In the same answer, Vance admitted that “most Republicans” don’t pay enough attention to affordability for young people, and he cast himself as the exception. “You’re absolutely right. Most Republicans don’t. I think that I’m an exception,” Vance said, adding that Trump is “very focused” on helping young people afford the American dream. But polls show Americans overwhelmingly believe Trump is neglecting cost-of-living issues, and Trump has often brushed off affordability concerns, as CNN’s Aaron Blake notes. Blake argues it’s the latest example of Vance quietly distancing himself from Trump with an eye on 2028, after reports of his private objections to the Iran war and his decision not to echo Trump’s endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of his own party, four days before Republicans, though not Vance himself, are on the ballot.
Trump Erupts at Reporter Over Canceled Rallies as Republicans Brace for a “Brutal” Election Night
Trump lashed out at a Reuters reporter who asked whether he canceled his Kansas rally because he was “sick of traveling.” “Oh you’re sick to ask that question. You are sick,” Trump said Thursday. “Look at this guy. He’s way out of shape... You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.” Trump, 80, insisted he skipped Kansas because Sen. Roger Marshall is “doing very well,” even though a new CNN poll shows Marshall trailing Democrat Adam Hamilton 49% to 45% and 57% of Kansas voters disapproving of Trump. Trump has held 25 rallies this month and has grown hoarse, admitting Monday that “God didn’t make your vocal cords to do a rally every day.” Days ago, he was touting his rallies as proof he was lifting Republicans in the polls.
Hours after the outburst, Trump also canceled his Sunday rally in Iowa, and Vice President JD Vance scrapped a Friday event in Minnesota. This morning, Trump decided to go back to Kansas and Iowa after facing major questions. CNN has confirmed that Trump’s rallies are indeed happening once again.
Republicans are privately bracing for a “brutal” election night with losses in once-safe Trump territory, according to POLITICO. House Republicans are no longer discussing whether they’ll lose the majority but by how many 
seats, and endangered GOP incumbents in once-safe districts have been begging party leaders for more money. Some even stopped doing their own polling weeks ago to save every dollar, according to three people involved. “It could be quite a brutal evening,” one senior Republican said. “Once the dominoes start falling it becomes hard to stop them.” Asked about the environment, one GOP strategist simply sent a video of a burning dumpster being swept away by floodwaters. Another senior Republican warned that any Democrat claiming they aren’t winning the Senate is “sandbagging expectations.”
The warning signs are showing up in some of the reddest places on the map. Republicans say Vivek Ramaswamy’s numbers in Ohio have “gone off a cliff” since his ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother, and GOP worries have even crept into Louisiana, a state Trump won by 22 points, where Republicans now expect only a single-digit win in the Senate race. In South Texas districts Republicans redrew in their favor, one official said no amount of new money will stop “the upcoming catastrophe,” and North Carolina’s open 11th District is considered close to gone. Republicans also fear that young men who voted for Trump will stay home over high costs and the Iran war. “I didn’t vote for this,” a 20-year-old first-time Trump voter told POLITICO at a Wisconsin gas station, saying he won’t vote this year. One GOP strategist summed it up: “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It might be a semi-truck, but at least I can see it.”
Even in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is sounding the alarm that Republican voters aren’t showing up. “I don’t necessarily want to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t think the turnout has been as strong as we would like to see,” DeSantis said this week. He contrasted it with his 2022 landslide, when “you could put hot coals on the ground in front of the polling place and our people were going to walk over those barefoot.” DeSantis said engagement is weaker among Republicans in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, while “the Democrats have turned out pretty good.” Republicans hold a roughly 1.5 million voter registration advantage in Florida, but DeSantis warned that numbers mean little if voters stay home. “Republicans have some work to do,” he said.
Trump Says Iran War Will Be “Wrapped Up Soon” as the Pentagon Prepares Strike Options and Diplomats Race to Stop a Post-Election Escalation
Trump says the Iran war is “going to get wrapped up soon,” but he won’t say how, and his administration is sending sharply mixed signals four days before the midterms. “We need a guarantee there’ll never be a nuclear weapon,” Trump told Kansas City radio station KCMO on Friday, after saying the U.S. would not strike Iran before the election. On Thursday, Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper briefed Trump on options for renewed attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times has reported that the U.S. and Israel have drawn up joint plans to strike Iran after Nov. 3. Fox News reports that military forces are being moved to give Trump options, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing for new strikes to remove the Iranian threat “once and for all.” At the same time, the Washington Post reports that Vice President JD Vance offered to meet Iran’s top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, in person to negotiate an end to the war. Vance told Fox, “Donald Trump is never going to let this be a forever war.”
Qatari mediators are back in Tehran with a revised peace proposal, and a source tells CBS News there are signs of progress. The delegation is delivering edits to a draft deal first presented last Sunday, and the talks are being coordinated with the U.S., an official told Reuters. Iran is expected to respond by the weekend, and the goal is to head off a new U.S. military campaign. But Tehran is publicly holding firm, with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declaring that “the carrot-and-stick approach has no effect on Iran” and that no deal is possible until the U.S. accepts Iran’s seven conditions. Those include lifting the U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports, easing sanctions, and unfreezing Iranian assets abroad, and Iran still hasn’t answered Vance’s letter. Al Jazeera reports that Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are all pressing for a breakthrough amid expectations across the region of a “huge escalation” after the midterms.
The top U.S. commander in the Middle East insists the Strait of Hormuz is safe, even as ships keep catching fire there. In a video Friday, Adm. Cooper claimed Iran’s navy is “all at the bottom of the sea” and that the strait’s main shipping routes are “free and clear” of mines. Within hours, Iran’s navy said two more tankers had struck mines and caught fire in the eastern part of the strait, after it claimed four tankers hit mines on Thursday. Britain’s maritime monitor confirmed a tanker was hit by a projectile Thursday evening, and a smaller vessel that caught fire nearby has sunk. On Friday, Oman’s navy said it rescued 25 crew members from a Panamanian-flagged ship that was “targeted” and set ablaze off its coast. Iran says ships using the southern route that the U.S. promotes are traveling “unauthorized” waters and is holding their owners responsible.
The Pentagon’s top war planner, fired this week, has admitted to leaking classified information about Iran and Ukraine, according to Axios. An internal investigation found that Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia confessed on video after failing four polygraph tests, Axios reported, though a defense official told Fox News he failed three. Investigators say the leaks began as early as June 2025 and involved encrypted Signal messages, a meeting with a reporter at a Virginia diner, and handwritten notes from a classified document about U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The case has been referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Trump said Sylvia is going to have “big problems” and that his administration is “very much looking for leakers.” “We vowed to find you, and we meant it,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X.
The human and economic toll of the war keeps climbing, with 23 U.S. service members now dead. The Pentagon added two more noncombat deaths this week, both airmen, bringing the total to 11 killed by enemy fire and 12 in nonhostile incidents such as accidents and illness. Iran-backed Houthi rebels fired two ballistic missiles at Riyadh on Thursday, and falling shrapnel injured a Saudi citizen and damaged a home. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh has warned of possible attacks on airports, and the State Department last week ordered some diplomats to leave Saudi Arabia. ExxonMobil’s CEO and a top Chevron executive have pulled out of next week’s major oil conference in Abu Dhabi over security fears, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation found Iran has smuggled at least $2 billion in weapons components past U.S. sanctions and the blockade since 2025.
Hard-line Iranian lawmakers are openly pushing the country’s new supreme leader to approve building a nuclear bomb. Lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian said Thursday that he asked Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei for permission to build “an atomic bomb” at a public gathering in Qom, where the crowd cheered in approval. Another lawmaker said earlier this month that the late Ali Khamenei’s religious ruling against nuclear weapons could be reconsidered, adding that calls for “ultimate military deterrence” are spreading among Friday prayer leaders. The International Atomic Energy Agency is demanding that its inspectors be allowed back into Iran’s nuclear sites to verify the program. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz said Iran “cannot explain away its failure to cooperate” with inspectors. “The United States and our partners will NEVER allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Period. End of story,” he wrote on X.
Trump-Pardoned Crypto Giant Binance Hit by $6.3 Billion Hack, the Biggest Crypto Heist Ever, Blamed on North Korea
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suspended all withdrawals after hackers stole about $6.3 billion in digital assets in what experts call the largest crypto theft on record. The attack more than quadruples the previous record, North Korea’s $1.5 billion hack of the exchange Bybit in February 2025. Binance first believed hackers got in through a compromised engineer’s laptop but now says it has found “additional points of breach” in what it calls a “complex hack.” The company says it will “cover all losses” and expects to let customers withdraw money again within two days. About half of the stolen assets have been frozen with help from other crypto firms, including Tether and Circle, but TRM Labs estimates about $2.4 billion has already been moved “beyond any issuer’s reach.” “It hurts, but we will survive,” founder Changpeng Zhao wrote on X.
Several crypto research firms say the hack was carried out by North Korea’s elite hacking unit, which Western intelligence says funds the regime’s nuclear weapons program. TRM Labs, Chainalysis, and Check Point all linked the attack to a North Korean group known as TraderTraitor, also called the Lazarus Group, which was blamed for the Bybit heist. TRM Labs’ Ari Redbord called the hack a “watershed moment” unlike anything the industry has seen. Check Point warned that “attackers no longer need the vault keys” and are instead targeting the systems and people who control them. Western security agencies have previously said North Korea uses stolen crypto to pay for its nuclear and missile programs, though the regime has denied involvement in past hacks. Binance says it is working with law enforcement “to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.”
The hack hits close to Trump, who pardoned Binance’s founder and whose family’s crypto business has partnered with the exchange. Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws and paid $4.3 billion in penalties, and Zhao served four months in federal prison before Trump pardoned him. Binance has since formed a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture and a major source of the president’s wealth, which says it helped freeze stolen funds. Trump has pledged to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet,” but as the New York Times notes, the industry “remains a wild west, vulnerable to hacks and fraud.” After the hack, Bitcoin fell below $80,000 for the first time in more than a month, and shares of Coinbase, Robinhood, and Strategy dropped more than 6% in premarket trading. Zhao even suggested Binance could sell its stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, now worth more than $1 billion, to cover customer losses.
Other news:
Seven congressional Democrats are demanding answers from ICE over its treatment of hunger strikers at a Texas detention center who say they’ve been threatened with force-feeding. Detainees at the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville launched the hunger strike on Oct. 11 to protest substandard medical care, undrinkable water, abuse by guards, and their prolonged detention, and 14 to 24 people are still refusing food. In a letter led by Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez and signed by Texas Reps. Greg Casar and Jasmine Crockett, the lawmakers wrote that DHS “continues to demonstrate gross disregard for the health, dignity, personhood, and safety of our communities” and demanded that ICE “refrain from force-feeding any person in your custody.” The husband of one striker, a Russian asylum seeker, says she has been denied medical care for leg and hip pain and a growth, and that women were told they’d be transferred elsewhere to be force-fed. ICE calls the threats “FALSE,” and DHS said lawmakers should be “thanking our law enforcement for removing these dangerous criminals,” but it offered no evidence that the strikers have any criminal history. The letter follows a hunger strike at a Georgia ICE facility where a detainee recently died.
Government corruption is now the second most important issue for voters in the midterms, behind only the cost of living, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian. Nearly nine in 10 Americans say corruption is a problem, and 78% agree that “elected officials care more about enriching themselves than helping people like me.” Voters are twice as likely to say Republicans have the bigger corruption problem, 40% to 21%, including 29% of Republicans themselves. Independents blame Republicans over Democrats 34% to 13%, while 42% say both parties share the problem equally. The findings come as Trump has built a $400 million ballroom largely funded by corporate donors, accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar, and made $1 billion from his family’s crypto business since returning to office, according to the Guardian. “Americans are triggered by leaders they now see as both responsible for and profiting off their growing economic hardship,” said Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema.
Israel’s final election results confirm that Netanyahu’s bloc has lost its parliamentary majority, setting up weeks of tough coalition talks. Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats, the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot, below left, won 48, and Arab-led parties won a historic 19, leaving no one with the 61 seats needed to govern. Netanyahu, right, and Likud amplified 
unsupported claims that Arab parties “stole” the election with foreign help, and on 
Friday Netanyahu declared it “forbidden” to form a coalition with them. The head of the election committee said reports about a related investigation are “entirely unfounded” and that it “does not affect the final results,” and the committee called allegations of systematic fraud “baseless.” When the new Knesset is sworn in on Nov. 10, the opposition and Arab parties could team up to elect a new speaker and take control of the parliamentary agenda. If Netanyahu loses power, he would face accountability over corruption allegations and an almost certain inquiry into the security failures before Oct. 7.
Pope Leo XIV, a registered Illinois voter, has requested an absentee ballot for Tuesday’s midterms and could become the first pope ever to vote in a U.S. election. The Will County Clerk’s Office confirmed that Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost, requested a mail ballot to be sent to Vatican City on Oct. 3, though it hasn’t been returned yet. Leo, who had lung cancer surgery this month, has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s war in Iran and its treatment of immigrants. After Leo called for peace in April, Trump called him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” and said, “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo.” Leo responded that he had “no fear of the Trump administration,” and Vice President JD Vance has warned him to “be careful” when discussing theology. Public records show Leo has voted in past general elections and in Republican primaries in 2012, 2014, and 2016.
Former FBI Director James Comey’s lawyers are in court Friday trying to throw out the third criminal case the Trump administration has brought against him in 13 months. The new case accuses Comey of authorizing his staff in 2016 to talk to a New York Times reporter about a story involving classified information. Comey’s lawyers say it’s invalid because no grand jury indicted him before the 10-year statute of limitations ran out, and prosecutors instead filed the charges directly without a judge’s sign-off. They also believe the government planned to arrest him on the Friday before Columbus Day weekend so he would sit in jail over the holiday. The first case against Comey was thrown out because the prosecutor was unlawfully serving, and a second, over an Instagram photo of seashells spelling “8647,” has been pushed to 2027. “Somebody is dictating this process, saying, ‘Bring the case,’” said former federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff. “The case is going to go nowhere.”
Three people were killed when two helicopters collided over a farm field near McMinnville, Oregon, about 35 miles southwest of Portland, on Thursday afternoon. The victims were pilot Tyler Sturdevant, 38, of Oregon, flight instructor Maddie Aasbo, 22, of Texas, and a student pilot from the United Kingdom whose name has not been released. Aasbo and the student were in one helicopter, and Sturdevant was in the other. The FAA says the crash involved a two-seat Robinson R22 and a larger Airbus H125, and one of the aircraft belonged to a flight school based at McMinnville Airport. Photos show one helicopter upside down in the field and the other crumpled in pieces. The FAA and NTSB are investigating, and a stretch of Highway 233 was closed.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is calling for a rapid expansion of the country’s drone program and personally watched a new round of weapons tests. Kim told an exhibition of attack drones that North Korea must seize “the absolute superiority in the drone technology,” state media reported Friday. South Korea’s military detected about 10 short-range ballistic missiles fired from the east coast on Thursday, North Korea’s first ballistic launches in 17 days. Kim was photographed alongside his teenage daughter, whom South Korean intelligence considers his likely heir. Experts say North Korean troops sent to fight for Russia in Ukraine have likely gained valuable drone warfare experience. Tensions are high on the Korean border after land mine blasts wounded three South Korean soldiers last month, and Pyongyang has stepped up weapons tests as Trump signals interest in restarting talks with Kim.
Spain’s government and its rail unions are clashing over who is to blame for the high-speed train collision that killed 69 people near Toledo. Transport Minister Óscar Puente, who faces calls to resign, has blamed a traffic controller who told a train to resume full speed despite a stop signal, calling it “inexplicable” and “erroneous.” But unions say controllers are overworked and understaffed, and that the 30-year-old automatic safety system has failed repeatedly. “Human error isn’t incomprehensible. What is incomprehensible is that the safety system is regularly failing,” said a spokesperson for the controllers’ union. Both of this year’s deadly crashes on the Madrid-Seville line involved a state-owned Renfe train and a private Iryo train, and unions say traffic has surged since the network opened to private operators in 2021. A judge and a government commission are investigating, and King Felipe VI said, “We will have to take measures so this never happens again.”
Tech stocks are set to lose more than $1 trillion in value Friday as investors grow more worried about the massive spending on AI. Amazon fell 7% in early trading after reporting that its AI spending was growing faster than expected while its core shopping business slowed, and CEO Andy Jassy said the company will spend about $220 billion this year and “meaningfully more” in 2027. Intel plunged 26% after warning that profits and sales would come in lower than expected because of supply shortages and a memory chip crunch. The selloff follows Alphabet’s worst day ever on Thursday, when it lost about $500 billion in market value, the second-largest one-day loss in market history. Investors are increasingly questioning whether hundreds of billions of dollars in AI spending will actually pay off. The U.S. government, which took a stake in Intel during its turnaround, is now the company’s largest shareholder.
Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row prisoner who survived a botched lethal injection last month, says there’s “pain in my mind and in my soul.” Pike, 50, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, survived after two rounds of lethal drugs had already entered her body on Sept. 30, making her the first person known to survive a lethal injection after the drugs were given. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak,” she said in her first public statement, adding, “healing is not the same as being okay.” Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions through the end of the year and ordered an independent review, and the state’s corrections commissioner is stepping down. But Lee has refused to commute her sentence, saying, “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before.” Pike was convicted of the brutal 1995 murder of a 19-year-old classmate, and she said she continues to think about her victim’s family and “the terrible pain and loss they have endured.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Four Days Out A Desperate And Rattled Trump Is Cancelling Rallies, Throwing DOJ At The Elections, And Getting His Ass Kicked All Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 30, 2026. 315pm Today: Tom Bonier is dropping by for a deep dive into what we are seeing in the early vote - join us!
Yes, this really happened yesterday:Cancelling rallies in critical battlegrounds in the final weekend of the election is…..um……really wild.
As I was hitting send the White House announced the rallies are back on! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The dude is closing with chaos, loads and loads of chaos……
Whatever happens now Trump never thought it would get to this. After all he escaped prison and retook the White House in 2024. He had conquered Venezuela and stolen their oil. He had looted the Treasury, stuffed his pockets, buried the Epstein files, and is building himself an Imperial enclave. He had launched a big war, a war that no one else had dared to wage, for he was mighty, an historic strongman, and he would be bring generations of glory to the Trump name. The stock market had boomed and he was successfully enriching his friends and cutting their taxes too. The titanic pay to play scheme he built would yield the Republicans unprecedented campaign cash, building a campaign fire wall that would ensure they keep the Senate no matter what happened in the House. He and his allies had successfully taken control of immensely powerful social and legacy media orgs, and successfully bullied and censored others. The right-wing noise machine supported by his Russian allies kept poisoning our discourse 24/7/365. Schumer and Jeffries were little people, he believed, not capable of mounting any kind of serious opposition. His quislings at the Fed would make sure the economy would be good. He would launch a huge end of election rally blitz that would re-awaken the faithful and lead them to victory once again. While things might get bumpy and spicy at the end of the day everything would be fine. He always found a way. The newly crowned Emperor of the Americas would once again slay his enemies and bring victory home to Natalie and MAGAland. The crowds would cheer, he would keep getting rich, and Todd Blanche would keep the legal lilliputians like Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Katie Phang and those Dem AGs at bay. Everything would be fine.
But everything is really not fine.
Democrats saw heightened performance in special elections all over the country these past two years. We blew it out in the November elections last year. We saw elevated performances in the primaries all across the US his year. Our candidates have raised gobs of money and the House Democrats have outraised little Mikie J. Inflation kept rising, job growth kept slowing, his glorious war went to shit, and his poll numbers just keep falling. The VP turned out to be a lifeless dud. His friend Lindsay passed. An American anti-Trump was elected Pope. Orban fell in Hungary. Putin kept getting humiliated by that little guy from Ukraine. His business partners in Saudi Arabia are getting routed by the Houthis. The Labour Party in the UK found a new leader and pushed the MAGA Reform Party into second place and escalating disarray. Vivek took a big, vile swing and gave away Ohio. Paxton turned out to be the shit candidate everyone warned him about. He had to fire lots of misbehaving staff, almost all women of course. The leaks from inside became a geyser. Then this week his allies in Serbia, Brazil, and Israel all lost their elections - yikes! The oligarch funded Senate firewall collapsed. And the old, unwell, addled, traitorous, rapacious, venal, big, blubbery baby man was forced to confront his failure and decline by having to campaign to embarrassingly small crowds in places like Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Carolina. He began repeatedly gushing over the beauty and strength of manly men, perhaps as a way of attempting to restore his own. Texas, of all places, was falling. The faithful weren’t showing up in the early vote and young, Black, and Hispanic voters - them - were showing up bigly. So, what to do?
RETREAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-- and throw Todd and the “Justice” Department at the elections.
Here’s the home page of Politico right now:
Yes, the Washington Post actually found Adam Hamilton up by 9 points today. We haven’t won a Senate race in Kansas in 94 years.
Here are the other polls we are seeing this week. Lots and lots of blue!
Here’s the generic ballot from FiftyPlusOne:Here’s my latest early vote summary -- turnout is running way ahead of 2022, and we continue to see a remarkable surge of young, Black, and Hispanic voters into the electorate. “Those people” are turning out in big numbers against the rancid racist in the White House:
As for throwing Todd and the DOJ at the elections, this is not something we should take lightly or dismiss. Given that both Bolsonaro and Bibi have claimed their elections were rigged and illegitimate -- for of course the only way mighty MAGA men could lose is if the other side cheated -- we have to anticipate that Trump is going to wage an intense campaign to delegitimize the elections, our victories, and our eventual assumption of power.
The likelihood that the electoral battle with Trump goes on for weeks or months has risen -- it is what he did the last time he lost in 2020 -- and we must be prepared, not scared. DOJ initiated subpoenas are flying in Alaska and California. US Attorneys have been turned into localized regime actors advancing their malicious schemes. On-line accounts are claiming Rs are winning the early vote not getting routed - as a predicate to make the case for our “rigging” and “stealing” the election. Trump helped Bolsonaro avoid prosecution and is allowing him to set up something like a government exile - a very ominous sign about where Trump’s head is at right now.
The first thing we must do is to keep driving the early vote, run up the score, and win this election by as big a margin as possible. Bolsonaro and Bibi are fighting, but Orban in Hungary and Vucic in Serbia chose not to. It is not a given that he fights and what we do in the next few days may determine whether he does.
But if he does we will be ready. What can you do? Call your state or local Democratic Party today and volunteer for this weekend, Election Day, and beyond if needed. Go to work. Drive the early vote. Protect our election on Election Day and beyond. Go to work. Do not sit idle and become overwhelmed by worry these next few days. Do.
Tom Bonier is coming by at 315pm to talk about the latest polling and what we are seeing in the early vote. It will be a great way to cap off what has been a very good week for us, and as we prepare for this critical, final weekend. Join us by clicking here at 315pm.
Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Blow Out The Midterms, And Prevent Their Neverending Fuckery From Winning The Day
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Where’d Roe Go? Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 30, 2026. In 2022, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, turned abortion access back into a state-level issue, and seemingly ushered in a new era of abortion-centric politics. For years, the issue was hotly contested: Red states passed laws slapping new abortion restrictions in place, while voters in many blue and red states passed ballot referendums rolling those restrictions back.
In 2022 and especially 2024, Democrats spent heavily messaging the issue: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned in front of a “RESTORE ROE” banner while trying to stave off the comeback of a president who had embraced the label “the most pro-life president in American history.”
Today, however, abortion politics is an afterthought. A few states¹ have abortion-policy ballot measures on the ballot this year, and the issue has come up in a few races: In Maine, Troy Jackson has repeatedly attacked Sen. Susan Collins for her votes to confirm the Supreme Court justices who ultimately struck down Roe, while Collins has pointed out that Jackson opposed abortion early in his legislative career.
By and large, though, the issue has vanished from candidates’ stump speeches and from the airwaves. This summer, AdImpact estimated that Democrats were buying ads mentioning abortion four times less than in the same period in 2024. Adsmom, a platform that tracks digital ad spending on Meta and Google, found that political spending on abortion ads in October came fifteenth among 26 different topics, below issues like data centers and the climate.
It’s common for one party or the other to inch away from a given issue as it becomes clear the opposition has the more popular position. What’s strange today is that both parties have dropped abortion messaging—for totally different reasons.
For Democrats, it’s mostly a matter of other issues crowding abortion out. In 2022 and 2024, when Democrats held the presidency, it was Republicans who were making the kick-the-bums-out cost-of-living message. Today, amid growing anger about rising prices thanks to tariffs and the Iran war, Democrats seem to see every moment not spent uttering the word “affordability” as a moment wasted.
Cost of living, Democratic strategist David Axelrod told The Bulwark, is “an urgent issue that unifies the largest number of people, so it makes sense that other issues, such as abortion, are playing a lesser role.”
Meanwhile, as Trump has become deeply unpopular and Democrats have pushed the political map deep into red states, they’re suddenly competing for the votes of plenty of Americans who may not fully agree with them on abortion politics. Here, too, it makes more sense to stick to the grand unifying theme of affordability.
“I think the reproductive freedom conversation—although very important—is a very specialized and nuanced conversation,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina. “You don’t think about that when you’re going to pay your light bill.”
All that makes sense. But it also makes it somewhat stranger that Republicans, playing defense in so many red states, aren’t turning to abortion politics to try to rally the troops. The GOP’s midterm strategy has been to give up independents for lost and spend all their time and energy juicing base turnout—so where’s the rally-round messaging for pro-lifers?
One major factor is that Trump and his allies, having seen abortion-access initiatives pass even in red states in 2022 and 2024, are no longer confident that their base actually finds abortion politics particularly motivating. While abortion remains an animating issue for highly religious voters, most social conservatives seem to have executed a Trump-led pivot toward other culture-war issues—most notably rabble-rousing about trans people—without much complaining.
“The pro-life movement died when Trump said it was a state issue. It’s not part of the Republican coalition right now. It’s a side issue. This is tragic, obviously, but it’s the truth.”–A social-conservative operative
Even for the highly anti-abortion conservatives that remain, Republicans today would just as soon have them thinking about something else. That’s because, among the major issue groups of the GOP coalition, they alone have not received the major executive action they’ve sought: The “most pro-life president in history” has not changed FDA regulations to forbid sending the abortion drug mifepristone through the mail.
The administration has been slow-walking a long-promised review on the subject, plainly trying to get to the far side of the midterms before making any decisions. Pro-life groups haven’t been impressed. “The FDA’s court-ordered update on its abortion-drug study is alarming,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said this month. “Instead of the promised gold-standard study, the FDA is trying to peddle fool’s gold.”
Even though nobody seems to want to talk about it right now, abortion politics isn’t going away for good. If Democrats retake a trifecta in 2028, they will likely face major base pressure to re-codify Roe in federal law. And when the midterms are past, the FDA will be out of excuses: Sooner or later, it will have to rule on mifepristone, and some coalition of Americans isn’t going to like it when they do. Whatever abortion-politics hiatus we’re on now, it isn’t going to last.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Republicans Are Begging Billionaires For Bailouts As They See A Blue Wave Wipeout Coming, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 30, 2026. Republicans who thought that their seats were safe are now begging for a last-minute bailout as they fear that a Democratic blue wave is coming to wipe them out.
Republicans have known for more than a year that the 2026 midterm election could be bad for them. The House was going to be hard to keep, and the hope was that the GOP could turn control of the House into a partisan turnout rock fight that would let them maintain a small majority.
That hope vanished when Donald Trump juiced up inflation with tariffs, and then turbo-charged it by starting a new war in the Middle East.The range of seats that Democrats could win has continued to expand. The map started off with 18 swing districts that Republicans almost universally carried in 2024. That is where the baseline of a small Democratic majority started.
Since the Iran war, the number of House districts and Senate seats that Trump’s policies put in jeopardy has exploded. The map has gone from districts and Senate seats that Trump won by 5 points being up for grabs to Republicans rushing to shore up districts and states that were Trump +15 to +20.
Voter anger is the oxygen that is fueling the Democratic gains. This election is about two issues that are intertwined. Voters are most angry about corruption and costs.
Republicans are now facing a wipeout, and they are trying to get a lifeline from the party’s leadership, which is funded by billionaires.
Politico reported on how Republicans involved in the election are viewing things on the ground:
“It could be quite a brutal evening,” said one senior Republican involved in the private conversations, who like others in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Once the dominoes start falling it becomes hard to stop them.”
Some Republican incumbents made an eyebrow-raising emergency decision. They stopped doing their own polling weeks ago as they tried to save every dollar for swaying voters as they begged for the GOP cavalry to arrive from President Donald Trump’s political operation to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to three of the people.
One Republican strategist working on midterm races simply responded to a question about the environment with a video of a dumpster on fire that was being swept away by flood waters.
Trump built this disaster that is set to dismantle the Republican Party, but he didn’t act alone. Trump was enabled by House and Senate Republicans who were so thirsty for a return to power that they didn’t care about the consequences of putting a 34-time felon with presidential immunity back into the White House.
When Trump attacked the Heartland of America with his tariffs and wars, Republicans should have said no. Democrats gave Republicans dozens of opportunities to vote against Trump’s tariffs and wars, but they refused to do so, and now many of those Republicans are going to lose their seats.
The GOP sees disaster coming, and there is nothing that they can do about it.
The only question left to be answered is how many seats Democrats are going to win in the House and Senate.
Elon Musk may end up spending close to half a billion to support Republicans by the time the final numbers are counted, and Republicans are still going to lose.
America is getting set to overthrow the current Republican government of billionaires.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Atomic Ramaswamy, Jim Swift, right, Oct. 30, 2026. Last spring, during the early stages of his party’s primary, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy declared himself “strongly in favor” of Ohio’s data center boom. But that boom has since become a political liability. A September poll found that among likely voters, three-quarters oppose having a data center built in their community, and 78 percent support a temporary ban on new construction.
Democratic candidate Amy Acton is making sure voters remember her opponent’s prior enthusiasm. Her “Dirty Rich” ad juxtaposes Ramaswamy bragging about his wealth with footage of him declaring himself pro-boom, loudly implying the guy is getting rich off developments that are driving up electricity prices for normal Ohioans.
Ramaswamy’s data center–related holdings are fairly well known: He owns stock in companies that build and supply them, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, and has other relevant investments in semiconductor companies and crypto.
But what about the nuclear plants he’s been pitching to power them?
When it comes to the intersection of energy policy and private profit, the state’s voters carry a certain amount of residual trauma. Memories of the FirstEnergy bribes-for-a-bailout scheme are still fresh. It was the biggest scandal in Ohio’s history, and the continuing aftershocks include the suicides of two people who had been implicated in the malfeasance.
Ramaswamy, left, has said he would sell his data center–related stocks if elected; he claimed they were just a “speck of dust” in his portfolio. Atlas Atomics, a nuclear startup Ramaswamy co-founded and backed, is probably a bit harder to brush off. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Atlas had raised roughly $400 million at a valuation of about $1.9 billion, with MAGA-friendly Andreessen Horowitz participating. The size and value of Ramaswamy’s stake in the company are not publicly known. Maintaining his position, however, would likely create significant conflicts of interest for Ramaswamy should he succeed in his bid for the governor’s mansion. I have not been able to find any examples of the candidate publicly addressing his investment in Atlas or being asked to explain it during his campaign for governor. The Ramaswamy campaign did not respond to my request for comment.
Ramaswamy has been somewhat freer in offering relevant comments elsewhere, however. In May, he delivered a keynote at Utah’s Operation Gigawatt Summit in which he advocated for state and federal leaders to help win the PR battle over nuclear power and data centers. Within two weeks, Atlas was signing an MOU with the state’s Office of Energy Development to explore the prospect of building a roughly 20-megawatt test reactor and a 350-megawatt commercial reactor using advanced heavy-water technology in Utah; the non-binding agreement also raises the possibility of “state and local incentives.” (Read: tax breaks.)
Ramaswamy has meanwhile professed opposition to tax breaks for development while on the campaign trail in Ohio. His position as a candidate back in the Midwest has morphed from cheerleading the data center boom to taking a much stricter line; he now insists that data-center developers generate their own power and cover nearby residents’ electricity costs (or power their homes directly, gratis, with surplus energy generated by the data centers’ own facilities). Nuclear energy is mentioned as an option in his proposal.
The governor would have substantial influence over the implementation of such a plan. All seven permanent voting positions on the Ohio Power Siting Board are held by gubernatorial appointees. That board reviews covered power-generation projects, though federal nuclear licensing remains separate.
Promoting nuclear power is defensible, especially as a means of lowering carbon emissions. But retaining a financial interest in a nuclear developer while serving as governor facing major strains on your state’s power grid raises significant ethical questions.
Would Ramaswamy sell his entire interest in Atlas before taking office? If he intends to keep it, Ohioans deserve to know how he would keep that investment from influencing the state’s energy decisions. FirstEnergy was bad enough the first time.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Israel’s Democracy—And Its Relationship with America—Remain in Limbo… No answers, no new questions, no good options, writes DANIEL B. SHAPIRO.QUICK HITS
WHAT’S RIGHT WITH KANSAS?: On Monday, the Kansas Republican Party announced that Donald Trump would be holding a rally for incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall in Salina, the prairie-town hub of central Kansas. Republicans feel the need to roll Trump out because the race is extremely competitive: Marshall is well known for his arrogance, poor constituent services, and miserly approach to medical debt, while the Democratic challenger, Methodist minister Adam Hamilton, is uniquely suited to the state despite being somewhat to the left of its median voter. The latest CNN/SSRS poll has Hamilton up by 4 points in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932.
In a rush of excitement about landing the big guy, local Republicans spammed seemingly everyone with a 785 area code on Wednesday. But then yesterday, the White House abruptly cancelled the rally, opting for a “shotgun” approach in which the president will hold twenty-odd “tele-rallies.” It seems like shuttling Trump to the middle of Kansas ate up too much of his time when there’s plenty of GOP desperation to go around.
But here’s another theory: Maybe Trump’s presence would have helped Hamilton. Kansas may be dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but it’s also seen enough bad conservative governance to make it show some Midwestern common sense. After Gov. Sam Brownback’s failed taxation experiment, Kansans twice elected Democrat Laura Kelly to the governor’s office. In 2022, Kansans voted down a strict anti-abortion constitutional amendment by 18 points, and in this cycle repudiated an effort to increase partisan influence on state judges by a wide margin. Perhaps Republican strategists realized that reminding rural Kansans who’s behind their high diesel prices, deportations of meatworkers, and job-killing tariffs was actually a pretty big risk.
–Joshua Tait
MORE JD LIES: We’ve written a couple times now about a shameless attempt to stoke anti-trans panic ahead of the midterms in Texas: inflammatory mailers addressed to the children of GOP voters that claimed to come from a Texas trans-rights group, but which, according to legal filings made public yesterday, were in fact sent by a state GOP group, the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund.
This was far from the first indication the mailers were a GOP operation; last week, the group that sent them retained a lawyer who has previously represented both Ken Paxton and Elon Musk in high-profile matters. Someone, however, has mysteriously failed to keep up with these developments. Yesterday, at his rally in Texas, Vice President JD Vance managed to give the impression—although he avoided claiming it directly—that the mailers had come from James Talarico:
At an earlier event, I was talking to a mom who told me—and I was shocked by it, we’re actually going to have the Department of Justice investigate—that her 11-year-old child got a letter encouraging that child to transition to a different gender. Now Talafreako calls the kind of person that would send that letter an honest and decent trans person that he’s fighting for. I call a person who would send a letter like that to an 11-year-old a pervert that deserves a prison sentence.
Harsh words, but the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund probably has little to fear. Now that it’s obvious that the “pervert that deserves a prison sentence” was a local gang of GOP ratfuckers, we suspect that the DOJ will wrap up its “investigation” pretty quick.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: What is Donald Trump planning? Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 29, 2026. At 4:36 this afternoon, the President of the United States began panicking on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews after he was asked why his final in-person rally was abruptly canceled. With the cameras broadcasting live, Donald Trump lost control of himself and attacked a reporter in one of the most revealing fits of rage of his presidency to date.
Trying to understand why rallies would be canceled with so little notice and at such a pivotal stage of the campaign, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, you’ve been doing a lot of travel. We’ve been doing a lot of travel with you. How are you feeling? How’s your health?”
Donald Trump responded in part with “Good. I think very good. I think you see that we had a great rally. That was a great rally… we’re going to have a strong Tuesday night. That’s my opinion.”
The reporter followed up with, “So you not going to Kansas has nothing to do with you being sick of traveling?” And that is when Donald Trump started to melt down out of nowhere, saying, “Oh, you’re sick to ask that question. You are sick. Who you with?” The reporter, Jacob Bogage, said, “I’m with Reuters, sir.”
The President snapped, pointing to Bogage, “You are a sick guy. Reuters is terrible, by the way. Can you imagine? Look at this. Look at this guy. He’s way out of shape. Look at how badly -- he comes to me,” and then Donald Trump tried to recreate what had just happened seconds before for all the same people who were standing there, forgetting they saw the entire exchange.
Bogage responded, “Well, we just want to make sure you’re doing well.”
Trump then picked up the attack again with increasing agitation and sweat pooling on his forehead and face. “I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell.”
His anger overflowing, the president barked at the entire group of reporters, “Thank you, everyone,” and turned to walk away.
That exchange alone would have been disturbing enough, especially coming from the President of the United States of America just five days before one of the most consequential midterm elections in modern history. But it’s what it revealed that is the most concerning. It wasn’t just a bad moment for him. It was the complete breakdown we witnessed as he resorted to primal reactions, seemingly unable to respond with any sort of logic, that should make all of us recognize just how much danger our country is in.
Taken together with everything else that happened today, we may be approaching an inflection point. Or perhaps the most dangerous days of his presidency have already begun, even before he enters what could become his complete sitting-duck era.
When Trump exploded like that, it was only about his Saturday rally in Kansas being canceled. Hours later, he canceled his Sunday rally in Dubuque, Iowa, as well. That means tomorrow’s rally in Florida will be his final in-person midterm event. The White House said he would “connect with Americans through more than 20 tele-rallies” before Election Day, leaving us with a multitude of questions about what is really happening. Why the sudden cancellations? And why is he now relying on the safety of a phone or screen when he has spent so much time seeking the excitement and adoration of the crowds at his live events?
He’s pulling back. But to what? And why now? He is 80 years old. He has held 25 rallies since October 1. In the past few weeks, he has appeared visibly drained, speaking in a hoarse voice and making strange vocal sounds mid-speech. Exhaustion would be understood and almost expected for someone even half his age. But there is another possibility that is deeply concerning, one that we all need to be paying close attention to over the next five days and beyond. Because desperate men do desperate things, and Donald Trump is as desperate as they come. These coming days may end up mattering more than we realize.
Just today, we were confronted with multiple serious warnings, including one that came directly from Senator Chris Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and attended a classified briefing on the Iran war. In a statement posted today on X, Murphy warned, “Trump is reportedly planning to restart war with Iran after the election. Some of us have been briefed on the war plan. And while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this: the plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives and will set off a new cycle of escalation.” His warning followed remarks he made yesterday at the Middle East Institute, where he went further, warning that the plan “will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law.”
We also learned that the Pentagon is reportedly reinforcing missile defenses, repositioning troops, and preparing additional warships and aircraft. They have even moved a barge of surface-to-air missile systems to the Intracoastal Waterway outside Mar-a-Lago.
Eight days ago, on October 21, the U.S. Army conducted a mass battlefield burial exercise at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Bulldozers dug simulated burial trenches, and 130 chaplains and religious support personnel practiced burial services under combat conditions. The military said it was preparation for “large-scale combat operations.”
Add all of this to countries across Europe telling their citizens to stockpile supplies and prepare for the possibility of armed aggression, with some urging two weeks of self-sufficiency, and reports that our own military bases are being prepared to survive 90 days of self-sufficiency. Then consider Donald Trump canceling the rest of his public appearances this weekend with our elections just five days away. Taken together, this is an extremely uncertain and dangerous time for our country and the world.
There was another piece to the puzzle that happened earlier in the day, during a separate exchange with the press before Donald Trump left for South Carolina. A reporter asked about the firing of Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the Pentagon’s top military planner, a three-star combat veteran with 32 years of service who held the position of Director for Strategy, Plans and Policy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the office known as J5, responsible for some of the most sensitive strategic planning in the entire military. Sylvia was abruptly fired by Pete Hegseth amid accusations that he leaked classified information about the war in Iran and Russia’s war in Ukraine to journalists. Pentagon officials claimed that he failed multiple polygraphs and referred the case to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Two Pentagon sources disputed those claims to CBS News, raising serious questions about whether this was a legitimate security action or a politically motivated purge. Sylvia is the second general Hegseth has removed from the J5 position in just over a year. The allegations are serious, but they remain allegations, and the timing of his removal is especially concerning given what the Trump administration is reportedly preparing for in the coming days.
Donald Trump, the commander in chief, clearly had no idea who he was talking about. Hearing the name “Sylvia,” he assumed the general was a woman. “She’s got problems,” the President said. “She is going to have big problems. She did, we’re very much looking for leakers and she’s going to have big problems. Long-term problems.”
Brett Sylvia is a 54-year-old man and a three-star general. Someone who has dedicated his life to the military and his country, and the commander in chief of the United States military, publicly threatening him with serious consequences while apparently not even knowing who he was talking about. It raises a much bigger question about what is happening inside this administration, who is actually making these decisions, and how much Donald Trump even knows.
And his firing comes at the exact moment when the Pentagon is reportedly preparing for possible military action against Iran after the midterms. The office responsible for strategic military planning has been gutted, and the man who authorized it can’t identify the general by gender. He’s not commanding the military. He’s performing command while someone else moves the pieces.
I was on my walk with Pete when all of this news was breaking at once. I kept looking down at my phone and seeing one alarming news story after the other, and I kept thinking the same thing over and over: I just hope enough people are seeing this. I hope it’s reaching the ones who are still on the fence and need a reason to show up on Tuesday. Hopefully this is the thing that makes them want to vote against everyone aligned with Donald Trump and his cabinet of destroyers.
Just as I was deep in that thought, I looked up, and a person walking toward us had their ballot in their hand. Filled out and ready to be mailed or dropped off. Then another one passed, and then another. People aren’t just voting here in California; it’s happening everywhere. More than 39 million Americans have already voted. Georgia shattered its first-day early voting record for a midterm by more than 53,000 voters. States across the country are reporting turnout running ahead of both 2018 and 2022 at the same point. People are showing up, but today also carried a different kind of weight, because we learned that we lost someone who spent his life reminding us why showing up matters.
Yesterday, Sir Patrick Stewart passed away, a man who spent his entire career playing characters defined by the very qualities our president pretends to have: moral clarity, principled leadership, calm under pressure, and the ability to command a room without degrading everyone in it. Sir Patrick embodied them as well. Stewart didn’t just play a leader on screen. He wanted to become an American citizen specifically so he could fight Donald Trump and what he was doing to this country. In 2017, he announced that he was applying for citizenship so he could oppose the president and his policies. He despised the “self-interest” of politicians and believed young people should be given every chance to express their beliefs at the ballot box. He understood that democracy was not something we could simply take for granted, and he used his voice to remind Americans of the responsibility we have to protect it. Years ago, he posted on social media with the reminder that “Your country needs YOU (to vote).”
Even as he watched what was happening to this country, he never surrendered to the negativity. When asked if he was optimistic about humanity’s future, he answered, “I always have been. Always. Even at the most dismaying of times.” He wisely said, “I know it feels like two steps forward and one step back, but we are making progress.” Those words mean even more tonight than when he wrote them. Because even in our darkest moments, when it feels like we are losing everything we have fought so hard for, we cannot forget how far we have come, how many people are still fighting, and how much power we have when we refuse to give up on each other or the future of our country. In five days, we will have our votes counted and leave no doubt that America belongs to “We the People” and not Donald Trump and his enablers.
More On U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs
New York Times, Tech Stocks Tumble, but Broader Market Is Holding On, Joe Rennison and Aruni Soni, Oct. 30, 2026. The S&P 500 is set for a small loss for the month, despite a deeper slide in some of the A.I. stocks that exert a heavy influence on the index.
A sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks accelerated on Friday, as investors’ fretted about whether the industry’s debt-fueled spending spree still justified such high share prices.
The S&P 500 index fell more than 1 percent on the last trading session of the month, with tech stocks recording steep declines.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped more than 2 percent. Shares of Intel plunged more than 25 percent after the chipmaker reported financial results that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Amazon’s stock fell 1.5 percent, after its earnings also missed analysts’ forecasts.
But in the face of this tech sell-off, the broader market showed resilience, bolstered by strength in sectors like energy and utilities and in companies selling everyday goods. Shares of consumer staples companies rose 1.5 percent on Friday. Exxon Mobil shares rose 1 percent.
The moves reflect a dynamic on display throughout October and, for some investors, have helped allay fears that if the A.I. trade falters the entire market will fall with it. It points to investor confidence in sectors that for years had languished. And it shows how even as worries about some A.I. companies have intensified, money has not fled the stock market and is instead being redeployed within it.
The S&P 500 is on course to post a small loss for October, extending a modest 0.5 percent loss in September. The index remains only slightly below its record high.
New York Times, Binance Suspends Withdrawals After Crypto Hackers Steal $6.3 Billion, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ryan Mac, Updated Oct. 30, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was compromised in what could be the biggest crypto heist ever. One research lab attributed the theft to “North Korea’s elite hacking unit.”
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Thursday that it had halted withdrawals after it was attacked by hackers who made off with more than $6 billion in digital coins, in what appears to be the biggest crypto heist in history.
The exact nature of the attack was not immediately clear. Binance’s founder, the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, said it “does look like a hack.” The company said it had temporarily suspended all deposits and withdrawals and that its customers would be made whole.
Binance said that it would cover all losses, estimated at about $6.3 billion. The company said that it had coordinated with other crypto firms to freeze about $3 billion in assets that were swept up in the hack.
The attack appeared to be the work of “North Korea’s elite hacking unit,” according to TRM Labs, a crypto research firm. The firm had “high confidence” in its assessment, it said, based on features of the hack that resembled previous thefts. TRM Labs estimated that the hackers had shifted about $2.4 billion in crypto coins “beyond any issuer’s reach.”
Binance initially believed that the attackers might have compromised its systems through an engineer’s laptop, leading to unauthorized withdrawals. But on Friday, the company said it had found “additional points of breach,” calling the attack a “complex hack.”
“We are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it,” Binance said in a statement.
Binance added on Friday that it had started to recover some of the stolen crypto assets as well as set aside billions of dollars to cover customers’ losses. It said it was on track to allow customers to withdraw money from their accounts within two days.
The attack on Binance was a stunning illustration of the risks of trading crypto, a renegade branch of finance. For years, the industry has sought mainstream respectability, pouring money into politics and earning the support of President Trump, who pledged to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” But the industry remains a wild west, vulnerable to hacks and fraud.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary: Will the AI Bubble Expose the Greatest Betrayal of America’s Working Class? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 30, 2026. The billionaires promise a technological paradise while predicting the decline of human labor. But if their gamble collapses, who loses their jobs, who keeps their fortunes, and who pays the bill?
The AI bubble and it’s possible disintegration gives us some pretty grim insights into the question of what happens when the richest people in the world rebuild the economy in a way that it no longer needs working people, but still expects them to pay their bills.
Reuters reported this week that China’s AI and semiconductor stock boom has suffered a sudden and staggering reversal: their STAR50 index of Beijing’s AI and chip champions (like our NASDAQ) has plunged 40 percent in less than four months, wiping out roughly $480 billion in market value.
Their robotics company Unitree, whose IPO just three months ago was oversubscribed 8,000 times by Chinese small investors and has lost half its value. Dong Baozhen, a Beijing fund manager, told Reuters:
“And now we see the bubble bursting.”
The same day (Monday) here in America Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27 percent of its global workforce, as it’s planning to replace them with AI. And when Anthropic (Claude) filed to go public they disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss and some $657 billion in infrastructure deals with companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX; fully $498 billion of that is noncancelable even if the company never uses the computing capacity it’s reserved.
Things got even weirder on Wednesday, when Microsoft and Alphabet reported some striking “earnings” numbers. Alphabet burned through $9.1 billion in free cash flow for the second straight quarter. NPR’s 1A tallied up Monday’s AI deals alone at roughly $235 billion, nearly one percent of American GDP, all in just one single day.
While Wall Street has been pouring massive sums into AI companies, data centers, chips, and power infrastructure, Economist Dean Baker reports at his weekly AI Bubble Monitor that CoreWeave’s debt (the company rents computing power to the AI giants) is now considered so deep in junk bond territory that they’re having to pay 16% interest on their long-term debt to get investors to bite.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated that every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double. Not only was his “Moore’s Law” right, but as the power of digital hardware increases, costs also reliably drop by a similar factor.
Most of today’s frenzy of data center and power plant construction is based on the current state of the AI chip-and-software art, but Moore’s Law dictates that over time — and not a lot of time, probably just a matter of months or years at the most — the size and power needs of these AI data centers will decrease exponentially.
Already, entire buildings filled with computers are on the verge of being replaced by a single “wafer” disc that will carry the computing power of billions of today’s red-hot chips. The Wall Street Journal broke the news with an article titled and subtitled:
“The Microchip Era Is About to End. The future is in wafers. Data centers will be the size of a box, not vast energy-hogging structures.”
Author George Gilder noted we’re not just on the verge of the breakthrough; it’s nearly in production:
“Cerebras of Palo Alto, Calif., used the concept in its WSE-3 wafer-scale engine. The WSE-3 boasts some four trillion transistors—14 times as many as Nvidia’s Blackwell chip—with 7,000 times the memory bandwidth. Cerebras inscribed the memory directly on to the wafer rather than relegating it to distant chips and chiplets in high-bandwidth memory mazes. The company stacked up its wafer-scale engines 16-fold, thereby reducing a data center to a small box with 64 trillion transistors.”
A data center — a 700,000 square-foot building drawing gigiwatts of electricity and chugging millions of gallons of water for cooling — replaced by “a small box” that could be powered by rooftop solar and a good battery bank.
Meanwhile, multiple companies have rolled out AI products that can run on a desktop PC, eliminating the need for data centers altogether. Perplexity introduced one just last month with the headline:
“Perplexity Computer now runs fully local on Mac”
Ya think that may have an impact on our economy?
Places booming today as AI and other data facilities and the power plants and transmission lines to feed them are being built — if Moore’s Law applies to data centers as it has proven to apply to all things digital from computers to cell phones to TVs and satellites — will soon look like Flint, Michigan when Reagan’s free trade policies began to seriously bite in the 1990s.
It sure looks like we’re seeing a repeat of previous bubbles and bursts ranging from Dutch tulips to the 19th century railroads to this century’s dot-com and home mortgage collapses. And the people running the show seem just fine with creating a world where the rich get mindbogglingly richer while working people and 401k investors are out on the street.
JD Vance’s sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Marc Andreesen, the billionaire who helped Elon recruit young men for DOGE to take apart our government, complained on a podcast this year that government workers have both civil service protections and public-sector unions, giving them “two layers of insulation against ever getting fired.”
Unions, of course, are actual democracy in the workplace that generations of workers have literally fought and died for, but these guys don’t seem to appreciate or even understand that.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a 2021 essay that as AI advances, “even more power will shift from labor to capital.” His warning points out how easily AI could dramatically increase the power of people who own businesses and tech while gutting the bargaining power of people who work for a living.
And, indeed, that’s already happening. Like Microsoft this week, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October, all after CEO Andy Jassy warned his employees that AI would “reduce our total corporate workforce.” One AI-related layoff tracker counts nearly 119,000 layoffs so far this year tied explicitly to AI automation, roughly four and a half times last year’s total.
And now the robotics business is exploding, with AI built into local machines that can assemble cars, sew clothing, clean streets, and drive you around town. It’s opened an entirely new industry: outfitting humans with sensors to track their movements to train robots to replace them.
So, if machines replace our workers, who’s going to have enough money to buy the goods and services the machines are putting out?
I grew up in a union family; my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, Michigan and was able to raise 4 boys with a 3-bedroom home, a new car every few years, and had a decent retirement. Henry Ford increased his workers’ pay so they’d be able to buy the cars they were making.
This isn’t rocket science. Workers are also customers, taxpayers, homeowners, and parents; they’re the ultimate economic base of their communities. If AI destroys their purchasing power, we’re gnawing away at the foundation of America’s historic economic greatness.
We’ve seen versions of this before.
Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry leading to predatory behavior that produced a massive crash; it cost taxpayers over $100 billion to clean up the mess (a trillion in today’s money). But Reagan also sent those banksters to prison: his regulators made more than 30,000 criminal referrals to the Justice Department, which won more than 1,000 felony convictions.
Since then, times have changed; it appears that the morbidly rich have acquired near-total immunity, no matter how badly they screw up things, because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires and corporations owning judges and politicians.
Congress and Bill Clinton deregulated our banks in the late 1990s and the bill came due in 2008 when it all fell apart and millions of Americans lost their homes, families watched retirement accounts evaporate, and workers who’d done absolutely nothing wrong lost their livelihoods.
Nepo-baby George W. Bush chose to hold nobody accountable, and even let the banksters keep their billion-dollar bonuses pulled out just before all the dominoes collapsed. He made zero criminal referrals against the big banks, in a crisis that was seventy times larger than Reagan’s S&L mess.
It appears that the AI gods tech bros think that’s the new normal and are betting on getting the same or better from the Trump regime. After all, in his first term he put “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, who’d thrown an estimated 36,000 Californians out of their homes during the 2008 crash, in charge of the entire economy as Treasury Secretary.
And this time the stakes are even larger than the banking system’s freeze-up; AI is now deeply entangled with America’s military, intelligence agencies, national security infrastructure, and the rivalry with China.
And in their arrogance, they’re saying the quiet part out loud: last November, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told a Wall Street Journal conference that her company wanted a federal “backstop” for the financing behind its data centers. When a reporter asked whether she meant a government guarantee, she answered, “Exactly.”
And pouring gasoline on this particular bonfire, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill lets these companies write off the full cost of their data center hardware the year they buy it rather than the normal depreciation schedules every other industry in America has to stick to.
Perhaps that’s because the Trump family is so well-invested now in this, and he’s depending on tech bro billions to keep Republicans in office; Elon alone is spending almost a half-billion so far this year to that end.
Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are already paying. Residential electricity prices rose 6.9 percent last year, more than double the inflation rate, and Goldman Sachs’ analysts say they expect data centers to drive a massive 40 percent of electricity demand growth through the end of the decade.
The 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwest states have been hit with $23 billion in consumer electricity prices increases through at least 2028, driven by AI data centers. A homeowner in Manassas, Virginia, opened a $281 electric bill in January, up from about $100 the month before.
If today’s boom goes bust, who’s going to be left stuck with the bills for the half-built transmission lines, data centers, and power plants? Apparently it won’t be the morbidly rich tech bro masters of the universe, any more than it was Bush’s billionaire bankers.
None of this is to diminish the power and importance of AI. But the internet was real, too, and look what happened in the 1999-2002 period when that industry took down people’s retirement accounts while creating billionaires out of Zuck, Bezos, and Gates.
In 1983, Reagan instructed his DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust and other anti-monopoly laws, leading to a decade of “Mergers & Acquisitions Mania” as was documented in Michael Douglas’ “greed is good” movie, Wall Street.
Add that to Reagan decriminalizing share buybacks and you have the perfect storm of perverse incentives that end up with doors falling off airplanes, workers and communities being screwed, and a new low standard of crappy customer service — all fed by a lack of competition. And we see that consolidation now happening in AI.
This is what happens when the people who own the machines accumulate more economic — and, thus, political — power than the people who depend on wages. It’s the old question: “Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the small number of mostly white men who control the economy?”
The AI revolution is going to force that debate back into the open.
The ultimate betrayal will be if AI succeeds in making America vastly wealthier while leaving working Americans with less economic security, less political power, and with the bill for another generation of financial speculation wiping out our retirement accounts.
If that happens, we need to be ready to force the issue of the concentration of wealth and power that grew up around it. We failed with the internet giants in 2000 and the banksters in 2008. We need to prepare — politically and economically — for the next cycle of boom and bust that’s increasingly seeming inevitable.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, A Sailor Jumped From the U.S.S. Lincoln. The Navy Punished Him, Jan Ransom, Oct. 29, 2026. The case offers a rare look at the military’s handling of mental health issues during extended deployments.
Nicholas McKelvey had been aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln for 255 grueling days.
As the war with Iran raged, the 19-year-old Navy airman — an aviation mechanic in a helicopter squadron — was working 12-hour shifts in the blazing sun, checking and guiding helicopters on the flight deck. He had missed the birth of his daughter. His in-laws were battling cancer. Food on the aircraft carrier was in short supply.
Then he reached his breaking point.
At about 10 a.m. on a Monday in early August, he sprinted along the flight deck then leaped from the ship’s edge and plunged 67 feet into the Arabian Sea, according to Navy records reviewed by The New York Times. He was rescued by a helicopter crew and returned to the ship 50 minutes later.
“I didn’t want to be there anymore,” Mr. McKelvey said in an interview, speaking publicly for the first time. “If I was going to die because of it, then that’s just how it is.”
On Thursday, the Navy effectively fired him — moving to discharge Mr. McKelvey after accusing him of “malingering,” or faking a mental health crisis to end his deployment, according to Mr. McKelvey’s wife, Samantha Larry. Under the terms of his removal — a general discharge under honorable conditions — he will become ineligible for education assistance under the G.I. Bill, cutting off a pathway to college that his family was counting on, Ms. Larry said.
The case offers a rare glimpse into how the Navy has handled mental health issues aboard ships under pressure from sustained deployments during the war with Iran. And it raises questions about whether officers treated Mr. McKelvey’s jump overboard as misconduct without sufficiently examining what led a sailor to take such an extreme, life-threatening step.
The Lincoln, which returned to San Diego this month after a near-record 322-day deployment, became a symbol of the food shortages and mental health challenges facing Navy ship crews after Iran destroyed a key supply hub in the region.
There were eight suicide attempts during the long deployment among sailors in the Lincoln strike group, according to a letter the Navy sent to lawmakers last month. The letter did not name Mr. McKelvey, but the description of a sailor who “went overboard from the ship” matches his story.
Aspects of the case were earlier reported by MS NOW, which did not identify Mr. McKelvey by name. Mr. McKelvey and his wife said they wanted to come forward publicly now to shed light on what they believed was inadequate mental health care before and after his jump and an unfair punishment.
“They don’t want to take accountability for what happened to him, and to what happened to multiple sailors on the boat,” said Ms. Larry, 19. “I don’t think that they care. They care more about how they’re pictured, how they’re viewed. They don’t want anyone to see the bad stuff.”
The Navy did not respond directly to specific questions about Mr. McKelvey. But a Navy spokesman said that aircraft carriers have “a multidisciplinary team of mental health resources” and that specialists “coordinate and provide care tailored to a wide range of conditions.”
Several former military lawyers and other experts interviewed by The Times agreed that Mr. McKelvey’s case presented complicated issues for the Navy. Some said the disciplinary response was legally justified and relatively lenient because malingering is sometimes treated as a criminal offense.
Others questioned whether the Navy’s response adequately addressed the distress that may have driven him to jump. The Navy, they said, could have focused on treating him, or seeking a medical discharge that would allow him to retain key benefits, rather than accusing him of wrongdoing.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: ICE Agent Indicted in Crash that Injured a Man in Texas, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 30, 2026. It’s starting. Accountability has reared its head for ICE agents who’ve been engaged in a terror campaign across the country for Donald Trump.
It’s starting. Accountability has reared its head for ICE agents who’ve been engaged in a terror campaign across the country for Donald Trump.
An ICE agent was indicted by a grand jury Friday morning.
In case the DA described as being investigated as an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent identified as Mario Morales has been indicted by a county grand jury, according to Click 2 Houston.
(DA) previously told KPRC 2 the case was being investigated as an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, pointing to surveillance video that he described as showing an “intentional” strike.
Surveillance video obtained by ABC13 showed an unmarked SUV carrying ICE agents running over 48 year-old Miguel Parra-Hernandez during a pursuit at a shopping center in Texas on October 10. An investigator found that the agent appeared to accelerate and turn directly toward Parra-Hernandez as he fled on foot.
After watching surveillance footage of the crash from a nearby business, Teare’s investigator observed that the agent accelerated toward Parra Hernandez, made a “clear turn to the left” and lined up his vehicle straight toward Parra Hernandez.
The agent then struck Parra Hernandez, who had his back to the Jeep as he was running away, the investigator wrote.
Parra-Hernandez suffered severe leg injuries and underwent surgery.
A Harris County grand jury indicted Morales following an investigation into an October 10 enforcement operation. The charges are unclear at this point.
“As ICE officers attempted to apprehend the illegal aliens, Miguel Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck,” a spokesperson for ICE in Houston told the Texas Tribune at the time.
However, a lawyer for Parra-Hernandez said the client does not even know the supposed target, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes.
The New York Times reported that the man ICE claimed to be targeted had been dead for nearly 10 years, according to his sister.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said in an interview at the time that he believed the ICE agent intentionally hit Parra-Hernandez. He added that “a charging decision is going to come in a relatively short order in this case.”
This case is different from the ICE agent who is under criminal investigation in California for hitting a legal observer.ICE Fled the Scene of the Accident and Refused to Cooperate
ICE officers fled the scene of the crash, taking their vehicle with them, before the investigation was over. The DA said they did not consent to having their vehicle towed to obtain forensic evidence and they left while investigators were in the process of obtaining a search warrant.
This mess got referred to the Department of Homeland Security’s so-called “legal division” by ICE, and surprise! The DHS had not yet responded as of October 23, per Click 2 Houston.
It shouldn’t even need to be said at this time, but law enforcement is supposed to WANT evidence to make a case. They ideally would have evidence before chasing people down, and would never run someone over on purpose. Top law enforcement in a democracy does not hide evidence or flee the scene of an accident in which they’ve injured someone. They don’t hide forensic evidence or evade warrants.
These are not the actions of law enforcement. Instead, these look like the actions of a rogue terrorist group being paid by US taxpayers to carry out an agenda of intimidation and fear for Donald J Trump.
ICE agents were told they had immunity, but history tells us that this promise will not hold. Some of them will be held accountable for their actions, and some will even be blamed for Trump’s orders in an effort to protect the top. This is why it does not pay to work for Donald Trump.
More Global News
New York Times, Another Toll of the Violent Unrest in France: The Political Center, Mark Landler, Oct. 30, 2026. Support for Édouard Philippe, the leading candidate from the centrist bloc, has eroded, while his far-right and far-left rivals benefit.
Soon after President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to a traumatized country, in the aftermath of riots that set cities aflame on Oct. 17, Mr. Macron’s former prime minister and aspiring successor, Édouard Philippe, responded to his old boss.
“Our country needs to be commanded,” Mr. Philippe wrote, scolding Mr. Macron for what he called a failure to restore order, protect shopkeepers from looters and engage protesting high-school students in dialogue.
For Mr. Philippe, the leading presidential candidate from France’s shrinking political center, it was not the first break with Mr. Macron. But his tempered tone suggested he was speaking more in sorrow than in anger. It was all but lost in an angry cacophony, underscoring how the upheaval is reshaping France’s politics: More extreme figures are sidelining centrists.
No major candidate has lost more support in the polls than Mr. Philippe since the protests erupted last month: roughly two percentage points, leaving him between 13 percent and 15 percent. He now trails the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and remains well behind the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, who claims the backing of about a third of those surveyed in most polls.
More U.S. Political Comments
Alaskan rivals for its U.S. Senate seat, Democrat Mary Peltola and Repubican incumbent Dan Sullivan (Photos by Reuters and the New York Times).
The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Stop Whining. Just Win, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 30, 2026. Republicans are babies. Some progressives are, too.
Mary Peltola’s team did something not nice and unsportsmanlike. They went and found another guy named Dan Sullivan and got him on the ballot in their race against incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Republicans are outraged—not just random Republicans on X, but national, elected Republicans. They have sued. They are calling on Peltola to drop out of the race. They are demanding that if Peltola wins the election, her victory not be certified, or she not be seated. President Trump has said Peltola should be prosecuted.
AYFKM?
Is Peltola’s trick illegal? No. It is perfectly within the law.
Is Peltola’s trick dishonest? No. No reasonable person could be confused by the Dan Sullivans on the ballot.
Can Peltola’s trick influence the election? No. Because Alaska has ranked-choice voting so even if a Dan Sullivan voter picked the wrong Dan Sullivan first, she would presumably pick the other Dan Sullivan second.
Is Peltola’s trick nice? No. You may have noticed during the course of this campaign that Mary Peltola has been exposed as a not-very-cuddly politician. She is surly. She has sharp elbows. She plays for keeps.
So if someone wanted to make the argument that Alaskans should vote against Peltola on character grounds, because she isn’t very nice, that would be fine. By all means, the Party of Trump and Epstein should absolutely play the character card.
But don’t tell me—not for one second—that Peltola has done something beyond the pale.
This is what hardball looks like.
Republicans were perfectly fine with hardball when Ron DeSantis was steamrolling the legislature into adopting his newly gerrymandered congressional map. We live in a world where legality is the standard. Mary Peltola’s dirty trick was legal. End of story.
So quit your whining, Republican snowflakes.
You like that? Great. Now let me make you angry by yelling at some progressive whiners.
2. Turkish
In Michigan, Haley Stevens’s fiancé, Jason Turkish, says he can’t vote for Abdul El-Sayed because he believes El-Sayed is antisemitic. So he’s voting for Mike Rogers.
People on Bluesky are losing their ever-loving minds over this.
Why?
Jason Turkish is a resident of Michigan. If he doesn’t want to be magnanimous and vote for the guy who trashed his fiancée, so what?
El-Sayed is not owed this guy’s vote. It’s his job to earn it. And you know what? If El-Sayed had spent months trashing my fiancée, I probably wouldn’t vote for him either. Just out of spite.
As an elected Democrat, Haley Stevens, left, had a duty to suck it up and endorse El-Sayed, no matter how hurt her feelings were. And she’s done that.
But for a lot of progressives, Stevens hasn’t done enough. No matter how many times she says she’s supporting El-Sayed, progressives are sure that, in her heart of hearts, she doesn’t really mean it. She doesn’t truly love El-Sayed.
To which I say: Grow up.
Haley Stevens did her duty (as did nearly all the rest of Michigan’s elected Democrats) and her fiancé had no such duty. Could Stevens have done more? Sure. Would it be better if her fiancé was on-side? Maybe.
But Abdul El-Sayed has agency here. He’s running for an open seat in the best Democratic environment since Watergate. If he can’t win this race in a blowout, then he never should have been the nominee in the first place. And you know what? The polling suggests that El-Sayed is pulling away. I think he’s going to win.
There is this weird “protect the precious” attitude some progressives (#NotAllProgressives) have about El-Sayed. It’s not enough for people to vote for the guy. It’s not enough to generally support him. People have to love him unconditionally, or else they’re not really on the team. And these little Stalinists are always looking to sniff out deviationism.
This is silly and those people should grow up.
Also: If El-Sayed wanted Jason Turkish’s vote, then he could have tried to earn it. Call the guy. Talk to him. Make the relationship work.
I will say this about Jason Turkish: His stated reason for voting for Mike Rogers is absurd. Turkish says he believes El-Sayed is giving aid and comfort to antisemites and might be one himself. Well I disagree. But even if you granted him that accusation, Rogers has run the most openly racist campaign of my lifetime.
Rogers’ entire pitch is that El-Sayed cannot be trusted because he is Muslim. Rogers put a guy on stage the other day who said that El-Sayed might have a birth certificate, but he’s not American.
JFC.
It is preposterous to say that you’re worried El-Sayed might be one kind of racist, so you have to vote for the guy whose entire campaign is based on racism.
It’s a free country, brother; vote how you want. But I’m not sure a losing candidate’s fiancé holding a press gaggle to whine about all the perceived slights is necessary. I don’t recall Doug Emhoff doing an airing of the grievances.
Tim talked about all of this yesterday.
One final whiner to complain about: This morning Haley Stevens put out a long statement that was superficially about coming together with El-Sayed, but also kind of a subtweet of him. She used the statement to complain about Hasan Piker’s uncle, Cenk Uygur.
This is ridiculous, too. No one cares. No votes are going to be moved either way. This is all high school lunch-table drama. Stop it.
Focus on winning.
3. Harvard
Surprise! Trump’s war against Harvard was never about antisemitism. It was just about power. Here’s an amazing feature in the Harvard Crimson about Trump’s handpicked man running the “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism”:
On Sept. 16, Leo J. Terrell threatened to choke a Justice Department intern with a computer charger.
For nearly an hour, Terrell, a senior Justice Department official who chairs the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, demanded to know why Tejas S. Billa ’28 had left his charger at home. He accused Billa of lying about where it was and threatened to fire him, according to Billa and another intern who witnessed the exchange.
Then, they said, Terrell told Billa that if he brought the charger to work the next day, he would choke him with it. Billa described the confrontation to other interns in messages that day and to someone outside the department the following day, according to texts reviewed by The Crimson.
That afternoon, Billa called Stacy L. Harwood, an office manager in the Office of the Associate Attorney General, to report what had happened.
“It’s not going incredibly well,” Billa began, according to a recording he shared with The Crimson. “I’m reaching out privately, on my own.”
Before he could explain, Harwood interrupted.
“He’s been terrible, hasn’t he?” she asked.
Billa described Terrell as “terrifying” and told her about the charger dispute.
“He’s threatened me, career-wise, physically, whatnot,” Billa said. “I don’t really take it as a joke given the sort of power.”
Harwood did not seem surprised.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” she replied. “This unfortunately has been a pattern.” . . .
The confrontation was one of a series of episodes described by Billa and three other interns, all Jewish. Terrell isolated them from the rest of the Justice Department, berated them over minor mistakes, and repeatedly threatened their jobs or careers. The three other interns were granted anonymity because they feared professional reprisal. . . .
Terrell barred the interns from venturing beyond his office area and the cafe, told them not to speak with Justice Department employees outside their team, and warned that he would fire them if they did, Billa and two interns said. Billa said Terrell specifically threatened to fire them if they spoke to Harwood.
After one intern spoke briefly with a gardener, Terrell questioned her about the encounter, the intern said.
“‘I’ll destroy your career’ was another one of the lines he used if we were caught talking to anyone outside of the office or going anywhere that he did not specify,” Billa said.
Terrell also threatened to have Billa arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for stealing government property after Billa took home notes that Terrell himself had told him to take home, Billa said. . . .
A national tour was supposed to be the centerpiece of Terrell’s work: a 15-city swing through battleground districts ahead of the midterm elections, initially billed as the National Awareness & Action Tour.
Terrell envisioned filling arenas and booking celebrities on the order of Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj at every stop. He floated bringing out comedian Jerry Seinfeld, actor Adam Sandler, and New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson. Terrell wrote in a statement that hundreds of names were mentioned.
The tour has held just one event thus far: an Oct. 14 gathering at a synagogue in Southfield, Mich. with Terrell as the keynote speaker. . . .
It is a steep fall from grace for a task force that was launched to great fanfare a year and a half ago, and pitched as an interagency team uniquely suited to execute the White House’s pressure campaign against elite universities.
The task force called Harvard a “breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination” and declared that the University’s leaders “forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.”
Read the whole thing. It’s WILD.
Defiance.org, Opinion: I’ve predicted Trump’s moves with 90 percent accuracy. Here’s what happens if you don’t vote, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 30, 2026. In January I posted a scorecard of the major warnings I’d made about a second Trump term. Ninety percent had already come true. The handful that hadn’t are getting close.
I’ve spent the better part of a decade predicting Donald Trump’s next moves, sounding the alarm about his abuses of power, and crisscrossing the country to get people to defect from his movement (and now to defy it). Hell, my first book was even called A WARNING. Candidly, this isn’t how I wanted to spend these years. But the warnings were necessary, and too many have come true.
Before the 2024 election I wrote BLOWBACK, built on interviews with roughly a hundred Republicans and former colleagues who served alongside me in the first Trump administration. I asked them what Trump wanted to do the first time that he would do the second time around. The list will feel very familiar: revenge investigations into his critics… a sweeping purge of the civil service… yes-men running the most powerful agencies… Congress’s spending power ignored… troops sent to American cities… intelligence politicized… self-enrichment and corruption… abandonment of our allies and cozying up to dictators… disaster aid and federal money used as leverage over Blue States… political opponents branded as terrorists… and so on.
Every one of those is now in the green column. But I’m no Nostradamus. I merely saw what Trump wanted from the inside, listened to him from the outside, and understood the downside of letting him get near power again.
So I implore you to consider one more warning, from a guy who has a pretty good track record.
This one is about what happens if you — and the rest of us in the pro-democracy movement — don’t vote on Tuesday and don’t drag everyone we know to the polls. Trump knows he will have unchecked power if his movement wins on November 3. And if the margins are tight or if we fall short, here’s how the back half of this term plays out.
Donald Trump will contest the results he doesn’t like. It’s already underway. His Justice Department has launched legal actions in states with competitive races and appears to have more on the way. In recent days, DOJ issued grand jury subpoenas to California and Washington election officials and tried to set aside 20,000 mail ballots from voters it calls noncitizens, a request a judge tossed. This could get much uglier, with the FBI sent to seize ballots, chaos in the streets, and the use of emergency powers and legislative maneuvers to suppress the political opposition.
Then he will keep his grip on the legislative branch. A Congress that stays MAGA-aligned stays silent. That’s it. Don’t expect any sudden political courage. There will be no subpoenas, no hearings on the retribution campaign, no re-opening of the Epstein investigation, no check on a president who already ignores spending directives. And what does that mean? It means he’s taking billions and billions of federal dollars and spending them how he wants — the most sweeping and under-reported power abuse of his presidency.
He will take over the Federal Reserve. He’s most of the way there. Jerome Powell is no longer in the chair, and Trump’s replacement cleared the Senate on a party-line vote. The Supreme Court blocked his firing of Governor Lisa Cook by a single vote while backing his power over other independent agencies, and he promptly warned there was more coming. Unchecked, he will finish the job in 2027. That means he will effectively control your interest rates… effectively control the printing of money… and could detonate the economy in ways you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares.
He will prosecute and jail his critics. Trump’s already indicted a former FBI director who investigated him, a sitting state attorney general who prosecuted him, and his own former national security adviser who spoke out against him. The career prosecutors who resigned rather than bring those cases are mostly gone, and the next targets won’t just be former officials. They’ll be governors, members of Congress, donors, organizers, protesters, and more. He’s said he doesn’t need convictions. For the intimidation to work, he just needs to ruin more lives along the way.
He will seek to finish off the free press. His FCC chairman has threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage and ordered ABC stations to reapply early. Journalists have been indicted for covering a protest in a church. And he’s kicked outlets he doesn’t like out of federal buildings. The next wave will be far worse and will include real federal action against news networks, more reporters monitored and arrested, DOJ and Trump lawsuits against individual reporters in independent media, and a wholesale ejection of the free press from the halls of power, including the White House.
He will flout the courts. Last year, Trump menacingly warned reporters that he has a way to evade judicial scrutiny: by taking over. Specifically, as I’ve warned about for years, he’s fantasized about invoking the Insurrection Act and taking us close to martial law; if that happens, in his words, there will be “no more court cases, there is no more anything.” If Trump has no Congressional check on his power, he’ll be much more willing to defy the last check — the courts — including unfavorable decisions from the Supreme Court.
He will put troops on American streets and keep them there. The Court blocked his National Guard deployments last December, so he pulled most of the troops while reminding everyone that he could still invoke emergency powers to do it again and at scale. If he has shirked the remaining constitutional checks on his power, by the summer of 2027, I expect soldiers policing major American cities (at least Democrat-run cities) on his orders, and the bloody peril of social unrest.
He will rewrite the rules of who gets to vote. The House has already passed the SAVE Act, which would end online and mail registration for millions. Though it stalled in the Senate, Trump will manage to secure its passage if power doesn’t change hands in Congress. The Supreme Court has already let DHS hand states an expanded citizenship database to scrub their voter rolls, and his blocked mail-ballot orders become law the moment a compliant Congress passes them. Make no mistake: this will result in the president having the de facto ability to create voting “blacklists” and wielding extraordinary power over federal elections.
He will refuse to leave. Trump has said himself that he’d “love” a third term, he’s explored it, and Steve Bannon says that “there is a plan.” The Trump Organization already sells the hats. He won’t surrender power unless he has a path to an office that shields him from accountability, whether it’s continuation in the presidency, the vice presidency behind a placeholder, the Speaker’s gavel (second in the line of succession, and the Constitution is silent on whether he can hold it), or something invented. If he controls Congress, he can steer his way toward any of these outcomes.
The 2028 election will not be certifiable. With the aforementioned crackdown, Trump will be able to make sure the voter rolls are favorably purged, mail-in voting is gutted, election officials are afraid of prosecution, troops are ready to suppress the vote in opposition cities, a compliant Fed is goosing the economy, and a threatened press is more docile. Whatever happens in that vote, there will be no legitimate way to certify it, and no independent institution left with the ability to review it. Accordingly, the constitutional order will face the prospect of total collapse; indeed, a democracy whose processes are no longer democratic stops being one.
That’s what happens if you don’t vote.
Forestalling such a dystopian future depends on a Congress willing to act. An overwhelming election result will tell Trump that the multitudes have turned against him. He and his officials will be made to fear the prospect of investigations, accountability, and justice, and while this won’t stop the man entirely, it will rein in his power considerably.
Maybe you think this is hyperbolic. If so, I bet you thought my second-term predictions were overstated. Well, now you’re living in them. I’ve been right about this man often enough that it haunts me. But you can make me wrong on Tuesday. I hope you’ll make the time to vote. It’s not a lot to ask.
Oct. 29
Top Headlines
President Trump’s super PAC and Elon Musk have both spent enormous amounts to support Republicans in the midterms. Here the president meets with fellow billionairres who help him run the government, including puppetmaster and federal contractor Elon Musk, looming over Trump in the Oval Office photo. Musk is a native of South Africa who is funding ultra-right poitical parties around the world to advance white leaders. Others advancing the agenda are Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, at left, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who like many Cabinet members are active campaigners for Republicans despite the Hatch Act barring such activity at taxpayer expense (New York Times photo by Haiyun Jiang).
Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 29, 2026. Our national pastime, our dark future, our big moment.News Roundups
Oct. 29, 2026. Five days out, Donald Trump is losing the argument, and he knows it. Barack Obama set a trap with a single joke about the Cheesecake Factory, and Trump has spent the final week of the campaign fighting about restaurants, sidewalks, a golf course, and Jeffrey Epstein instead of the gas prices and grocery bills.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, An Unpredictable President, a Grim White House: Trump Faces Down the Midterms, Katie Rogers, Updated Oct. 29, 2026. The White House has been rocked by turnover and anxiety over the midterms. The president, who is tightening his inner circle, has lashed out at critics, held meandering rallies and feasted on a diet of news clips and “A.I. slop,” as one aide put it.
Oct. 29, 2026. Polls tell us that affordability and corruption — and the nexus between the two — are driving the blue wave that threatens to sweep out MAGA politicians up and down the ticket. But in the closing days of the campaign, more evident is that the depravity, cruelty, bigotry, and dishonesty — the nexus of traits, emotions, and base urges — that drive Donald Trump and his cult are very much on the ballot.
Oct. 29, 2026. It’s all they have. The Republican Party no longer has anything constructive to say about anything or anyone, so what is its closing argument in the 2026 midterm elections? Hate, fear, and bigotry.Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 29, 2026. Here’s some happy data to start your day.
Oct. 29, 2026. A quick look this morning at three pieces of news from yesterday evening: one about sports, one about politics, and one about war. The Milwaukee Brewers are the World Series champions. It was the first World Series victory for the franchise, which came into existence as an expansion team in 1969. A mere 57 years later (!), they took it all.They pulled this off while playing in the league’s smallest media market, and with baseball’s nineteenth-biggest payroll. The Brewers’ talent and momentum overcame the obstacles of money and history. Perhaps a good omen for next week?
Special Reports: Who Should Decide Elections?
Oct. 29, 2026. From Putin’s Russia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, dictators have learned that you don’t have to cancel elections to steal democracy: You just have to terrorize the people who run them...Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.Special Report: China Spying On Chip Titan, Trump Crony?
More On U.S. Law, Courts, Election Rigging, Grifting, Pedophiles
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Oct. 29, 2026. A fight over the Cheesecake Factory has baited Trump into making the worst, most self-defeating "closing argument" in the history of American elections.It took Barack Obama one joke to get the president of the United States to sabotage his party’s midterm election chances.Oct. 28-29, 2026. At 12:29 this afternoon, I was driving to pick up my daughter when my phone suddenly started lighting up with nonstop message notifications, one after another, without a break for several minutes. There were so many that my mind went to the worst places. The one thing they all had in common, aside from the scare tactics, manipulative language, and false sense of urgency, was something buried way at the bottom of the messages if they even disclosed it. They were all being sent on behalf of the local Republican Party, PACs supporting Republicans, or the Republican candidates’ campaigns directly.
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
Oct. 29, 2026. The boom is hitting two walls at once: Financing and public hatred. The boom in AI-related spending is already enormous relative to the size of the U.S. economy and is widely expected to grow even bigger. More Global News
Top Stories
President Trump’s super PAC and Elon Musk have both spent enormous amounts to support Republicans in the midterms. Here the president meets with fellow billionairres who help him run the government, including puppetmaster and federal contractor Elon Musk, looming over Trump in the Oval Office photo. Musk is a native of South Africa who is funding ultra-right poitical parties around the world to advance white leaders. Others advancing the agenda are Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, at left, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who like many Cabinet members are active campaigners for Republicans despite the Hatch Act barring such activity at taxpayer expense (New York Times photo by Haiyun Jiang).
New York Times, Cabinet Officials on the Campaign Trail? Ethics Experts Say Some Are Breaking the Law, Karoun Demirjian, Updated Oct. 29, 2026. As Trump officials stump for Republican candidates facing difficult races, ethics experts say they are being lax about complying with the Hatch Act, a federal anti-corruption law.This summer, Attorney General Todd Blanche boasted about the drop in federal crime while stumping for the Republican candidate for New York governor at a rally headlined by President Trump.
In Michigan, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, personally endorsed Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate, arguing that Mr. Rogers would help advance his department’s work.
And in Alaska this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stood with the president at a rally in which he noted the role of Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, in securing a natural gas pipeline.
Such appearances have become commonplace as nearly all of Mr. Trump’s top deputies fanned out to promote Republican candidates facing difficult election odds. But they have alarmed government ethics experts who say administration officials are running afoul of the Hatch Act, an 87-year-old law that limits how executive branch employees can participate in political activity.
In the past few months, at least nine of 15 cabinet secretaries and several other senior Trump deputies have been formally accused of Hatch Act violations, such as using official government titles while engaging in campaign activities and using taxpayer funds to pay for political advertisements.
“We have not seen this level of violations in recent times,” said Kedric Payne, the head of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group that recently filed a Hatch Act complaint against several White House and homeland security officials over three taxpayer-funded commercials promoting Mr. Trump. Its affiliated litigation arm, Campaign Legal Center Action, is one of the groups that is also suing the Trump administration over the ad campaign.
“Officials should not be using their titles or taxpayer resources to be involved in political campaigns, yet the Trump administration continues to increase activity that goes against the letter and the spirit of this principle,” Mr. Payne said. “Now it seems as though the administration can flood the zone with potential Hatch Act violations and not suffer any consequences until after the election.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is This Heaven? No, It’s the Midterms, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 29, 2026. Our national pastime, our dark future, our big moment.
“Any election that doesn’t go my way is fraud.” That’s the Trump model, and his right-wing allies around the world are starting to embrace it too. “The elections in the state of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted yesterday on X. “We demand from the police and the Shin Bet a thorough investigation into the election theft by the Arab parties and a full prosecution of the criminals.” Law enforcement, he said, “must act with an iron fist and in an immediate manner.”
Not every such claim gets Trump’s blessing, however. Brazil’s Flávio Bolsonaro, who fled the country after his own election loss this week, yesterday posted a letter thanking Trump and Argentinian president Javier Milei for helping him escape to the United States. In it, he declared himself the “true president-elect of Brazil.” But Trump immediately poured water on the claim: “I’m not going to make a comment about that,” he told reporters. “I won’t get involved.” Bolsonaro subsequently deleted the letter and reposted it, sans president-elect claim. Happy Thursday.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Falls for Obama’s Trap, GOP Turnout Tanks, National Guard Mobilized, Prison Guards to the Polls, Major General Purged, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 29, 2026. Five days out, Donald Trump is losing the argument, and he knows it. Barack Obama set a trap with a single joke about the Cheesecake Factory, and Trump has spent the final week of the campaign fighting about restaurants, sidewalks, a golf course, and Jeffrey Epstein instead of the gas prices and grocery bills.
So his administration is going after the election itself. A federal judge accused it of “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference” and blocked its attempt to set aside 20,000 California ballots. The Justice Department has confirmed it will send agents from the DEA, the ATF, and the Bureau of Prisons to monitor polling places. And according to a new report, the National Guard is quietly being mobilized in all 50 states.
Then there’s Alaska. The New York Times and much of the national press have made Alaska the story. But they’re leaving out the rest of it. Republicans have been running this exact playbook for years: a “ghost candidate” scheme in Florida that ended in criminal convictions, with one of the operatives involved back at it this year, and a Republican operative in Washington state who recruited two extra “Bob Fergusons” to run for governor. Today, I’m covering all of it, not just the half that fits Trump’s narrative.
That’s why your support matters right now. TikTok, Meta, and other platforms keep suppressing election content like this in the final stretch, and I can’t count on the algorithm to get it to you. The newsletter is the one place they can’t throttle. If you value reporting that tells the whole story, not just the one the White House wants told, please become a paid subscriber today. It keeps this work independent, and it’s how we’ll keep reporting through Election Day and whatever comes after.
Here’s what you need to know today.
Obama Mocks Trump’s “Whole-of-Government” Meltdown Over His Cheesecake Factory Joke as Trump Fires Back and Gets Heckled About Epstein
Barack Obama mocked the Trump administration for treating his Cheesecake Factory joke like a national emergency while ignoring inflation. “They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke, not to inflation, but to that joke,” Obama told a crowd of about 4,000 near Atlanta on Wednesday. “The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory.” He ridiculed the White House for sending Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to hold a press conference outside the restaurant: “The guy who is trying to figure out how to lower inflation... they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.” Obama also dismissed the “elitism” charge from Republicans: “I am the father of two daughters. Do you think I could have survived their childhood without going to the Cheesecake Factory?” He then threw in a jab about his own presidency: “I am old enough to remember when a president wearing a tan suit was a major national controversy.”
Obama turned the joke into a closing argument about affordability and corruption. “These are not serious people,” he said of Trump and Republicans. “They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory.” He accused the administration of using “distractions... attacks, fabrications, phony outrage” so that voters “won’t notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher.” “We have never seen a president so intent on selling favors,” Obama added. “The guy has made billions of dollars while in office.” Obama was rallying for Sen. Jon Ossoff, who leads his race by 8 to 10 points, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is in a tight race for governor. Ossoff warned Trump officials that “next year you’ll be raising your hand to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” and the crowd chanted “Lock him up!”
Trump couldn’t let it go, hitting back at Obama again at his own rally in Ohio, where a heckler confronted him about Jeffrey Epstein. Trump insisted the White House is now “more beautiful and in better shape” and claimed Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness” or “broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.” He also claimed Obama couldn’t pass a cognitive test and again praised Sen. Jon Husted’s physique. When a protester yelled about Epstein, Trump replied, “I threw Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago because I thought he was a wackjob.” He also called Rep. Ilhan Omar “a fresh little thing” after Homeland Security agents raided her home. Critics piled on, with one Hill columnist writing that Obama had “rope-a-doped Trump here, drawing him into a fight that only advantages Dems.”
Judge Slams Trump’s “Pattern of Attempted Election Interference” as DOJ Confirms It Will Send DEA, ATF, and Prison Guards to the Polls
A federal judge has refused the Trump administration’s demand to set aside 20,000 California ballots, accusing it of “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference.” The administration wanted the ballots separated over claims that the voters might not be citizens. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter. He warned that “if the executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger.” Carter also faulted the government for failing to explain how it built its list, and prosecutors have admitted that some people on it are likely citizens. California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the case “amateur hour” and said the administration is “trying to attack the fundamental right to vote with trash data.”
The administration is vowing to keep fighting, even as its effort to target suspected noncitizen voters keeps losing in court. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said the administration will appeal to the 9th Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court, arguing it needs the ballots “segregated” now because counties are already counting them. A 9th Circuit panel already rejected an earlier emergency request from his office on Monday. Separately, the ACLU and other civil rights groups sued Wednesday to block the administration’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” which they say directs immigration officials to build target lists and coordinate with ICE to question suspected noncitizen voters. Judge Carter noted that people flagged as noncitizens “have repeatedly turned out to be naturalized citizens.” Another federal judge has already barred the Department of Homeland Security from questioning suspected noncitizens in person through Election Day, finding that it relied on “faulty data sources that sweep in U.S. citizens.”
The Justice Department has confirmed in a court filing that its election monitors will come from the DEA, the ATF, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, raising fresh fears of voter intimidation. The filing came in response to an NAACP lawsuit arguing that sending law enforcement personnel to polling places amounts to voter intimidation. The DOJ says the monitors will not act as law enforcement, will not carry firearms, and will only observe and take notes, while FBI and ICE personnel will not take part. It will still be the department’s largest monitoring operation ever, and Democrats and watchdog groups are responding with tens of thousands of their own poll monitors and a legal team on the scale of a presidential campaign. “We’ve never had to deal with the president of the United States saying that he may seize ballots, put ICE agents outside polling locations and other kinds of very clear direct threats to the voting process,” said DNC vice chair Jane Kleeb. Democratic officials are also running drills for scenarios like federal agents seizing ballots or ICE agents showing up at polling places.
Hegseth Fires the Pentagon’s Top War Planner as Trump Reportedly Pushes for a New Strike on Iran After the Midterms
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Pentagon’s top military planner just as Trump weighs new strikes on Iran, according to the AP. Hegseth removed Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia as head of strategy, plans, and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a post known as the J5. The J5 is responsible for developing and coordinating military plans with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the president, which makes the firing especially significant on the eve of a possible new campaign. A defense official said no reason was given and no replacement has been named. Sylvia, a 32-year veteran who previously commanded the 101st Airborne Division, is the second J5 Hegseth has pushed out, after he forced Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee to retire last October. The Joint Staff thanked Sylvia for “32 years of distinguished service to our nation.”
Sylvia is the latest of nearly two dozen senior military leaders Hegseth has fired or forced out, and the Pentagon hasn’t explained almost any of them. The list includes the civilian secretaries of the Army and Navy as well as several top uniformed officers. Last month, Hegseth ordered the military to cut its roughly 800 general and flag officer positions by 20% by Jan. 1, 2027, calling it “accountability and long overdue.” Critics in Congress call it a purge that will take years to undo. “He’s got some kind of deep-seated grievance about leadership in the military,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy combat pilot. “He’s purging a generation of great military leaders, and it will take a generation to recover from it.”
Trump is reportedly the person in his inner circle most eager for a new attack on Iran, and the U.S. is preparing for one right after the midterms. According to Semafor, an administration official said Trump “is the one most open” to ramping up military operations, though many inside the administration are skeptical and even he has reservations. The official said negotiations on a “temporary peace deal” are under way, but if diplomacy fails, the U.S. is prepared to strike soon after the Nov. 3 elections. Two diplomats told the AP that U.S. officials have warned Middle Eastern allies to prepare for renewed military action after Tuesday, along with possible Iranian retaliation. A third U.S. aircraft carrier and thousands more troops are headed to the region. Trump has vowed to “finish the job” in Iran, though officials say he hasn’t made a final decision.
Tensions keep rising across the region as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says three tankers caught fire after hitting mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC Navy claims the tankers had switched off their radar and were trying to use an “unauthorised” route. It also says it captured a U.S. “spy and deception” drone near the strait, and it challenged U.S. Central Command to “prove” its claim that the strait has been cleared of mines. Russia has offered to mediate between Iran and the U.S., and a Kremlin spokesman told Al Jazeera that Moscow is even willing to take Iran’s enriched uranium if it remains a sticking point. Meanwhile, the war in Yemen keeps escalating: the WHO says 1,677 people have been killed and more than 276,000 displaced since fighting reignited in September. Aden’s airport briefly shut down after Houthi missile strikes.
National Guard Quietly Mobilizes in All 50 States for the Midterms, According to a New Report
National Guard units across the country are being quietly mobilized for next week’s midterm elections, according to an exclusive report by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. Military sources told Klippenstein that the Guard’s mission spans all 50 states and centers on supporting federal cybersecurity efforts. Guardsmen will also observe ballot drop boxes and polling places and help protect so-called “critical infrastructure.” The mobilization follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order directing military spy agencies to “mobilize every asset ... to defend our election” from foreign interference. Klippenstein also reports that Task Force Raider, U.S. Cyber Command’s previously secret election security effort, is already “in full swing.” All of this comes despite repeated assurances from Pentagon leaders that the military has “no plans” to involve itself in the election.
Only seven states have publicly acknowledged any National Guard role: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Washington. In Washington, Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson offered county auditors an “Election Neighborhood Watch” of Guard members in civilian clothes to watch ballot drop boxes, and he says they won’t be armed. Iowa activated its own “Joint Task Force Cyber” to monitor election networks. After suspicious packages containing white powder arrived at election offices in Alabama and Oklahoma this month, sources say all 50 states have put their Guard “Civil Support Teams” on standby. Guard involvement in elections has been growing for years, from two states in 2020 to 14 in 2022 and 15 in 2024. Several states that used the Guard in 2024 have not said whether they are doing so this year.
Klippenstein argues that the Pentagon’s public reassurances are full of loopholes. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told Congress he has “neither received nor anticipate[s] receiving any unlawful order” about the election, a qualifier Klippenstein says is “big enough to drive a Humvee through.” Caine also promised there are no plans to send federal troops or “Federalized” Guard members to polling places, but that promise doesn’t cover Guard members who answer to state governors. When Congress asked the head of the National Guard Bureau for assurances about troops at polling places, he said only that the Guard “always follows constitution, law, policy and guidance.” Klippenstein warns that the real military role in this election is happening in cyberspace and under the “ridiculously elastic” label of critical infrastructure, which the military still can’t clearly define. “Polls open Tuesday,” he writes. “Happy voting, and don’t forget to smile for the Guard.”
Trump Demands Peltola Be Kicked Off the Ballot, but Republicans Have Run the Same “Spoiler Candidate” Playbook Before
Trump is demanding that Democrat Mary Peltola be removed from Alaska’s Senate ballot, and his attorney general is hinting at more action from the Justice Department. The demand follows a New York Times report that Peltola campaign aides and DSCC officials took part in a monthslong effort to recruit a second “Dan Sullivan” and other spoiler candidates to pull votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. “Mary Peltola should suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done, A FRAUD ON THE AMERICAN PUBLIC,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News, “I expect you’re going to hear more from the Department of Justice this week,” but when asked whether the conduct was illegal, he answered “Absolutely,” then added, “It certainly should be.” As POLITICO notes, recruiting candidates to split an opponent’s vote is a familiar tactic that generally falls within the law. Peltola’s campaign denies recruiting anyone and says “no tweet or threat from any DC politician” will push her out of the race, which Cook rates a toss-up.
In Florida, a Republican “ghost candidate” scheme in 2020 ended in criminal convictions, and one of the operatives involved is back at it this year, according to the Orlando Sentinel. In 2020, former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles paid a man named Alex Rodriguez to run as an independent against Democratic state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez. The fake candidate drew more than 6,000 votes, and the Republican won by just 32 votes. Political committees run by GOP operative Alex Alvarado sent mailers promoting the “ghost” candidates as progressive alternatives, and Artiles and others were later convicted, though Alvarado was never charged. Now Alvarado’s new PAC is sending texts designed to sound like they come from a left-leaning group, attacking Rodríguez, who is running for attorney general, on abortion rights. Rodríguez’s campaign, which was just endorsed by Planned Parenthood Florida Action, called the texts an attempt “to confuse voters and suppress turnout.”
In Washington state, a Republican operative recruited two men named “Bob Ferguson” to run for governor in 2024 against Democrat Bob Ferguson, then the state’s attorney general. Former Tacoma City Council member Keith Blocker wrote in an op-ed at the time that it was “a calculated move that could have disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters.” Ferguson’s campaign sent cease-and-desist letters, and the two other Bob Fergusons dropped out before the election. Blocker noted that some commentators attacked Ferguson for fighting back, which he compared to “accusing firefighters of arson while the arsonist walks free.” Ferguson went on to win and is now governor. Unlike the Florida and Washington cases, the Alaska Sullivan stayed on the ballot after the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that state law does not require candidates to run in good faith.
Democrats Gain in Key Senate Races as Trump Drags Down the GOP
New CNN polls in four key states show Democrats well positioned to take back the Senate five days before Election Day. In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed leads Republican Mike Rogers 49% to 42% among likely voters, after the race was tied around Labor Day. In Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in three decades, Democrat James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton 49% to 43%, helped by 63% support among Latino likely voters. Democrats Troy Jackson in Maine (49% to Susan Collins’s 45%) and Adam Hamilton in deep-red Kansas (49% to Sen. Roger Marshall’s 45%) are also ahead, but CNN says neither race has a clear leader within the margin of error. Hamilton is winning roughly 12% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, more crossover than any other Democrat CNN tested. Democrats need a net gain of four seats for the majority, and CNN says Trump’s underwater ratings, even in states he won easily in 2024, are putting once-safe Republican territory in play.
Trump’s record-low approval and rambling rallies are threatening to drag down Republicans in the final days of the campaign. A New York Times/Siena poll found just 36% approve of his job performance, the lowest of any president heading into a midterm since 1946. Even in one House district Trump won by more than 20 points, an internal Republican poll obtained by USA TODAY shows him underwater, at 47% approval and 50% disapproval. Instead of talking about prices, Trump has bragged about a new D.C. golf course, praised Sen. Jon Husted’s backside in three separate speeches, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the Iran war is making the country rich even as Americans pay more for gas. Former Trump aide Marc Short said voters feel affordability is “not where he’s focused,” and GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini called it a “horrendous environment for Republicans.” Only 1% of Republican ads aired in October mention Trump, down from 47% in May, while candidates like New Hampshire’s John Sununu now say, “I’ve never even met the man.”
Other news:
Trump says he will hold a federal judge “fully responsible” if anyone is hurt or killed at the D.C. golf course he wants to overhaul. Judge Ana Reyes blocked further tree removal and required 10 days’ notice before any “irreparable modification” at East Potomac Golf Links, after about 430 trees were cut down with less than a day’s notice. In a late-night Truth Social rant, Trump called the public course “highly dangerous, dilapidated, and absolutely disgusting” and claimed a White House staffer was “hit violently in the chest” by a golf ball. The Justice Department confirmed that the course is set to close on Nov. 15 for 15 months of renovations. The project joins Trump’s other D.C. construction, including the ballroom built where the East Wing once stood. Obama has mocked the projects on the trail, saying Trump “should be on HGTV.”
Utah has filed felony charges against Kalshi and its two co-founders, the most aggressive move yet by a state to rein in prediction markets. The charges include 13 counts of violating Utah’s gambling ban, plus a count of profiting off illegal activity, and they name CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara. “Calling it a ‘prediction market’ doesn’t change what it is, and being federally registered doesn’t put a company above the law,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said. Kalshi called the charges a “crazy overreach” and accused Utah of “playing politics.” Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sided with Kalshi and has sued at least 10 states, including Utah this week, to stop them from regulating prediction markets. With litigation in roughly 20 states, experts expect the fight to end up at the Supreme Court.
U.S. intelligence concluded that a Chinese businesswoman with a close relationship to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was passing information to Beijing, and Trump was briefed and took no action, according to the New York Times. The woman, Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, was already under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia AI chips to China. Surveillance of her revealed her ties to Jensen Huang, raising fears that Beijing could gain insight into Trump’s thinking on chip policy ahead of his trip to China next month. Jensen Huang has never received a defensive briefing, and companies tied to Megaspeed kept buying Nvidia chips this year, according to the Times. Nvidia called his interactions with her “not unusual,” but some senior administration officials doubt he could have been unaware of her role. Since winning Trump over, Huang has secured looser chip export rules, and Nvidia donated at least $20 million to Trump’s ballroom fund.
A Cornell student accused in an alleged fraternity gang rape is asking a judge to remove New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor in the case. His lawyer, Andrew Miltenberg, argues that James showed bias when she posted on X that what the accuser endured was “horrific and unacceptable” and that “we stand with you.” Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed James three days after that post, saying she had “lost faith” in the local district attorney, who had declined to bring charges. James’s office called the post a “single empathetic remark” and called the student’s concerns “wildly speculative.” A Republican state judge will hear arguments Thursday, and a second student has filed a similar challenge. Meanwhile, Cornell’s Faculty Senate is weighing a no-confidence vote over the university’s handling of sexual assault.
Spain has begun three days of national mourning after a collision between two high-speed trains near Toledo killed 69 people. A Renfe train slammed into the back of a stopped Iryo train on Wednesday morning, derailing several carriages, and 107 people needed hospital treatment. Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the automatic signaling system crashed about 30 minutes before the collision, and that operators at a Madrid control center then told trains to keep moving despite a stop signal, which he called “inexplicable” and “clearly a wrong decision.” It is Europe’s deadliest train crash since 2013 and comes just 10 months after another Renfe-Iryo collision on the same line killed 46 people. Train drivers went ahead with a planned strike demanding more investment in safety. Police have set up centers in four cities for families to give DNA samples, and 64 people have been reported missing.
Two Colorado college students who went missing during a weekend hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains have been found dead. The bodies of Kaden Matsuda, 19, and Jackson Donlon, 20, were found Wednesday in a basin of West Apostle Mountain, about 100 miles southeast of Aspen. The two left Colorado Mountain College’s Leadville campus on Friday to attempt a technical climb, and they went missing after a heavy snowstorm hit. Rescuers had earlier found their tent collapsed under the snow, and their climbing gear was missing, suggesting they had set out on the climb. Authorities say foul play is not suspected, and the causes of death are under investigation. Matsuda was training to become a wildland firefighter, and Donlon was training to become a mountain guide.
Newly released emails show officials in Minneapolis’s Hennepin County secretly surveilled environmental activists fighting to close a polluting trash incinerator, according to the Guardian. County employee Joe Vital, whom activists considered an ally, allegedly joined their private organizing call and wrote up a dossier on who attended and what they planned. Another county official, David McNary, forwarded activists’ emails to the incinerator’s operator and industry lobbyists, who used them to help kill an environmental justice bill in 2024. In a recording, Vital also allegedly tried to confirm the identity of a whistleblower. The county called the activities “ordinary functions of government,” while activists asked why public resources were being used to monitor “community members who are simply organizing.” The incinerator burns 365,000 tons of trash a year in low-income north Minneapolis neighborhoods.
The Federal Trade Commission is ordering nine major companies, including Delta, United, Uber, and Walmart, to explain how they use algorithms to charge customers different prices for the same products. The inquiry also covers JetBlue, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Target, and asks whether prices or gig workers’ pay vary based on personal data or loyalty programs. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said the agency will “scrutinize the opaque methodology” behind these practices. The FTC cannot fine or regulate the airlines, however, because they fall outside its authority. Several states are already moving to ban so-called surveillance pricing. Former FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra warned that studies like this rarely lead to real rule changes.
The Milwaukee Brewers won their first World Series in franchise history, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 to take the series four games to one. Jacob Misiorowski threw five and two-thirds scoreless innings, and rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt drove in two runs. Catcher William Contreras was named World Series MVP after batting .381. The title ends a 57-year wait for the franchise and gives Milwaukee its first World Series championship since the 1957 Braves. The Brewers capped a major league-best 103-win season after sweeping the Dodgers in the NLCS. Outfielder Christian Yelich dedicated the win to late broadcaster Bob Uecker: “This one’s still for Bob.”
A fire at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, inside a federal complex where nuclear bomb materials were once made, triggered an emergency declaration on Wednesday. Officials halted incoming traffic and restricted air, rail, and river travel around the site while employees sheltered in place. The “site area emergency” is the second-highest of three emergency levels at the facility. The fire was put out Wednesday night, one employee suffered minor injuries, and officials said no contamination was detected. The lab still handles radioactive material, and a nuclear safety expert said fires there require “extreme precautions” because of the risk of contamination. Officials have not said what caused the fire.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, An Unpredictable President, a Grim White House: Trump Faces Down the Midterms, Katie Rogers, Updated Oct. 29, 2026. The White House has been rocked by turnover and anxiety over the midterms. The president, who is tightening his inner circle, has lashed out at critics, held meandering rallies and feasted on a diet of news clips and “A.I. slop,” as one aide put it.
President Trump’s private dining room, located just off the Oval Office, is where he goes to watch television, make phone calls and sift through stacks of printed-out news articles and documents that eat up most of the space. A spot has been cleared for Natalie Harp, a devoted aide who now works out of that room when she is not seated behind the president at his desk.
Elsewhere, Bill Pulte, a top federal housing official and purveyor of A.I.-generated images and memes that make their way to the president’s social media feed, spends some of his time making posters. He recently made one of Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a Republican whose backside Mr. Trump has admired, for the president to display while riding aboard Air Force One.
Amid the loyalists, news clippings, poster boards and pieces of art made by his fans is an increasingly unpredictable president staring down the possibility that the Republican Party could lose both chambers of Congress in next week’s elections.
Many G.O.P. candidates in tight races have tried to distance themselves from Mr. Trump’s policies, his behavior and the widespread allegations of self-dealing in his administration. Behind the scenes, some political advisers and outside Republican groups have warned the president’s aides that Mr. Trump could do more harm than good by holding rallies in battleground states with uncomfortably close races, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
But the president, under pressure and angry with naysayers, has dismissed polls that reflect his unpopularity, and has raged against unflattering stories that plunge him into a dark mood. Determined to win by turning the midterm season into a referendum on himself, he is set to headline rallies around the country all week, including in Ohio on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump remains convinced that his dominant place in the Republican Party is enough to mitigate a tough political climate. But a grim mood has set in around the White House, which has been rocked by turnover, tension among internal factions and anxiety over what happens should Republicans lose legislative control in Washington, according to 16 current and former administration officials and allies of Mr. Trump’s, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Depravity Is on the Ballot, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 29, 2026. Polls tell us that affordability and corruption — and the nexus between the two — are driving the blue wave that threatens to sweep out MAGA politicians up and down the ticket. But in the closing days of the campaign, more evident is that the depravity, cruelty, bigotry, and dishonesty — the nexus of traits, emotions, and base urges — that drive Donald Trump and his cult are very much on the ballot.
As former president Barack Obama said last weekend in Ohio:
There is a moral component to the choices we face right now. We are not going to fix the economic system or the political system that’s broken. We’re not going to unrig our economy, so long as we’ve got a culture where anything goes, and where people in the highest offices in the land think it’s okay to lie and cheat and bully, and where money is the only measure of our worth....
Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets. Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington, but we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation, if we don’t return to some of those old-fashioned virtues — (Applause.) — if our fundamental attitude to each other is to try and hurt other people so they don’t hurt us first, if we’re driven by fear instead of by hope, if we think it’s okay to snatch children from parents or cut programs for the aged or the infirm, so the powerful can get whatever they want, we will continue to fester in anger and division.
Politics is said to be downstream from culture, but politics, as Obama reminded us, it is also how we express our collective aspirations and values. He told the crowd:
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being divided.…
This election can be a start. This election can be an inflection point. This election can be a course correction in America’s long journey toward a more perfect union — (applause) — because if we’re willing to turn out in big numbers here in Ohio and across the country, if we’re willing to vote for change and vote for Democrats up and down the ballot, then this election might just mark the moment this country began moving in a better direction — (cheers/applause) — when we leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals!
In another election, that might simply be empty rhetoric. But in an election in which Trump and former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) are openly and blatantly lying, fanning the worst Islamophobia, and accusing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed of being a Muslim Brotherhood supporter; Vivek Ramaswamy, egged on by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, is running the most despicable ad in memory to attack the victim of childhood sexual abuse; the Justice Department is making patently absurd, unfounded claims (rejected even by judges Trump appointed) to thwart free and fair elections and intimidate nonwhite voters; and Trump uses a transphobic slur to describe Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee for Senate from South Carolina, viciously throws around racial invectives against entire Somalian-American and Haitian-American communities, and seeks to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), we cannot deny that the moral fiber of our democracy is at issue.
We are deciding not only if we want to continue a set of disastrous policies (e.g., an illegal and reckless war, tax cuts for the rich paid for by cutting healthcare and food stamps for the poor, tariffs that raise prices for everyone, unregulated AI) but also whether we want a government run by grifters, racists, propagandists, and exploiters. Trump actually framed the election perfectly: We should pretend he is on the ballot. But what he stands for is also on the ballot — the sort of rhetoric he has tried to normalize, the cultish loyalty of a soulless party, the mindset that says exploiting victims of child sexual abuse is acceptable to keep power, the brutish and blatant fear-mongering against our neighbors, and the lawless brutality perpetrated in the name of border security.
It is not every election in which the contest between darkness and light, between hope and fear is so evident. We saw earlier this week what it looks like when pro-democracy forces turn out the vote and popular solidarity triumphs over thuggish authoritarianism.
The eruption of unbridled joy that we saw in the streets of Serbia and Brazil after democratic forces beat back right-wing authoritarians — a political earthquake driven in large part by young people and labor unions over the despotic, corrupt right-wing parties openly aligned with Trump (and in the case of Brazil, aided by Big Tech) — illustrates the global hunger for communal action and the repudiation of the politics of meanness, exploitation, and repression. Those celebrations of the triumph of democracy reverberated around the world as international leaders congratulated voters on the defeat of forces of violence, corruption, and repression.
The Guardian captured the mood in Belgrade, where “tens of thousands of people flooded the city’s main boulevards, chanting euphorically, waving flags and setting off flares against an unrelenting backdrop of honking car horns. ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to explain it,’ says Tamara, 35. ‘I’m so happy and excited.’” She and others expressed hope that the elections would give rise to “freedom and hope for a better tomorrow.”
The U.S. elections do not come in a vacuum. Be it in Hungary or Serbia or Brazil or the United States (in the outpouring of communal energy in the No Kings movement), ordinary people have coalesced to form a powerful counterweight to authoritarianism. A common revulsion against exploitation by the rich and powerful consistently has defied expectations, overcoming better-funded elites and their Big Tech allies. (In victory, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared, “We had to overcome foreign interference in the election, coming from outside through digital platforms that we will have to regulate…. No, we cannot fail to recognize that crimes in the digital world must be treated in the same way as crimes in the real world.”)
In the U.S., as Obama said, we now have the opportunity to “leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals.” Imagine the celebrations that will erupt if we do.
Robert Reich, Opinion: The Republicans’ Closing Argument, Robert Reich, right, Oct. 29, 2026. It’s all they have. The Republican Party no longer has anything constructive to say about anything or anyone, so what is its closing argument in the 2026 midterm elections? Hate, fear, and bigotry.
On Sunday, Trump claimed that if Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won, he’d “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores.”
We’ve become so numbed to Trump’s bigotry that it’s necessary to remind ourselves that the president of the United States is now accusing an American citizen who’s running for the Senate of posing a danger to America because he’s Muslim.
Trump’s rants against Representative Ilhan Omar draw on the same Islamophobia. He’s launched a criminal investigation against her based on an allegation that she came to the United States fraudulently.
He charged recently that her real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi and “her last name is, incredibly, also the exact name of her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the person they said she married and had children with.”
He’s called her “garbage” and “a scammer” who comes from “a non-country, basically. Somalia has no government, has no nothing. ... All they do is run around shooting each other.”
Again, the president of the United States is investigating a member of Congress because she was born in Somalia and is Muslim.
Of course, hateful bigotry is nothing new for Trump. But until recently the Republican Party as a whole had avoided Trump’s bottom-feeding shite.
A few weeks ago, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, claimed that Dr. El-Sayed slept in an Osama “bin Laden jersey.”
On Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while campaigning against Dr. El-Sayed, falsely accused him of being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and then baselessly claimed that the rise of the Brotherhood (an Islamist political movement founded in 1928) had created “stagnant societies” in which Arabs do not win major global awards such as Nobel Prizes and “don’t produce literature.”
I once worked for RFK Jr.’s father. Junior’s bigotry would appall Robert F. Kennedy, whose life was dedicated to fighting such crap.
But when it comes to mimicking Trump’s hatefulness, no one comes as close as JD Vance.
At a recent rally in Michigan, Vance branded El-Sayed a “little weasel” who harbored hatred for the U.S. and said he should “shut his mouth and show a little gratitude” to America.
Vance’s bigotry extends beyond Islamophobia. Vance has tried to suggest that Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico is gay. Campaigning in Texas on October 13 for Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Vance answered a man who shouted that he loved him by saying he felt the same but in a “platonic” way, adding: “I’m not James Talarico.”
Then, insinuating that a positive statement Talarico once made about transgender children harbored something sinister in Talarico’s past, Vance alluded to Talarico’s internet search history before admitting he was “just guessing.”
Yet Vance thinks it’s fine to weaponize childhood sexual assault. He vigorously defends Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring the estranged birth mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a “liar” and mocking her mental health — without mentioning that the mother had lost custody of Acton after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for raping Acton as a child. Vance even blasted fellow Republicans who spoke out against the ad, calling their criticism “disgusting” and telling them to “stop whining” because “politics is a tough business.”
The midterm elections are bringing out this filth because Republicans dare not talk about the economy, which they and Trump have wrecked for most people; or foreign policy, in which Canada has become an enemy and Putin a friend; or the violent dragnet of their domestic policy, in which American citizens have been shot and killed by masked ICE agents.
All they have left with which to appeal to Americans is fear of the “other,” hate of Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, and blatant bigotry toward anyone who’s different. If this is enough for a majority of voters to keep them in control of Congress and deliver them governorships, our nation is a lot worse off than I feared.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: The Polls Are Encouraging, The Early Vote Is Strong, Trump Is Unraveling - Let’s Put Our Heads Down, Close Strong, And Win This Thing! Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 29, 2026. Here’s some happy data to start your day:
The big story in the early vote continues to be the jawdropping surge of Hispanic voters all across the country:
Look at these wildly encouraging polls CNN released this morning:
Here’s the CNN headline from their poll story. Lots of ketchup flying in the White House today:
Here’s a summary of the polls we’ve seen in the last few days. Ain’t a lot of red in there!
While Donnie got a decent GDP report today, with the new ugly PCE data he also got this morning let’s review how he ended the election for his party -- one of the worst months of inflation in the modern era of our politics:
So the proud plucky patriots of this community got together last night for our last Wednesday night gathering of the 2026 election. Here is some of what we discussed…..
From the earliest days of this promising cycle we talked about the need for Dems to learn once again how to win in red places and red states, to expand our map, and regain our lost majority. Well, peeps, with five days to go we are competitive in places like Alaska and Texas, throughout the Heartland/Midwest, and even in places in the Deep South. All places we have not won successfully in many, many years. We have expanded our map and grown as a national party in deeply encouraging ways.
A central reason we’ve been able to do this is by embracing what I call a raucous pluralism. We are rallying behind a wildly diverse set of candidates from across the country who fit their districts and states, and come from an extraordinary range of backgrounds and experiences -- firefighters, nurses, teachers, navy pilots, chaplains, local electeds, union leaders, drill instructors, waitresses, farmers, and doctors…….One of the reasons we are seeing so many “regular” people emerge is that our low-dollar fundraising system -- all of you -- provides seed capital to let any Democrat become competitive. You no longer need to be rich to run for office and win.
This dynamic has helped a new type of Democrat emerge this cycle, what I am calling servant-leaders, people who have a clear proven track record of delivering and putting people and their communities over themselves. In a time of extraordinary abandonment and betrayal by Trump and his fellow oligarchs, voters are looking for people they know will fight for them, deliver for them, work to make things better for them and their families, and put things right in this country where things have gone so off course. They are looking for leaders like this remarkable people we’ve met along the way:
We also talked about how given how bad everything has gotten for Trump and the Rs, despite their control over legacy and social media, their enormous corrupt spend, their 24/7/365 right-wing noise machine, and given that Trump has seen his allies be denied power by voters in Hungary, Brazil, Serbia, and now Israel, we must assume that Trump’s fuckery is going to go into overdrive these next few weeks and that he -- desperate, scared, pathetic -- is going to do whatever it takes to keep himself and his allies in power, here and everywhere.
And we, in the face of this, will approach this next phase of our fight be being prepared, not scared; and that we will, if things start going sideways, lead the fight in our communities and not recoil from it. For that is what we do here at Hopium -- when the proud patriots of this community are called, we answer. And so now what we must do is keep driving the early vote, run up the score, blow out these Tuesday elections, and then work with everything we got to ensure there is a peaceful transfer of power in Washington and across the country in January.
Finally, I thanked everyone here. We’ve done remarkable things together these past three and a half years. Your fight, your generosity, your commitment, your love of country, your hard and determined work is the fuel, the spirit that keeps this place roaring every day. I am humbled by it all, for their is no more profound act of patriotism than the little acts we all take each to fight for our democracy and our freedoms. And while we have done so much here over these past three and half years our most important work lies in what we need do over the next six months and beyond, and as we work together to win these elections, take power away from this horrible and corrupt crew, and then begin the hard work of making things better and putting things right.
That’s what I am seeing this morning, and what we discussed last night. Watch the video when you can, share it with others, hit like so more will see it, and now let’s…….Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Blow Out The Midterms, And Prevent Their Neverending Fuckery For Winning The Day
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Baseball, Politics, and War, William Kristol, right, Oct. 29, 2026. A quick look this morning at three pieces of news from yesterday evening: one about sports, one about politics, and one about war.
The Milwaukee Brewers are the World Series champions. It was the first World Series victory for the franchise, which came into existence as an expansion team in 1969. A mere 57 years later (!), they took it all.
They pulled this off while playing in the league’s smallest media market, and with baseball’s nineteenth-biggest payroll.
And they did it impressively and decisively, defeating the Padres 3–1 in the division championship series, taking the league championship 4–0 over the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers, and then putting away Tampa Bay in the World Series 4 games to 1. The Brewers’ 11–2 postseason record this year was one of the four best performances in the last thirty years. One might even call what happened this year a Brew Wave. (Sorry.)
The Brewers’ talent and momentum overcame the obstacles of money and history. Perhaps a good omen for next week?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Bulwark Book Club: ‘The Age of Acrimony… JVL and MONA CHAREN join JON GRINSPAN to discuss his book: The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915.QUICK HITS
NO BAD IDEAS IN A BRAINSTORM: What’s the ideal number of U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department who publicly advance eugenicist views? Less than one, right? Andrew reported yesterday on Ellis Boyle, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, who went on a podcast last week and shared some interesting views on crime:
Five percent of the population cause 90 percent of the crime. . . . If you took out 5 percent of the population that’s bad and removed them from society, so they don’t create mayhem and create, you know, babies with the gene pool of more bad, then I think, in two, maybe three generations, think of how great this population would be. But that’s something that takes willpower.New York Times,
Special Reports: Who Should Decide Elections?
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: “Electoral Authoritarianism”: Should Elections Control the Government or Should Government Control Elections? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 29, 2026. From Putin’s Russia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, dictators have learned that you don’t have to cancel elections to steal democracy: You just have to terrorize the people who run them...
Reporters for MS NOW just broke an extremely troubling story: seven people inside and around the FBI reached out to say that they’re afraid that in the next week they’ll be called upon to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt our election next week.
They all know that federal law has made it a crime for federal law enforcement officers to enter polling places armed (unless there’s an active crime, like a shooting, going on), and has been since 1865, which has them particularly worried about their own possible legal exposure.
Several also noted that what makes this concern particularly cogent and urgent is that they’ve already watched Trump’s and Blanche’s Justice Department use invented claims of “irregularities” to get a judge to sign a warrant that allowed them to march armed agents into Georgia election offices on national television with little blowback and no consequences.
One former senior agent told the reporters how the Bureau used to handle this:
“We were extremely careful about going nowhere near polling places, and [the FBI] even instructing agents to go unarmed to vote, just so there was never any whiff of federal activity near a polling place.”
The precedent was set, the wall was breached, when FBI agents raided the Fulton County election office in Atlanta on January 28th and carried out more than 600 boxes of ballots and records from the 2020 election with oversight by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence. She said she was there on Trump’s personal instruction.
The warrant for that raid, according to Reuters, originated with a referral from Kurt Olsen, an election denier MAGA suck-up who Trump had enlisted to try to prove the long-debunked theory (that cost Fox “News” millions) that Dominion voting machines were secretly controlled from Venezuela.
Months earlier, Gabbard’s office had hauled voting machines out of Puerto Rico and hired a forensics contractor to tear them apart looking for the hack. While the contractor found some small vulnerabilities, as every voting machine audit does, they reported explicitly that there was no evidence whatsoever that even one single vote had been altered.
When that news reached the White House, Stephen Miller’s response was to push to bring in the FBI and seize more machines. Trump then named MAGA 2020 election denier Olsen the White House Director of Election Security. The FBI agents talking to MS NOW were unnerved by all that, and are now worried about what may be coming next.
The law they’re explicitly worried about breaking was passed in February of 1865, as the Civil War was still being fought (it ended in May of that year). Members of Congress were furious that President Lincoln had sent Union troops into polling places in Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, so they passed a law making it a federal felony for any federal official to bring “troops or armed men” to a place where an election is being held, unless it was necessary to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”
The penalty for a federal official to carry a gun into a polling place was specified as up to five years in prison along with a lifetime ban from holding federal office or a federal job, and it’s still on the books today.
Ironically, Congress wrote the law against Lincoln, but the principle that armed government agents in a polling place is both intimidating, election interference, and a federal crime has stood for 161 years.
For exactly 100 years, the Constitution and this law dictated that states run the elections, and the feds can’t go anywhere near them. Then, in 1965, that relationship was flipped upside down when, instead of federal Union Troops, it was the local Klan-connected racist southern sheriffs who were going armed into polling places to intimidate or arrest Black people who tried to vote. In response, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
That law turned the feds from the suspicious group that might mess with elections into the explicit protectors of the integrity of elections, regardless of the objections of local authorities. Feds still couldn’t enter with a gun — unless there was a crime being committed as specified by the VRA.
Now the New York Times reports that secretaries of state are war-gaming how to respond to the possibility of ICE raids at polling places, misbehaving federal “monitors,” and/or federal attempts to seize votes or machines. The entire situation has flipped in just a single year. In the corrupt hands of Trump, Miller, Blanche, Mullin, and Patel the question is now whether your state can protect your vote from Washington.
I’ve seen what impact armed federal agents showing up can have on things far less consequential than elections; back in the late 1960s when I was a young reporter and morning news anchor at WITL in Lansing, Michigan, a police officer and a federal agent walked into our newsroom one morning and asked us, politely but with an edge of threat of “consequences” to us (they wrote down our drivers’ licenses), to hold a story about a mass arrest they were about to make of anti-Vietnam War tax protestors. Over my protests, our news director went with their request and I’ve never forgotten how little “authority” it took to intimidate us.
Fear, in other words, often works. Dictators around the world figured this out centuries ago, and modern autocrats know that you don’t need to cancel elections to control their outcome.
In 2008 Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe’s party lost the first round of a national election; in response his federal police arrested more than 100 presiding officers and election officials on “election fraud” charges that Human Rights Watch described as politically motivated and designed to instill fear in the people running the vote. Mugabe’s candidates, not surprisingly, “won” the next round.
Nobody had to steal a ballot box; they just had to make every election worker in the country wonder if he’d be the next one carted off to prison. This is why the Trump administration just sent letters to election officials in every one of the 50 states warning them that they face years in brutal federal prisons if they process a single “illegal” ballot.
Political scientists call this “electoral authoritarianism” and it’s how elections in Russia are run right now. Just look at the direction we’re moving; it’s as if Putin is walking Trump through it step-by-step:
— Trump told a podcaster in February that Republicans should “take over the voting” in fifteen states.
— A draft executive order declaring a “national emergency over foreign election interference” has been circulating among his allies for months: both Senators Warner and Himes told MS NOW that, as a result, they’re preparing for the possibility that an exaggerated or fabricated intelligence claim gets used as the pretext to halt voting in Democratic areas.
— When FBI Director, former rightwing social media star, and Trump book author Ka$h Patel (his preferred spelling) was asked directly by Senator Blumenthal, he refused to commit to keeping armed federal agents away from the polls.
— Attorney General and former Trump criminal lawyer Todd Blanche told reporters he won’t rule out “postelection actions” and has publicly asked why sending armed federal immigration officers to polling places would even be objectionable.
— Homeland Security Secretary and former plumber Markwayne Mullin said ICE could be sent to voting sites.
— Shortly thereafter, Blanche’s Justice Department announced roughly 1,000 federal “monitors” for the midterms, deployed, he said, at the request of local Republican parties rather than in consultation with the officials who actually run the elections.
— Two weeks ago Blanche’s Justice Department sent California a thumb drive with 20,000 names it called “likely noncitizens,” gave the state 48 hours to pull their ballots, and then warned Los Angeles County election workers that counting those ballots could be a violation of federal law that could lead to imprisonment.
— Trump posted the letter himself and added that they’d “all go to jail for a long period of time.”
— And we learned yesterday from Ken Klippenstein that Trump has mobilized the National Guard nationwide specifically for the election.
That’s Mugabe’s playbook: threaten the clerks, and the clerks will hesitate, particularly when your armed agents show up to cart off the voting machines or boxes of ballots.
Four federal lawsuits are now pending to keep armed agents away from the polls, including one filed by Arlington County, Virginia, which has just heightened the nervousness of the FBI agents who talked to MS NOW.
In The Hidden History of the War on Voting I traced how every generation of this country has had to fight essentially the same fight against “conservatives” over gets to vote and who counts the votes. As Politifact notes:
“… Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s former personal secretary, claimed that Stalin said: ‘Я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать; но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это кто и как будет считать голоса.’ It translates to: ‘I regard it as completely unimportant who in the party will vote and how, but it is extremely important who will count the votes and how.’”
So here we are five days out. Vote early if your state allows it, put the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, in your phone and use it the moment anything looks wrong.
Call your elected officials — both state and federal — and tell them you demand that they stand up to intimidation from Trump and his lickspittles. Congress was right in 1865 and that law is still on the books.
The government officials we’re voting for (or against) shouldn’t be deciding whose votes get counted and whose don’t, particularly if this bizarre replay of Mugabe’s efforts gets repeated here in America over the next week or so.
Special Report: China Spying On Chip Titan, Trump Crony?
New York Times, Exclusive: Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur, Tripp Mickle and Julian E. Barnes, Oct. 29, 2026. A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.
American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.
A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced 
Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.
For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.
Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.
This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts.
American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips.
But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Defiance.org, Barack Obama tricked Donald Trump into self-imploding just before the midterms, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 29, 2026. A fight over the Cheesecake Factory has baited Trump into making the worst, most self-defeating "closing argument" in the history of American elections.It took Barack Obama one joke to get the president of the United States to sabotage his party’s midterm election chances.
Last Saturday in Cleveland, Obama walked rally-goers through the absurdity of Trump’s gold-leafed Oval Office, the paved-over Rose Garden, the helipad, and the billion-dollar ballroom-bunker complex rising where the East Wing used to be. He summed it up in a sentence: Trump has the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
It was a funny throwaway line in a speech about corruption and the cost of living. And the real point was that the sitting president is so out of touch that he’s redecorating his palace while Americans can’t afford groceries.
And Trump couldn’t let it go. So much so that he began a multi-day process of self-implosion, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen burn so brightly in American politics.
First, Trump attacked Obama on Truth Social that very night… and again on the tarmac Monday, calling him a “lousy president.” Then, he flew to Mississippi, stood in front of a rally that was supposed to be focused on saving an at-risk GOP Senate seat, and kept circling back to the Obama insult. Not one or two times. But for roughly ten minutes. Ten minutes of Trump visibly flustered by the whole ordeal and defending his gold trim, the marble, his new granite helipad, and the ballroom to people who came to hear about their jobs.
I was on set at CNN that night as they aired a supercut of it. You had to see it to believe it.
“We have the most beautiful marble,” Trump protested, trying to persuade his audience. “It’s not money. It’s peanuts. We built the most magnificent ballroom you’ve ever seen. It’s under construction. It’s ahead of schedule. Barack Hussein, he didn’t talk about that. He talked about the ballroom that, he spends all his time thinking about the ballroom. That has to be pristine. And I would try and explain that to a guy like Obama, but he wouldn’t understand.”
Oh, Mr. President, I think Obama understands very well.
The liberal and conservative panelists on set with me at CNN could barely hold back their laughter. I might’ve been in the worst shape. I was having trouble composing myself as we came back from the clip.
Americans already knew what Obama was talking about. We’ve watched Trump’s fixation with redecorating the White House pretty much swallow him whole. In March, two days after he ordered the strikes that started the Iran war, Trump used a Medal of Honor ceremony to gush about his ballroom instead of address to solemness of the ceremony or the fact that we were at war.
“I picked those drapes in my first term,” he smiled to attendees. “I always liked gold.”
Meanwhile, gas prices were beginning to soar as the bombs dropped.
But this week when he was called out for it, Trump’s descent into self-destructive territory didn’t stop with his defensive response to Obama. Remarkably, he confessed to another rally crowd that his own advisers had begged him not to brag about oil profits while people were paying $4.29 a gallon. But he bragged anyway.
“I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune!” he gushed to what I imagine must’ve been a confused audience.
Who is the “we” in this sentence? It’s certainly not the people at the pump. Presumably, the president was bragging about the U.S. oil companies themselves posting record profits off a war he started. Somehow in his twice-warmed-over microwaved mind, he wants his followers to think that counts as a win for the family filling up their minivan. Don’t worry, he assures them, all the cash you’re forking over to the oil execs will, you know, trickle back down to you… someday!
That right there — those absurd comments — could’ve set the record for the most out-of-touch thing a president has said on the eve of an election. Ever. But he didn’t stop there.
Tuesday night in Corpus Christi, Trump brought up the $5,000 checks he’s promised to send Americans if and only if Republicans keep Congress. In a bizarre moment, he invited the crowd to spend the money on him… at his own club… as his guests at Mar-a-Lago. Then, he seemed to remember how high his own club’s prices actually were.
“For $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I’m not even sure you could buy that,” he said. “No, don’t go there. That’s not a good place if you’re price-conscious.”
Marie Antoinette must’ve been smiling from the grave. Finally, “let them eat cake” had been supplanted by something an order of magnitude more callous.
Trump’s closing argument on corruption and affordability — the two issues voters say matter most — seems to boil down to this: Don’t worry about my renovations, they’re beautiful, and that’s good for America. Also, if gas prices bother you, just be happy that my oil friends are getting rich. And if you’re still upset, come have a burger at my club, which you can’t afford even with the $5,000 I’m dangling, so on second thought don’t bother, poor people.
In a window that he’s supposed to be “on message,” Trump’s comments went from self-defeating… to self-destruction… to full-on political self-immolation in less than a week.
So last night in Atlanta, Obama couldn’t resist:
“He’s literally doing arts and crafts while we’re fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices,” he said, laughing. “The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments.”
Then the part he clearly savored:
“They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke. Not to inflation, but to that joke. Y’all didn’t see this? This really happened. And the Treasury Secretary, who happens to be worth half a billion dollars, he’s out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory explaining how he ordered the delicious French dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls.”
The former president knew he’d walked the current one into a trap. Days before an election, he’d gotten Trump on his back foot, defending indefensible corruption and mocking the plight of the people themselves. The people who will vote on November 3 whether to re-hire or fire Trump’s enablers.
Last week ended with Obama making a joke. This week, Trump took it as poorly as you could possibly imagine. And next week, voters will have the last laugh.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is running out of time, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 28-29, 2026. At 12:29 this afternoon, I was driving to pick up my daughter when my phone suddenly started lighting up with nonstop message notifications, one after another, without a break for several minutes. There were so many that my mind went to the worst places.
When I was finally able to pull off the freeway and look to see what the emergency was, the first thing I saw was a message that began with “URGENT!” from someone named Dave at a local phone number I didn’t recognize.
His message to me continued with, “I’ve been assigned to TRACK your ballot -- but I see you still haven’t voted yet!” Dave wanted to make my voting easy. Dave wanted me to know someone was watching. Dave isn’t real. No one has been assigned to track me or my ballot. But the language being used was deliberate: track, urgent, assigned. Words designed to intimidate me and make me feel vulnerable.
The other text messages were just as disturbing. There was one that said “YOUR TAX ASSESSMENT” that tried to convince me one candidate would “force” me to pay exorbitant taxes if elected. Another said “WE NEED YOUR HELP, YOUR VOTE!” and insisted that “This is not political,” while trying to scare me into believing my daughter would be in danger if I didn’t vote for them, and quickly.
I lost track of how many messages I received, and deleted, before I stopped and really studied them. The one thing they all had in common, aside from the scare tactics, manipulative language, and false sense of urgency, was something buried way at the bottom of the messages if they even disclosed it. They were all being sent on behalf of the local Republican Party, PACs supporting Republicans, or the Republican candidates’ campaigns directly.
In contrast, the few Democratic messages I’ve received could not have been more different. They immediately identified themselves and who paid for the message, and there were no scare tactics. No threats or attempts to scare me into voting a certain way. They were playing by the rules that most political campaigns used to follow.
In any other era, text messages like these, maybe not to this extent, would be annoying and perhaps even laughable. Just more political spam you delete without thinking. But in this era, under this president, in a week when the Department of Justice literally tried to throw out the ballots of 20,000 registered voters in my own state of California, it feels more like a warning of what’s to come.
Everything about politics, our elections, and the election cycles themselves is different. It feels like we are living in the upside down. Before Trump, we disagreed about politics. We argued about tax policy and whether the government should spend more or less and on what programs and priorities. We weren’t arguing about whether the president was above the law or whether the Constitution would still protect us when those in power decided it was inconvenient. We weren’t worried about losing the kind of rights that had already been fought for and won hundreds of years before. We weren’t afraid of what an election might take from us, because even when the other side won, there were limits. There were norms. There was a floor beneath us.
That floor is gone now. And every two years, we now find ourselves standing at the edge of something, holding our breath, wondering what they’ll come for next, knowing that everything we thought was settled can be ripped away by the right combination of power and cruelty. We are being held hostage to elections in a way we never were before, because this isn’t politics anymore. This is a cult of personality with the power to dismantle the country piece by piece, and every cycle feels like it could be the one where we lose something we can never get back.
And perhaps one of the cruelest parts of all of this is that we never get a chance to recover from the last election before we are forced to start fighting for our country all over again. There is no time to catch our breath, no time to enjoy the freedoms we have managed to protect, no time to feel the kind of security that comes from knowing our country will still be recognizable when we wake up tomorrow. We have spent years living from one election to the next, measuring time not by the things we have accomplished or the lives we have built, but by how much longer we have to survive before we get another chance to stop what is happening. And even when we win, the relief is temporary, because we know the people trying to take those rights away are not going to stop. They will come back in two years, or four, with another plan, another manufactured crisis, another attempt to take something from us that we never imagined we would have to defend in the first place.
I think about the generations who came before us, the people who fought and marched and sacrificed, sometimes giving their lives, to secure rights they believed their children and grandchildren would never have to fight for again. They weren’t fighting so that every generation would have to start over. They were fighting so that the next generation could build on what they had accomplished, so that America could keep moving closer to becoming the country it had always promised to be. And now, instead of building on their progress, we are spending our lives trying to prevent it from being erased. Instead of arguing about how to make our country better, we are fighting to keep it from becoming something our ancestors would have recognized as the very thing they were trying to escape or overcome.
Our “politics” have gotten so bad that the President of the United States was back on a stage campaigning at the Shoemaker Center at Ohio University, six days before the midterm elections, defending a campaign ad from Vivek Ramaswamy that attacked a child abuse survivor, his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. What kind of country have we become when the President of the United States stands in front of thousands of people and endorses the use of such a deplorable ad?
That wasn’t even the worst moment of the night. For at least the third time, Donald Trump returned to his fixation on Senator Jon Husted’s body, telling the audience that he had “examined” Husted’s physique and “looked at his ass.” He seems to know he should stop making these inappropriate comments, but he just can’t stop himself. We’ve also seen more protesters interrupting his speeches, along with his growing hostility toward them. Between the desperate text messages and what Donald Trump has been saying, it is becoming clearer by the day how much fear and intimidation have become part of our elections, and how far removed we are from a time when political campaigns were about competing ideas for the future of our country.
It wasn’t that long ago that so much of what we are witnessing today would have been unthinkable. Today, we got a small glimpse of how politics in our country used to be conducted and how they could be again when President Barack Obama stood before thousands of people and asked them to rediscover their north star. He talked about rising prices and real solutions. He talked about what kind of country we want to be. He didn’t insult anyone. He didn’t perform cruelty. He didn’t ramble about anyone’s body or dismiss abuse survivors or scream about paid protesters. Instead, he focused on the Trump administration’s response to the speech he gave earlier this week, where he described the last two years as “chaos, and cruelty, and corruption,” and how they didn’t dispute any of that. Instead, they got upset because Obama said Trump had the White House looking like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” The President of the United States was more offended by a joke about his interior decorating than by being called out for making life harder for every American family. And Obama leaned into it, because of how absurd it is. They have no defense for what they’ve done, so they argue about Donald Trump’s pet projects.
Obama also called this election what it is: an inflection point and a course correction. He gave Democrats a reality check, telling them they have two more years of this administration no matter what happens next Tuesday, but that it doesn’t mean we’re powerless. He said nobody voted for sending “masked agents running through our streets.” He called on people to show up and vote because the country they want to live in depends on it.
While two presidents were addressing the nation, another branch of government was also making its voice heard. This afternoon, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied the Department of Justice’s emergency request to block California from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots. The DOJ had claimed those voters were “likely noncitizens” and demanded the state set aside their ballots until their citizenship could be verified. When Los Angeles County actually reviewed a sample of 200 names from the DOJ’s list, nearly 40 percent were people born in the United States. Thankfully, a federal judge saw through their attempt to interfere with the election.
Judge Carter, an 82-year-old Clinton appointee, opened his ruling with these powerful words: “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.” He wrote that the Executive Branch would have the court believe “that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.”
He didn’t stop there. He warned the DOJ to stop threatening election workers. Trump’s own top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, had been insisting during the hearing that election administrators who processed ballots from people on the DOJ’s list would be committing a federal crime. Carter shut that down too and suggested a timeline that would push the case past Election Day entirely, preventing the Trump DOJ from interfering with ballot processing while voting is still underway.
This was the second time Judge Carter has blocked the DOJ’s attempts to seize control of California’s elections. Back in January, he also dismissed their lawsuit demanding the unredacted voter data of 23 million Californians, writing in a 33-page ruling that “the taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left.”
If nothing feels right and just and okay, it’s because we are living in a holding pattern right now, all of us, holding our breath, waiting for the next ruling, raid, executive order, and the next election. Waiting to find out if the courts will hold, if the states will fight back, if the results next Tuesday will be the ones that finally begin to turn this around. It is exhausting. And some days it feels like we are chasing a sense of normal that might not come for years, if it comes at all.
But the reality is that normal isn’t something that returns on its own. It’s something we build back, one action at a time. Each time we vote, show up to a protest, call our representatives, or just talk to another person in our community about what is being done to our country, we are doing our part to build the future we want to live in, even when we can’t see the results of our efforts right away. As hard as it is to live through this constant back and forth, we have to remember that the progress we are fighting for was never going to happen all at once, and not all of us will get to see everything we are working toward become a reality. Some of this work is for the generation after us, and the one after that. But that’s always been true. The women who marched for suffrage didn’t all live to see the 19th Amendment. The people who marched for voting rights in Selma didn’t all live to see the Voting Rights Act. They did the work anyway, because they understood something that every generation in crisis has to learn: the fight is the legacy. The refusal to stop is the gift we leave behind. In six days, the next chapter of our country’s history begins, and we will have another chance to move America closer to becoming the country it has always promised to be.
More On U.S. Law, Courts, Election Rigging, Grifting, Pedophiles
New York Times, Justice Dept. Pressures California With Expanded Election Investigation, Devlin Barrett and Shawn Hubler, Oct. 29, 2026. The department has issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials as part of a widening effort to prove unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of illegal voters in the state.
The Trump administration has widened a criminal investigation in its intensifying campaign to prove thousands of noncitizens are on California’s voter rolls, issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials, according to people with knowledge of the matter and copies of subpoenas obtained by The New York Times.
The move escalates the Justice Department’s pressure on the most populous state as the administration seeks to tighten its grip on the midterm elections by making unsubstantiated claims that large numbers of illegal voters are on the rolls. A day earlier, a federal judge resoundingly rejected the Trump administration’s bid to block the state from counting the votes of some 20,000 people it says are likely noncitizens, even though studies have found such fraud is very rare.
The new subpoenas are part of the administration’s broader effort to portray elections in Democratic states as rigged against Republicans. Justice Department officials have repeatedly suggested they would investigate and prosecute local election officials who did not accede to federal demands to set aside ballots of people that the administration had claimed were likely noncitizens.
The people with knowledge of the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal matters.
At least two employees of Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office received grand jury subpoenas last week for a proceeding scheduled for Nov. 4, on the morning after the election, according to records obtained by The Times through the state’s public records law. Federal marshals served one county employee at home, despite having already served that employee at the registrar’s office and issuing a notification of counsel, according to officials familiar with the incident.
Already, the Trump administration has sought records on individuals whom prosecutors appeared to suspect lacked the citizenship status required to cast ballots. The new round of subpoenas appear directed at election officials themselves, seeking copies of all internal communications about the Justice Department’s demands to county officials and the California secretary of state. They also ask for all records involving the agency’s “methods for screening for unlawful voting by aliens” and “efforts to prevent noncitizen votes from being counted in any election.”
Using criminal justice processes like grand jury subpoenas may allow the administration to gain access to records that it has so far failed to acquire through a lawsuit and menacing letters. Such a subpoena does not mean that the person who receives one is under investigation; the Justice Department rarely subpoenas individuals it intends to charge with a crime.
Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, denounced the subpoenas as “intimidation.”
“At every step, the U.S. Department of Justice has taken a confrontational, adversarial approach,” he said in a statement. “Election officials are acting in accordance with state and federal law.”
already being processed every day by election officials.
New York Times, Judge Orders Trump Officials to Outline Election Demands Sent to States, Zach Montague, Oct. 29, 2026. A federal judge gave the government until noon on Friday to share which states had received letters trying to enlist them in an effort to find evidence of voter fraud.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to provide a list of states it targeted with demands that state and local officials change how they will administer the midterm election, including that they set aside specific ballots for extra scrutiny.
The order from Chief Judge James E. Boasberg in Federal District Court in Washington could provide new transparency into the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure local officials ahead of next week’s election.
It came in a lawsuit brought by a broad coalition of Democratic politicians and party organizations that is seeking a court order prohibiting the Trump administration from interfering in election administration.
The Justice Department has sent letters to California and Washington State asking them to impound ballots sent from voters the department said it had reason to believe were noncitizens. The states said that the lists provided by the government were riddled with errors and that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — the power to administer elections.
Uzoma Nkem Nkwonta, a lawyer representing the Democratic coalition, said the groups were concerned that the Trump administration had potentially sent similar letters to more states and local officials than it had publicly revealed.
While judges have so far declined to order states to turn over voter data to the administration or to segregate ballots, officials in other states may have quietly complied, he argued.
At a hearing, Judge Boasberg said he planned to decide whether to block the Trump administration’s efforts by Nov. 3.
But he said that information he asked the administration to produce by noon on Friday would help him determine the extent of the federal government’s efforts and whether he had reason to intervene.
New York Times, Trump Erupted After Learning of Alina Habba’s $50 Million Deal, Tyler Pager, Oct. 29, 2026. Angry about the scale of a contract signed by one of his former lawyers with the family of a wealthy pardon seeker, the president told allies he wanted some of the money to go to his future presidential library.
President Trump erupted last week after he learned that one of his former lawyers, Alina Habba Mildon, secured a contract worth more than $50 million to work for a billionaire Venezuelan family.
Angered at the size of Mrs. Mildon’s deal, Mr. Trump has told aides and allies that she should donate a portion of that money to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.
His fury came in response to reporting by The New York Times that Mrs. Mildon, while working as an adviser at the Justice Department, had signed on last year to serve as an extraordinarily well compensated general counsel for a company started by the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, who at the time was seeking a pardon from Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump told at least one ally that the Herrera family should not pay out the rest of the contract, a message that got back to them, the people said.
Mrs. Mildon, who had served earlier as a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump and then briefly as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, signed a four-year contract, and it is unclear whether the family could terminate it early. Mr. Trump also called Mrs. Mildon to discuss the contract, but it is not known whether he explicitly asked her to make a donation or only suggested it to others.
The contract calls for the Herrera family to pay Mrs. Mildon $10 million a year for four years along with a variety of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Times.
MeidasTouch Network, Dan Sullivan Maintained Long-Standing Political Alliance With an Alleged Pedophile, Even When The Charges Became Public, Troy Matthews, Oct. 28, 2026. Sullivan also blocked the release of the Epstein files and took money from Epstein associates
An Anchorage Daily News investigation reported allegations that Cathy Tilton sexually abused a 14-year-old boy for decades.The alleged victim, Luke Whaley, died by suicide in 2023, according to a police report.Dan Sullivan maintained political ties with Tilton.
Alaska Republican Senator Dan Sullivan maintained a long-standing alliance with State Senator Cathy Tilton, despite revelations of her alleged predatory sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy that started in the 90’s and continued for years. Her victim committed suicide in 2023.
Sullivan also recently allowed himself to photographed standing next to a registered child sex offender at a campaign event, before deleting the photo from social media.
The Anchorage Daily News released an investigation earlier this month on Alaska State Senator Cathy Tilton’s alleged decades-long sexual relationship with a man, Luke Whaley, that began when he was 14-years-old and working in her home, while she was in her late 20’s.
Details of their relationship were “widely shared” in April of this year on social media, including accusations from Whaley’s siblings. Multiple individuals told the Daily News that they had “long known” about the predatory relationship which was described as an “open secret…for years.”
Whaley described himself as having had a “dating or sexual relationship” with Tilton in a 2010 request for a restraining order filed against her husband. Whaley later withdrew the request.
The relationship reportedly continued for two decades. Whaley died by suicide at age 47 in February 2023, according to a police report obtained by public records request. On his bed was an open notebook with a suicide note that read in part, “It is meant to end all of the pain I have felt. I own nothing. I have no children, and I am ending my suffering. I am in so much pain. I have been since I was a child.”
Sullivan and Tilton have been associates and political allies from at least December 2014 until August 2026, according to social media posts. Multiple posts featured the two together at various political events and small gatherings.
In September 2026, after the allegations were public, Cathy Tilton was announced by the Sullivan campaign as a founding member of the “Women for Dan Sullivan” campaign coalition, and was photographed with Sullivan’s wife Julie at a coalition meeting.Tilton pictured center'
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
New York Times, Consumers and A.I. Spending Push U.S. Economic Growth Higher, Ben Casselman, Oct. 29, 2026. The economy grew 3.4 percent in the third quarter, the fastest pace in a year. Strong spending and growth contrast with the poor marks that many voters are giving the economy.
U.S. economic growth was robust over the summer, as businesses poured money into artificial intelligence and consumers kept spending despite high prices that have soured their mood ahead of midterm elections next week.
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the country, increased at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the third quarter, adjusted for inflation, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday.
That was an acceleration from the 2.2 percent rate in the spring, and was the fastest growth in a year. Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic output, grew at a 3.8 percent rate.
The strong spending and growth figures contrast with the poor marks that many voters are giving the economy as they head to the ballot box for next week’s midterm elections. Polls consistently show that Americans are frustrated with the high cost of living and hold President Trump and congressional Republicans responsible for failing to deliver on their promises to improve affordability.
Those frustrations are grounded in reality. Consumer prices were up 3.5 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, driven in part by high gas prices that are the direct result of Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. Americans are increasingly dipping into their savings to keep up with rising costs. Households, in the aggregate, saved just 4.1 percent of their after-tax income in the third quarter, the lowest rate in nearly four years. After-tax income, adjusted for inflation, rose in the third quarter as a whole but fell in September.
Still, the data released Thursday, which is preliminary, is the latest evidence that while Americans may be unhappy about inflation, they haven’t pulled back their spending. That has helped keep the economy on track through a tumultuous period, but it could also be contributing to inflation by making it easier for businesses to pass on price increases to customers.
“This is a hot economy,” said Aditya Bhave, head of U.S. economics for Bank of America. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that inflation is the price we pay for that hot economy, and inflation is going to remain elevated.”
That could be a problem for officials at the Federal Reserve, who are trying to bring down inflation after five years above their goal of 2 percent annual price increases. On Wednesday, policymakers decided against raising interest rates for a second straight meeting, a gradual approach that some economists warn runs the risk of allowing inflation to become more entrenched.
The A.I. investment boom is responsible, directly and indirectly, for much of the economy’s resilience. Companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers and related infrastructure this year, with trillions more planned by 2030. That has rippled through the economy, lifting the fortunes not just of chipmakers and computer equipment manufacturers but also of companies seemingly far removed from the tech sector, like the producer of the gray paint used inside many data centers.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Will the AI Investment Splurge Last? Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 29, 2026. The boom is hitting two walls at once: Financing and public hatred.
The boom in AI-related spending is already enormous relative to the size of the U.S. economy and is widely expected to grow even bigger. Indeed, a widely cited projection by Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of the Columbia Business School concludes, based on announced plans by major players in the industry, that this will be the biggest investment boom in U.S. history, measured as a percentage of GDP:Source: Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
Well, I’m going to make a prediction: This will not happen. Instead, the splurge on AI will run into two walls that will force either postponement or cancellation of many of those announced projects.
First, the money to fund all this AI investment spending simply won’t be there. Much of the spending so far has come from established industry giants like Google and Microsoft, who in the early phases of the boom could rely on retained earnings from their existing businesses. But the size of the buildout is now so big that it is increasingly dependent upon massive levels of borrowing.
And lenders are getting cold feet. Many observers have long argued that AI is an impressive technology, but profits will be elusive. And it’s now apparent that companies that are spending hundreds of billions on frontier technology are unlikely to generate enough profits to justify their huge outlays. There are a variety of reasons why, with the most obvious being competition from much cheaper and less powerful, yet commercially adequate, models from China.
After all, we’ve seen this movie before. The IT boom of the late 1990s changed the world, but it also ended with many tech leaders going bankrupt because they couldn’t monetize their achievements. During the last few weeks, lenders to AI companies seem to be having a collective Wile E. Coyote moment — the point at which the animated character, having run off a cliff, looks down and only then, obeying the laws of cartoon physics, plunges to the ground.
The financial data now clearly show that fear is spreading in the loan markets. Starting in the summer, CDS spreads — the price of insurance against default — have soared for a number of AI companies:
Coreweave, which basically sells compute, is in a league of its own in terms of high default risk. But other companies are also starting to show strain, especially Oracle. As yesterday’s Bloomberg headline put it,With lenders running scared, and either demanding much higher interest rates or refusing to lend altogether, it’s increasingly difficult to see how the hyperscalers can realize their gargantuan investment plans unless someone is willing to take massive losses.
Furthermore, the AI investment boom is facing another huge obstacle: Most Americans really, really hate data centers and AI in general.
The polling on data centers is astonishingly negative. Not only do most Americans oppose construction of data centers near where they live, an almost equally large majority oppose building them anywhere in the U.S. And the opposition is much more intense than the support:This hostility no doubt has multiple sources. Data centers impose real costs on communities through their consumption of water and electricity, as well as pollution if they build their own power supplies. At the same time, data centers, once up and running, provide almost no local jobs.
At a more cosmic level, there are widespread fears that AI will lead to mass unemployment and possibly even human extinction — fears that have been spread by the industry itself, in the belief that fear of apocalypse is good for their IPOs.
More generally, the race to build data centers, often accomplished through back-room deals with corrupt local politicians, feeds into the public sense that big-money elites are rigging the system against ordinary Americans.
But the American public is now fighting back, pitchforks in hand. Grassroots opposition is having a big effect because permits are needed to build giants data centers — permits that more and more local governments are refusing to grant in the face of local opposition. One important contributor to Oracle’s problems is the repeated rejection of permits for a natural gas pipeline to provide power to Project Jupiter, Oracle’s massive data center project in New Mexico.
Elsewhere, New York State has introduced a one-year moratorium on all construction of large new data centers, while a number of other states and local governments are considering major restrictions. Furthermore, the political environment is unlikely to become more favorable after the midterms given how well Democrats are polling across state and local races.
Granted, neither financing problems nor political opposition are likely, by themselves, to completely stop AI investment. But I predict they will greatly slow it down. And this would be a very good outcome, perhaps even allowing the AI bubble to deflate rather than bursting and thereby delivering a body-blow to the overall economy.
Yes, some companies – such as Coreweave – may very well go bust and many investors will be hurt. However, under current investment plans, there’s a high probability that a lot of that investment money would have been wasted and total losses would be many times larger. Thus, in the end, angry locals and panicky lenders may well end up saving investors from themselves. And, more importantly, slowing this juggernaut down may save the American economy from the devastation of the bursting of a gigantic AI bubble.
More Global News
New York Times, Spain Crash Investigators Focus on Train Traffic Controllers’ Role, Jason Horowitz, Oct. 29, 2026. After the country’s second major rail disaster in a year, Spaniards were confronting questions about the safety of their once-vaunted rail system.
A day after a horrific train crash in Spain killed at least 69 people, emergency workers and canine units looked for survivors and victims; a prime minister facing elections and fresh accusations about his government’s competency set up camp near the crash site; and victims’ identities began to emerge.
More than 50 people were still in hospitals, officials said, with 15 in critical condition.
Investigators focused on the role of train traffic controllers in Madrid in allowing, or even causing, one high-speed train to rear-end another that was stopped on the same tracks after an automatic safety system went down.
In a time of concern that humans could be losing control over technology, the crash prompted questions in Spain about a lack of technological safeguards against human error. Those doubts were especially troubling in a country suffering its second train disaster in a year. Spain’s vast rail system — once a point of pride, and an attraction to a growing number of tourists, foreigners and boosters of Spanish growth — has become a source of anxiety.
“I want to reassure all citizens that the entire central government and all the institutions of the state are working day and night, not only to respond to the needs of the victims’ families, but also to establish every last detail of what caused this tragedy and to strengthen safety measures so that something like this never happens again,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Thursday in the town of Urda, near the crash site.
Oct. 28
Top Headlines
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, former personal attorney defending Donald Trump.
Johnatan Reiss, Aaron Boxerman, Qasim Nauman and Leo Sands, Oct. 28, 2026. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, were projected to gain a parliamentary majority. The close race sets the stage for weeks of negotiations over the next government. Here’s the latest.Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 28, 2026. Maybe he’s the villain Democrats needed. A new New York Times poll today has some surprising findings in close Senate races: South arolina is basically a tie at 48 percent for Sen. Darline Graham and the same for Annie Andrews. Florida isn’t nearly as close: Sen. Ashley Moody, at 50 percent, is six points ahead of Democrat Angie Nixon. Special Report: Democratic Advocate Analyzes U.S. Midterm News
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Six Days Out Dems Are Driving Deep Into Red States And Red Places, The Early Vote Is Encouraging, And We Have A Clear Shot At Flipping The Senate, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 28, 2026. We have six days of voting left. The most important political news this morning is that Trump and the Rs are spending money in and traveling to Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, and South Carolina in the final week of the election. As we saw in that last round of national polling Trump has continued to decline and it’s clear they now believe their Senate battlefield has deteriorated further. Special Report: Arms Scandal Reporting Involving Senate Candidate's Husband
U.S. Senate Republican nominee Darline Graham Nordone of South Carolina, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, poses this summer at the White House with the President Trump, who strongly advocated her nomination.
Oct. 28, 2026. The friction between Graham’s stated politics and her husband’s career, it turns out, goes significantly further than his company’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing.News Roundups
Oct. 28, 2026. Election Day is six days away, and Barack Obama is living rent-free in Donald Trump’s head. Sources say Trump can’t stop talking about Obama’s “Cheesecake Factory” jab, in private and in public.This week he spent more than half of a press gaggle attacking the former president instead of selling his own candidates. That tells you everything about where this president’s mind is as his party’s map collapses.Oct. 28, 2026. Election Day is six days away, and the walls are closing in. A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has ordered a criminal investigation into whether a donor network co-founded by JD Vance helped bankroll Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign. That’s the same Bolsonaro who just defied a court order, fled through Argentina and Ecuador, and was handed a U.S. visa by the Trump administration. A former Miss Switzerland has accused Donald Trump of rape in a new House Democratic report, and Epstein survivors are demanding a special counsel. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is telling allies to prepare for an intense strike on Iran right after the midterms, as the war’s cost tops $47 billion.More On U.S. Courtroom Abuses, Scandals
Oct. 28, 2026. 🚨 6 Days to the Midterms 🚨 In the run-up to the midterms, district and circuit federal court judges have done an admirable job in beating back absurd, abusive Trump regime legal maneuvers that are utterly lacking in merit. And yet, even defeats for the government’s patently frivolous actions and refreshing rebukes from courts leave us unmoved. The government, particularly Attorney General Todd Blanche and his flunkies, suffer no adverse consequences from trying every trick in the book — no matter how frivolous, no matter how legally unsound and constitutionally abusive.
Special Report: The Musk Influence
Oct. 28, 2026. Democrats’ main hope for next week’s elections is to win enough seats to put a check on Donald Trump. But in Texas, James Talarico is trying to create a Democratic template for another problem: How to deal with Elon Musk.Special Reports: Trump Team Election Interference
The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack. "When Trump Attacks Our Elections, We Will Have No Excuse": Democracy Docket.Investigative Commentary: Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part IV, Seth Abramson, The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack. You can find earlier reports in this new Proof series here: Part I; Part II; Part III. A full introduction to this pre-election report series can be found here.Child Rape Ad Political Disaster and Scandal In Ohio
and Jason Easley, Oct. 28, 2026. The Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad attacking Amy Acton, above, for being abuses as a child has not only hurt him in the governor’s race, but has damaged the entire GOP ticket in Ohio and could cost Republicans the Senate.More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Marshall purchased stock in obscure pharma company just before it secured key FDA approval, Judd Legum, right, 
Oct. 28, 2026. In the Senate, Marshall has oversight of the FDA. On November 8, 2018, then-Congressman Roger Marshall (R-KS) and his wife completed a purchase of 1,250 shares of Ionics Life Sciences, a privately held company, according to documents from the Irish Companies Registration Office obtained by Popular Information. The Marshalls spent $250,000 to acquire the stock at a price of $200 per share. It was an impeccably timed purchase.U.S. Civil Rights
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Oct. 28, 2026. Today, word leaked out that a grand jury in the District of Columbia refused to indict Cassidy Hutchinson. There — if you need it — is the explanation for why the government used an information to charge Jim Comey, bypassing the grand jury. This was the third attempt to prosecute Comey, and the case was apparently too weak for even this Justice Department to think it could get it past a grand jury. Opinion: Under Trump, FBI agents admit they're being asked to perform “witch hunts,” Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 28, 2026. The White House continues to demand revenge against Trump's foes. But agents, judges, and grand juries are pushing back.Something remarkable happened in a U.S. courtroom yesterday. An FBI agent blurted out the truth about Trump’s politicized investigations.
Oct. 28, 2026. Weaponized Justice Department. Back in 2020, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides worked hard to prevent foreign governments from tampering in US elections. Jeanine Pirro and Todd Blanche and Kash Patel were so determined to ensure nothing like that happens between now and Tuesday — to ensure that no one at the FBI would reject frivolous claims of election fraud by criminalizing doing so — that they flubbed the charges they filed against Floris and Benavides last week.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
right, Oct. 27, 2026. Just before 6:30 Central Time tonight, Donald Trump emerged from the parting curtains as “God Bless the USA” blasted from the speakers. In his hand, and up his entire arm, were red-and-white Make America Great Again hats that he stopped to throw at the audience on his way to the podium. Once there, he spoke for an hour and forty-five minutes, repeating the same stories he has been saying for weeks to distract us from the damning news stories that were just released.More On Artificial Intelligence, U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
Oct. 28, 2026. The dark side of AI is already here.More Global News
right, Oct. 28, 2026. On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”Oct. 28, 2026. In yesterday’s elections in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and the opposition bloc both seem to have failed to win a clear governing majority. So there will be complicated and confusing maneuvering over the coming weeks and probably months, and it’s unclear who will end up as the next prime minister.Top Stories
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, former personal attorney defending Donald Trump.
New York Times, With ‘Flood-the-Zone Strategy,’ Justice Dept. Steps Up Moves as Midterms Near, Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Devlin Barrett, Oct. 28, 2026 (print ed.). In some cases, court paperwork bears unmistakable signs of urgency — typos, unorthodox tactics and the signatures of the department’s senior political leadership.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has delivered the same message time and again, at turns soothing and combative: The Justice Department is doing nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing remotely improper, in the lead-up to the midterm elections.
“We don’t do political paybacks,” Mr. Blanche declared last week, after he announced the indictment of a prominent Virginia Democrat on drug-trafficking charges.
“You got to stop it with that!” the usually measured Mr. Blanche said on Sunday, scolding Dana Bash of CNN for suggesting his effort to potentially block certification of Alaska’s Senate election to protect the Republican incumbent was undemocratic.
Yet it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile reassurances with reality, critics say.
In recent days Mr. Blanche and his team have announced, unsealed or initiated a succession of headline-grabbing actions certain to placate Mr. Trump’s demand for results, many targeting his longtime adversaries or promoting contested claims of election fraud.
That cadence seems to be quickening to a gallop.
On Monday, a federal judge in Washington unsealed new charges against James B. Comey, the third criminal case brought against the former F.B.I. director Mr. Trump openly reviles. If it is sustained in court, the charges open a new lane of criminal inquiry after the department’s indictment against Mr. Comey in April for sharing an image of seashells that Trump appointees say was a veiled assassination threat.
“This is a classic flood-the-zone strategy — run so many plays at once that the defense doesn’t know where to look,” said Greg Rosen, a former federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department section that investigated Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Department officials declined to comment on ongoing investigations or matters before grand juries. But Emily Covington, the agency’s spokeswoman, said that all of the recent actions reported in the news media broadly reflected the normal progression of investigations and were in no way related to the election or partisan motives.
Mr. Comey’s team requested the charges be unsealed, and a judge determined the timing of the release. The government did not object, Ms. Covington said.
“This department is following the facts and the law, not anyone’s political timetable,” she said in a statement.
Nonetheless, some paperwork filed in recent cases bears unmistakable signs of haste and exigency — typos, unorthodox tactics and the telltale signatures of the department’s senior political leadership in lieu of unit chiefs and career prosecutors.
The Comey case, for instance, was not based on a grand jury indictment, but rather an intermediate procedural benchmark known as an “information.” A letter federal prosecutors sent on Monday to officials in Washington State seeking help in protecting “the integrity” of the midterms referred to “voter roles” — misspelling voter rolls. The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alaska last week omitted the key verb describing the action it wanted the court to take.
New York Times, Live Updates: In Tight Israeli Election, Leading Parties Face Tough Path to Power, Isabel Kershner, Johnatan Reiss, Aaron Boxerman, Qasim Nauman and Leo Sands, Oct. 28, 2026. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, nor his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, were projected to gain a parliamentary majority. The close race sets the stage for weeks of negotiations over the next government. Here’s the latest.
Israel’s political leaders were poised for weeks of jockeying over the shape of the next government, as initial results on Wednesday showed no clear winner in a tightly fought national election that many have described as a make-or-break moment for the country.
If neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line alliance, nor a bloc of opposition parties led by Gadi Eisenkot win enough seats to form a government, both would need to find support from outside their blocs for backing as prime minister.
By early Wednesday afternoon, election officials had counted more than 70 percent of ballots. The votes counted so far — alongside the exit polls — indicate that neither bloc would reach the 61 seats needed to secure a straightforward majority in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.
Some of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies are floating the idea that he could join Mr. Eisenkot, left, and other centrists to form a broad unity government to stay in power. For Mr. Netanyahu, who remains as a caretaker prime minister until a government is formed, that would be a comfortable scenario, as long as he remained on top.
His primary rival, Mr. Eisenkot, faces a thorny dilemma of his own: He has denounced Mr. Netanyahu as unfit to lead Israel, but he has also objected to partnering with Arab parties in a potential coalition. The two Arab parties are projected to win as many as 17 seats — a remarkable show of strength that could make them Mr. Eisenkot’s only path to toppling Mr. Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, Mr. Eisenkot did not explicitly mention the Arab parties and instead pledged to build “a stable Zionist government.”
Turnout in Tuesday’s election, widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, was the highest in at least a quarter-century. It was the first election since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks ignited three years of war.
Most of the votes were expected to be counted by Wednesday, though the final tally could take days. Lengthy negotiations could follow as political parties try to assemble a governing majority. If those negotiations fail, the country could head to a second round of elections — a scenario that has played out before. For Mr. Netanyahu, playing down the clock in the hope of securing a stronger showing in a fresh election could be his strongest shot at retaining his role as prime minister.
The uncertainty did not stop the leading candidates from making triumphant late-night speeches to their supporters.
Mr. Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief of staff, struck a defiant tone toward Mr. Netanyahu, saying: “Tonight we got the answer: The public opted for change.”
A few hours later, Mr. Netanyahu told supporters that his party, Likud, had emerged as the largest in Israel. “We must form a strong right-wing government,” he said.
Here’s what else we are covering:
Herzog’s role: President Isaac Herzog of Israel holds a largely ceremonial position, except after national elections, when it falls to him to select a potential prime minister. Read more ›
More votes: The exit polls do not reflect the hundreds of thousands of votes cast at special polling stations, including at military bases, hospitals, prisons and embassies. In Israel’s 2022 election, those votes tended to favor Mr. Netanyahu and his allies.
War fears: Following reports that Mr. Netanyahu has been pushing for renewed attacks on Iran, Mr. Eisenkot warned him against abusing his power as caretaker prime minister. “Netanyahu, don’t dare use Israel’s security for your political needs,” he said in his post-election speech.
Initial results: The 70 percent of the votes counted indicate that Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition will receive about 54 seats, Mr. Eisenkot’s bloc will get roughly 49, and the Arab parties will reach 17. But the numbers could still easily shift.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Elon Musk? Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 28, 2026. Maybe he’s the villain Democrats needed.
A new New York Times poll today has some surprising findings in close Senate races: South Carolina is basically a tie at 48 percent for Sen. Darline Graham and the same for Annie Andrews. Florida isn’t nearly as close: Sen. Ashley Moody, at 50 percent, is six points ahead of Democrat Angie Nixon. In Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan is at 54 percent, while Michele Tafoya is basically on the sidelines of her own race. Happy Wednesday.
Special Report: Democratic Advocate Analyzes U.S. Midterm News
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Six Days Out Dems Are Driving Deep Into Red States And Red Places, The Early Vote Is Encouraging, And We Have A Clear Shot At Flipping The Senate, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 28, 2026. We have six days of voting left, and need to keep working it everyone!
The most important political news this morning is that Trump and the Rs are spending money in and traveling to Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, and South Carolina in the final week of the election. As we saw in that last round of national polling Trump has continued to decline and it’s clear they now believe their Senate battlefield has deteriorated further. New polling shows how wide the Senate battlefield has become as both Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Dr. Annie Andrews have new polls showing them essentially tied, and with the GOP incumbent under 50.
For all of us who wanted Dems to expand our map this cycle it not only remarkable that we’ve put places like Alaska and Texas in play, but we are also now competing throughout the Midwest/Heartland and the Deep South in places where we haven’t won in many, many years.
Here is a roundup of polls released in the last two days. It’s encouraging stuff:
Yesterday we learned Dr. Amy Acton’s rapist was also charged with raping his own 16 year old biological daughter. Vivek, Trump, and Vance also should formally apologize to the people of Ohio for rallying behind this serial pedophile and his wife against Dr. Acton:
In the aftermath of the Vivek’s vile fiasco yesterday Fox News moved both the Ohio Senate and Governors races to “Lean Dem” from “Toss Up”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Trump continues to do outrageous things to push him and Republicans away from voters in these closing days:
MIAMI (AP) — Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family have landed in Miami after fleeing Argentina.
We got a shot to flip the Senate everyone and need to working it peeps!Subscribed
Using TargetEarly’s 10/28/26 midnight update Dems lead in the early vote by 53% -39%, 11 points better than 2024 at this time. This is a similar swing towards the Dems that we’ve seen in the generic ballot in recent weeks:
And the early vote electorate continues to be the electorate we all wanted to see this year, and overall turnout is running way ahead of 2022. We should be very encouraged by the intensity of the vote right now, and this surge we keep seeing from critical parts of our coalition:
For a deep dive on the huge Hispanic surge we are seeing across the country watch my new conversation with Maria Cardona, Leon Krauze, and Johnny Garcia (TX-35):Latinos Are Turning Out In Big Numbers Across The US - A Conversation With Maria Cardona, Leon Krauze, And Johnny Garcia (TX-35)Latinos Are Turning Out In Big Numbers Across The US - A Conversation With Maria Cardona, Leon Krauze, And Johnny Garcia (TX-35)Simon Rosenberg·Oct 27Watch now
And to explore what we are seeing with 18-29 year olds watch my new interview with youth vote expert John Della Volpe:John Della Volpe Dropped By To Brief Us On The New Harvard IOP Youth PollJohn Della Volpe Dropped By To Brief Us On The New Harvard IOP Youth PollSimon Rosenberg and John Della Volpe·Oct 22Watch now
I’ve started talking to reporters about what I’m seeing in the early vote. Here’s an excerpt from a new Time story:
Simon Rosenberg, a long-time Democratic strategist, contends that independents are also more likely to be voting in favor of Democrats, given recent polling, which has shown that more independent likely voters support Democratic candidates. One YouGov poll found that 54% of independents said they’d vote for Democratic candidates, versus 27% who said they’d vote for Republican candidates. Another PBS/NPR/Marist poll showed that independents favored Democrats by a margin of 25 points.
Given such polling, Rosenberg believes that the number of people voting for Democratic candidates is actually higher than the partisan breakdown in early voting data explicitly indicates.
Rosenberg says that the most significant data coming out of early voting is the number of Hispanic people voting early.
So far, Hispanic early voting participation is outpacing its levels at the same point in the election cycle in 2022 and 2024. Presidential election years such as 2024 typically yield higher voter turnout, which Rosenberg says makes the 2026 figures to date all the more notable and surprising.
Rosenberg cautions that early voting “can tell you a lot, but it can’t tell you everything,” and that voter turnout can shift from day to day.
He notes that early voting returns showed Kamala Harris leading in the 2024 presidential election, and that she still lost after a strong gain in Republican turnout for Trump.
But he contends that “the lack of intensity that we’re seeing in many rural and Republican counties around the country does not bode well for them for Election Day.”
It’s not determinative. It’s not going to predict what’s going to happen,” Rosenberg says. “But every campaign in the country right now is living and dying on this early vote data.”
Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET in our final get together before the election (register here), and remember:
Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October!
Yes, my friends, it is that time. Time to……Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight Their Neverending Fuckery
There are two things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:
Special Report: Arms Scandal Reporting Involving Senate Candidate's Husband
U.S. Senate Republican nominee Darline Graham Nordone of South Carolina, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, poses this summer at the White House with the President Trump, who strongly advocated her nomination.
Drop Site News, Company Linked to Darline Graham’s Husband Was Sanctioned for Arming Russia Against Ukraine, Ryan Grim, Oct. 28, 2026. The friction between Graham’s stated politics and her husband’s career, it turns out, goes significantly further than his company’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Sen. Darline Graham’s husband, Larry Nordone, is a senior executive at a company that merged with a Chinese weapons maker. Graham, of course, is running for her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat, and she opposes “depending on Communist China” for manufacturing.
It was an embarrassing enough revelation for the campaign, but the friction between her husband’s career and her stated politics, it turns out, goes significantly further than that. Graham’s husband’s company is also linked to a Chinese firm that the U.S. sanctioned in 2024 for heavily arming Russia in its war against Ukraine—in blatant contrast to the Graham family’s staunch support for Ukraine.
Nordone is a senior executive at Cosmox Outdoors’ subsidiary, Cosmox North America. Cosmox Outdoors, merged in 2021 with the Chinese weapons maker Zhongzhou Machinery Works (ZZM). Until recently, ZZM listed two major Chinese arms companies as “partners and clients.”
The two Chinese companies are Poly Technologies and Norinco; they have both been sanctioned by the U.S. Poly Technologies was hit with U.S. sanctions in 2024 for providing “sensitive military technologies” to Russia to facilitate its invasion of Ukraine, according to C4ADS, a U.S. intelligence-adjacent research outfit. Norinco is a military and aerospace conglomerate whose history of providing arms to Iran dates back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and remains on the Treasury Department’s restricted list.Upgrade to paid
Graham’s brother, Lindsey Graham, was the Senate’s most vocal champion of arming Ukraine against Russia. He died suddenly, according to his staff, shortly after returning from a visit to Ukraine, where he toured a drone factory. Darline Graham was appointed to replace her late brother and won the Republican nomination in South Carolina. She is facing Democrat Annie Andrews in a surprisingly close race.
Darline Graham was the lead sponsor on a bill, named for her brother and signed into law in September, that introduced a new set of sanctions on Russia and Iran. Though Trump signed the bill into law, he followed it with an executive order that rolled back its provisions.
“Lindsey believed this bill, which he worked on for well over a year, would help achieve [a peaceful resolution in Ukraine] through squeezing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin economically and forcing his customers to reevaluate the relationship with Russia,” Graham reportedly said at a press conference in September.
The Bush administration sanctioned Norinco in 2003 for allegedly selling missile-related goods and technology to Iran, although the sanctions were lifted in 2005.
In a debate with Andrews on October 11, Graham argued that President Donald Trump ought to continue pursuing the war on Iran. “Why in the world would we stop now when they’re still dangerous?” Graham said, adding that she believed the U.S. was close to winning the war. “Again, I think the president wants to end the war. I know he does. We all want the war to end. But I support a strong military. I believe in peace through strength.”
Cosmox and ZZM did not respond to questions from Drop Site. Nordone’s employer scrubbed the reference to Norinco as one of its “partners and clients” from its website after inquiries from the Post:
After The Post reached out with questions about ZZM’s website touting its ties to the Chinese defense industry, a spokesperson for ZZM distanced the manufacturer from the defense companies, saying ZZM no longer does business with them. ZZM and Cosmox Outdoors’ websites were then taken down and replaced with a notice to users that the sites are undergoing maintenance.
ZZM’s site reappeared days later with the mention of its own “military-grade” production capabilities removed, as well as mentions of Norinco and Poly Technologies. Cosmox Outdoors’s site removed a tile from its homepage about ZZM but still linked to ZZM’s site from Cosmox Outdoors’ “Firearms” tab.
Rachel Chen, a spokesperson for Cosmox, answered the Post’s questions on behalf of both ZZM and Cosmox, telling the paper, “Cosmox Outdoors has had no commercial dealings with CSGC [China South Industries Group Corporation], NORINCO, or Poly Technologies.” The websites saying otherwise, said Chen, were out of date.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Mobilizes ‘Election Army’ and Trump Seethes About Obama, MAGA Influencers Charged, Bolsonaro Declares Himself President, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 28, 2026. Election Day is six days away, and Barack Obama is living rent-free in Donald Trump’s head. Sources say Trump can’t stop talking about Obama’s “Cheesecake Factory” jab, in private and in public.This week he spent more than half of a press gaggle attacking the former president instead of selling his own candidates. That tells you everything about where this president’s mind is as his party’s map collapses.
While Trump fumes over Obama, his election army is on the move. According to ProPublica, Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who was on the call when Trump demanded that Georgia “find” votes, built a national network to fight this election and placed at least 25 allies inside his administration. According to TIME, Trump’s allies are now urging him to consider declaring martial law to seize ballots. Trump is demanding that Alaska’s Democratic Senate nominee be thrown off the ballot and prosecuted. Two right-wing influencers were charged with felonies after staging a fake voter fraud stunt in Minnesota. And Flávio Bolsonaro, the Trump-aligned candidate who just lost Brazil’s election, landed in Miami after fleeing a court order. He has now declared himself Brazil’s “rightful” president from American soil, while Americans call for the Bolsonaros to be deported.
Here’s what you need to know: the platforms don’t want you to see this. TikTok and others are suppressing election content like ours in the final days of this race. Videos about voting and election interference are being buried, throttled, and kept out of people’s feeds. When the companies that control what you see start deciding which election news reaches you, independent journalism becomes more important than ever.
That’s why I’m asking you to subscribe today. Your inbox is the one place no algorithm can bury this reporting. We don’t answer to billionaires, tech companies, or corporate owners. We answer to you, and right now, we need you more than ever.
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Let’s get into the news.
Barack Obama has gotten under Donald Trump’s skin, and sources say Trump can’t stop talking about it, both privately and publicly. At a rally in Ohio on Saturday, Obama mocked Trump’s White House renovations, saying “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Behind closed doors, sources say Trump has been fixated on the jab and keeps bringing it up. In public, he has been just as unable to let it go. According to the New York Times, “no one appeared more insulted than Mr. Trump.” On his way to a campaign stop in Mississippi on Monday, he spent more than half of a six-minute exchange with reporters on Obama’s remark and called him “a stupid person.” “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump said, before spending another six minutes on stage defending the marble, columns, and ballroom. He eventually admitted, “I have fun doing it. It actually relaxes me.” Six days before the midterms, with the Iran war dragging on and Americans struggling with high prices, Trump is more consumed by a single line from Obama than by his own party’s collapsing map.
Six Days Out: Trump’s Allies Push Drastic Measures as Election Officials Brace for Federal Interference on Election Day and Beyond
With six days until Election Day, the Trump administration is ramping up efforts that could interfere with the midterms, according to TIME. In recent days, Trump officials have sued to potentially block certification of Alaska’s Senate race, threatened California election officials with jail time, and suggested that Minnesota’s Senate result can’t be trusted if the Republican loses. TIME reports that Trump’s allies are also urging him to take drastic steps, including declaring martial law to seize ballots. Trump has refused to rule out declaring a federal emergency on Election Day or sending ICE agents to the polls, telling TIME in September that he doesn’t “rule anything out.” At least three lawsuits have already been filed to stop ICE from deploying to polling sites. One alleges that a Colorado sheriff’s office has already been conducting “warrant checks at polling locations” this year.
The threat doesn’t end when the polls close, and election officials are preparing for interference at every stage, from counting to certification. Officials and voting rights groups are bracing for the possibility that federal agents will try to seize ballots and voting machines, as the FBI did in Fulton County, Georgia, in January. “The lesson of Fulton County was that you have to be ready to be in court literally in minutes,” said Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Action, whose teams are ready to file lawsuits immediately. The DOJ has already asked Washington state not to count ballots from more than 400 voters it claims are noncitizens. It has also sued to block certification in Alaska, which an election expert said he “cannot recall an administration ever attempting.” In the 2020 election, Trump pressured officials in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona to overturn results, and officials expect similar fights this time.
The woman behind Trump’s “Big Lie” is pressing him to go further, according to a new ProPublica investigation. Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was on Trump’s 2021 call demanding Georgia “find” votes and who helped launch the fake electors scheme, has shaped almost every part of the administration’s election agenda. At least 25 Trump appointees have close ties to her, including a protégé at DHS who leads the hunt for noncitizen voters. With courts blocking much of her agenda, Mitchell argued on Steve Bannon’s podcast that Trump could unilaterally impose voting restrictions: “We’ve got the blueprint. We’ll help. We just need someone in authority to say, ‘Let’s do it.’” On Oct. 6, she urged agencies to intervene in voting machines “today,” repeating the word seven times. “In her mind, in her timeline, it’s existential,” said a former member of her network.
For the first time, election officials in both parties are treating the federal government itself as a potential threat to the vote, according to The New York Times. Poll workers are being trained on what to do if ICE agents show up, on the federal law barring armed federal agents from polling places, and on the limits of what federal monitors can do. “This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. “We really are shadowboxing here, because we don’t know when or if the blow is going to land,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. Arlington County, Virginia, said in a court filing that it has “never before needed to prepare for these threat scenarios.” Minnesota’s attorney general put his level of concern at “a seven,” saying, “It’s as high as it’s ever been for me.”
Trump is now demanding that Alaska’s Democratic Senate nominee be thrown off the ballot after a New York Times report on a “spoiler” candidate scheme. The Times reported that Democratic operatives, including people tied to Mary Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC, recruited candidates to pull votes from Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, including a retired teacher who also happens to be named Dan Sullivan. Trump accused Democrats of an illegal scheme and perjury, demanding that both Peltola and the “FAKE Dan Sullivan” be removed six days before the election. However, the Times noted that this kind of “ballot stacking” is generally legal, has been used by both parties in Alaska, and that its reporting did not establish criminal wrongdoing. Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC deny recruiting anyone. The episode gives Trump a new pretext to challenge the result in a race that could decide the Senate.
Trump further called for Peltola to be prosecuted:
Meanwhile, two right-wing influencers who staged a fake “voter fraud” stunt are now facing felony charges. James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, and Cam Higby were charged with unlawful voting and identity theft after they disguised themselves in what they called “Muslim garb” at Minnesota polling places during the August primary. Prosecutors say they used the names of real Minnesota voters, some of them deceased, without their knowledge, in an attempt to “show vulnerabilities” in the state’s vouching process. One man whose name they used had actually voted in the primary and was “shocked.” “If you identify as a journalist, there is no such thing as undercover investigation in the polling place,” said Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Higby called the charges “lawfare” and “FASCISM” and launched a legal fundraiser, as Trump allies keep pushing unsubstantiated claims of fraud in Minnesota.
Flávio Bolsonaro Lands in Miami With a Canceled Passport After Fleeing Brazil as Americans Call for the Bolsonaros to Be Deported
Flávio Bolsonaro landed at a private airport outside Miami on Wednesday morning after fleeing Brazil, even though its Supreme Court had labeled him a flight risk. Video showed him and his family leaving the plane just after 9:30 a.m. and being rushed into an SUV under umbrellas. According to Argentina’s immigration authority, the family crossed into Argentina by van on Tuesday night. They then flew to Ecuador on a private plane owned by a company that has transported Argentine President Javier Milei, and from there on to Miami. A Brazilian diplomat told the AP that Bolsonaro used an Italian passport to enter Argentina, and that Brazil’s federal police weren’t monitoring him despite considering him a flight risk. According to the New York Times, public U.S. records suggest he entered the United States on a canceled Brazilian diplomatic passport. The State Department says it will issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family.
Bolsonaro is running from serious criminal investigations in Brazil. He is being investigated over ties to a lawyer accused of laundering more than $1 billion through an online gambling scheme. He also faces a probe over more than $12 million he raised from a disgraced banker to fund a biopic about his father, along with allegations that he misused money meant for senior citizens. Brazil’s federal police say they have no record of him leaving the country and are investigating “the circumstances surrounding the senator’s failure to comply with court orders.” His abrupt escape left even his own allies confused, since his party had urged him to concede and lead the opposition. Bolsonaro lost to Lula by 4.4 million votes, and international observers from the Carter Center and the Organization of American States found no irregularities.
From his new refuge in Miami, Flávio Bolsonaro has declared himself Brazil’s “rightful” president-elect, claiming without evidence that the election was stolen in an “electoral coup d’etat.” “I want to say, not only to my 60 million voters but to the Brazilian people, that I am the elected president and that the criminals who stole Brazil’s election are part of a criminal organisation that has established a tyranny,” Bolsonaro wrote in an open letter shared by his allies. He accused Lula and Brazil’s Supreme Court of stealing his victory, but offered no evidence of fraud. He also thanked Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei for helping him leave Brazil and for welcoming him. International observers found the Oct. 25 vote was fair, and Bolsonaro lost by 4.4 million votes. Days earlier, his own party had accepted the result, and he had backed off his election challenge. Now, safe on American soil, he is echoing the same stolen-election playbook his father used before being convicted of plotting a coup.
Americans are now calling for the Bolsonaros to be deported, as Trump’s decision to shelter Flávio fuels a growing backlash. Trump called Brazil’s election “rigged” and was one of the few world leaders who didn’t congratulate Lula. Even Colombia’s right-wing president, a Bolsonaro ally, accepted the result. Lula has accused Trump of interfering in Brazil’s affairs and called Bolsonaro’s departure “shameful.” Critics say the U.S. should not be a safe haven for a foreign politician who defied a court order and fled criminal investigations, especially after he reportedly entered the country on a canceled diplomatic passport. This isn’t the first time the family has run to Florida: Flávio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, fled there in 2023 after his supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília, and he was later convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to 27 years. Now Americans want the son sent back to face justice too.
Putin Calls Elon Musk a “Genius” and Says They’re in Contact as Ukraine Claims Battlefield Gains Ahead of Post-Midterm Peace Talks
Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk as “a true genius” and said Russia is in “close contact” with him, weeks after Musk cut off Ukraine’s Starlink access. Speaking at a summit with African leaders in Moscow, Putin compared Musk’s satellite network to Russia’s effort to build its own military version. “Elon Musk is a genius, a true genius,” Putin said, adding that “we are in close contact with our American partners, including Mr. Musk.” Earlier this month, Starshield, the military version of Starlink, was suddenly restricted for about 10 days, which hampered Ukraine’s drone attacks and some of its air defenses. Musk first denied ordering the cutoff, then admitted he had “closed a loophole” that let Ukraine’s military use the civilian service for “offensive drone strikes.” According to the Guardian, Putin appeared to be flattering Musk, whose control of the technology has raised questions about his influence on the White House and on Ukraine’s war effort.
Zelensky says Ukraine’s battlefield position is the strongest it has been in some time, after a series of offensives retook territory. He revealed a previously secret operation, “Veles,” in which Ukrainian troops used underground gas pipelines near Kupiansk to outflank Russian forces. “The Russians tried to use underground gas pipelines to advance past our positions,” Zelensky said. “Our fighters turned this tactic against the Russians.” A separate operation, “Vivaldi,” cleared about 29 square miles of Russian infiltration groups near the key cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Zelensky also said he hopes peace talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. will take place in Abu Dhabi between Nov. 6 and 10, adding that the Americans will “be ready with all the answers after the elections.”
The leaders of Finland and Norway held a rare 90-minute phone call with Putin to urge him to end the war, breaking Europe’s long-standing practice of shunning the Kremlin. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said they acted because Trump has shifted toward Russia and U.S.-Ukraine relations are at their lowest point in 18 months. “I am worried that some of these messages do not reach him when the Americans talk to him,” Støre said. The Kremlin showed no signs of compromise, insisting that peace is possible only if Russia’s interests are “fully and unconditionally taken into account,” and a source said Russia won’t give up its aim of capturing all of the Donbas. Ukraine said the call was coordinated with Kyiv, but Denmark’s prime minister said Europe “should stick together rather than going solo,” and Sweden’s prime minister said, “Everyone wants peace, except for Putin himself.”
Europe is stepping up support for Ukraine ahead of what is expected to be its hardest winter of the war, even as Trump grows closer to Moscow. Britain announced £10 billion in new financing for Ukraine over three years, plus an immediate £500 million for air defense, and Zelensky said the British leaders had “made my day.” The Netherlands pledged €500 million in military support and €1.2 billion in non-military aid, partly to repair Ukraine’s battered energy grid. Russia has fired more than 100 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region since mid-October, targeting power plants in what Zelensky called an effort to create a humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, Putin hosted Iran’s president and Qatar’s emir in Moscow, where Iran’s president said the Middle East could solve its problems “without the intervention of the US.” Trump, by contrast, struck a deal this month to buy Russian diesel ahead of the midterms.
Other news:
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady in its last decision before the midterms, saying inflation remains “elevated.” Inflation rose to 3.7% in September, up from 3.4% in August, and has stayed above the Fed’s 2% target for years. Rates now sit at one of the highest pre-election levels in more than 20 years, after the Fed raised them last month for the first time since 2023. Two Fed governors voted against holding steady because they wanted another quarter-point hike, and one of them was Lisa Cook, whom Trump has tried and failed to remove. Trump has pressured the Fed and his own handpicked chair, Kevin Warsh, to slash rates, saying they “should be 1% or less.” Instead, the central bank is signaling it may still raise rates again before the end of the year.
Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor and civil rights leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers, has died at 96. Her foundation said she died at her home in Bakersfield, California, surrounded by family. Huerta spent decades organizing major labor protests and fighting for better conditions for agricultural workers, and she coined the rallying cry “Sí se puede.” “We’ve all lost a stalwart champion of working Americans,” said Bill Clinton. Nancy Pelosi said her rallying cry “inspired generations of Americans to believe in the power of collective action.” Earlier this year, Huerta was among several women who accused UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez of sexual abuse in an investigation published by the New York Times.
The Senate race in deep red South Carolina is now a tossup, according to a new New York Times/Siena poll. Republican Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, who was appointed to finish his term, leads Democrat Annie Andrews by just one point. If Andrews wins, it would be the first time in nearly three decades that South Carolina has sent a Democrat to the Senate. The poll adds to growing Republican anxiety about seats in states once considered safe, including Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, where races are far closer than expected or Democrats are leading. Trump and Vance have been forced to spend the final stretch campaigning in deep red states, not just traditional battlegrounds. With six days to go, the map is expanding in Democrats’ favor.
Arizona’s wealthiest congressional district, long a Republican stronghold, could flip as longtime GOP voters turn on Trump. The open seat in Arizona’s 1st District, which includes north Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, pits Democrat Amish Shah, an ER doctor who narrowly lost in 2024, against Trump-backed former NFL kicker Jay Feely. “Any politician on the face of the Earth who’s a Republican is not getting my vote,” said Tom Wolfe, an 82-year-old lifelong Republican who called Trump’s endorsement a “death knell.” A Democratic strategist described the district’s voters as “McCain-type” Republicans: business owners and college graduates who are tuned in to politics. Even a Trump supporter admitted the country is on the right course only “mostly,” after paying $101 to fill his tank. The race could help decide control of the House.
Sen. Mark Kelly says he’s “considering” a run for president in 2028. “I’ll make a decision after this election sometime,” the Arizona Democrat said while campaigning in Maine for Senate candidate Troy Jackson. Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy combat pilot, said serving in the Senate is “by far, the most important job I’ve ever had.” He described the weight of the presidency: “If I screw it up in the rocket ship, it just gets blown up. People get over it in a week. This is different.” He added that “it’s important that the United States maintains its position of leadership in the world.” Kelly joins a growing list of Democrats openly weighing 2028 bids, as Nate Silver says the race begins the moment the midterm votes are counted.
Mary Peltola’s campaign recruited a candidate with the same name as her Republican opponent, Dan Sullivan, according to a New York Times report. For months, Peltola’s Alaska Senate campaign denied any connection to the other Dan Sullivan on the ballot. But according to interviews, text messages, and legal filings obtained by the Times, the campaign sought out several Dan Sullivans around the state, along with other candidates who could pull votes from the Republican. Tactics like this are generally considered legal, if underhanded. Trump’s Justice Department has already sued to block certification of the race if votes for the other Dan Sullivan cost the Republican the seat. The report gives Republicans new ammunition in a race that could decide control of the Senate.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski broke with her party to endorse Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins for Alaska governor. Murkowski told local station KTUU that the three Republicans in the ranked-choice race are overly partisan and lack the bipartisanship the job requires. She called Kreiss-Tomkins “a young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now, a freshness of energy.” She also described him as “a commonsense guy who has a known ability to be working together.” Murkowski has broken with Trump many times, but endorsing a Democrat for governor in the final week of the campaign is a major blow to Alaska Republicans. It comes as the state’s Senate race has become one of the most contested and litigated in the country.
Former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel predicts Democrats will win the House and says it’s a bad sign that Republicans are spending heavily to defend deep red states. “The fact that we’re talking about Kansas, the fact the president’s been in South Carolina and Mississippi, I know for a fact, you’re not in these states unless there’s a data point that’s driving him,” McDaniel told CBS News. She criticized the GOP for pouring more than $230 million into Texas alone, making it one of the most expensive non-presidential races in history. “We shouldn’t be spending $200 million or $300 million in Texas to defend a Senate candidate,” she said. McDaniel, who led the RNC from 2017 to 2024, said the House “is probably gonna go to the Democrats.” She said Republicans could still keep the Senate, but warned that “the map has expanded, and Democrats are feeling bullish.”
Cornell University’s faculty is set to vote on a no-confidence resolution against President Michael Kotlikoff over the school’s handling of a student’s report that she was gang-raped at a fraternity house. The student, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit last month alleging that seven fraternity members assaulted her in October 2024 and that Cornell mishandled her complaints. All seven men deny the allegations, and the district attorney declined to bring charges. In a recording obtained by the AP, Kotlikoff admitted to faculty that he never read the Cornell Police Department’s report on the case. He also told the New York Times that he never followed up on what happened to the student, and that he didn’t know she had dropped out until the lawsuit was filed. Electronic voting opens after Wednesday’s closed-door meeting and runs through Nov. 6. A no-confidence vote would be largely symbolic, but it could pressure the trustees who decide who leads the university.
The Trump administration imposed new sanctions on North Korea, targeting a network of IT workers who fraudulently got jobs at companies in the U.S. and elsewhere to fund Pyongyang’s weapons programs. The Treasury Department sanctioned 10 people and one entity, including workers based in North Korea and Russia. According to Treasury, North Korea takes most of these workers’ wages to pay for its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. The sanctions come as Trump has been eager to restart talks with Kim Jong Un, but North Korea has shown little interest in diplomacy. Trump has repeatedly called North Korea a “nuclear power,” even though his administration still officially calls for its denuclearization. Earlier this month, he downplayed the idea of another high-profile meeting with Kim.
RFK Jr.’s health department is letting compounding pharmacies make six unapproved peptides, even though the FDA’s own scientists found insufficient evidence that they are safe or effective. HHS said it will not take legal action against pharmacies that make BPC-157, epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, semax, and TB-500, which have been promoted online for faster healing, younger-looking skin, and longer life. Kennedy has called himself a “big fan” of peptides and argues the move will pull people away from a dangerous “gray market.” In July, an FDA advisory panel narrowly voted to allow the peptides, but that panel included six new appointees with ties to the peptide industry. A former FDA official said the agency is “turning a blind eye” to widen access to unproven drugs. “Imagine what it means for the nation’s top drug regulator to announce they won’t enforce the laws,” said Shabbir Safdar of the Partnership for Safe Medicines.
An estimated 75% of NFL players who died over a 15-year span had signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, according to a new study, the highest estimate yet. Researchers at Boston University analyzed 396 donated brains and death records for nearly 2,000 other former players who died between 2008 and 2023. They then adjusted for the fact that families of players with cognitive decline are far more likely to donate brains. “I had to double-check the numbers,” said study leader Yorghos Tripodis. The study also estimated that 27% of the players had dementia, though not everyone with signs of CTE develops symptoms. Outside experts cautioned that the figures are estimates, since CTE can only be diagnosed after death. The NFL said it “continuously strives to make the game of football safer,” pointing to redesigned helmets and new kickoff rules.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Walls Close In on Vance and Trump: Major Criminal Probe, Bolsonaro’s Escape, a New Rape Allegation, and a Secret Iran Strike Plan, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 28, 2026. Election Day is six days away, and the walls are closing in. A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has ordered a criminal investigation into whether a donor network co-founded by JD Vance helped bankroll Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign. That’s the same Bolsonaro who just defied a court order, fled through Argentina and Ecuador, and was handed a U.S. visa by the Trump administration. A former Miss Switzerland has accused Donald Trump of rape in a new House Democratic report, and Epstein survivors are demanding a special counsel. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is telling allies to prepare for an intense strike on Iran right after the midterms, as the war’s cost tops $47 billion.
Then there’s the censorship. In the final week of this election, Meta silenced the Latino outreach account of a Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, just days after it took down the No Kings account in the middle of nationwide protests to get out the vote. Independent voices are being throttled, suppressed, and pushed out of people’s feeds, and we’re feeling it too. When the platforms decide what you get to see, the only reporting you can count on is the reporting that comes straight to you.
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Let’s get into the news.
Flávio Bolsonaro Flees Brazil Through Argentina and Ecuador as Trump Hands Him a Visa and Brazil Opens a Probe Into JD Vance’s Donor Network
Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil with his wife and two daughters and has landed in Miami this morning, after the Trump administration granted the family U.S. visas. Argentina’s migration authority said the family crossed into Argentina at 10:50 p.m. Tuesday via the Tancredo Neves International Bridge, a main border checkpoint. They then boarded a private Gulfstream jet in Puerto Iguazú and flew to Guayaquil, Ecuador, before departing for Miami’s Opa-locka Executive Airport, where the plane was scheduled to land at 9:18 a.m., according to FlightAware data cited by Reuters. Bolsonaro had been ordered to surrender his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday, and he reportedly also holds an Italian passport. It remains unclear how he entered Ecuador. Just one day before he left, he said, “I have never thought about leaving the country.”
Trump personally signed off on Bolsonaro’s arrival, telling reporters Wednesday that he approves of him coming to the U.S. A senior State Department official told the Washington Post that the family will be issued visas to stay in the country. Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil’s Supreme Court for alleged corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion in two cases, and he loses his immunity from prosecution when his Senate term ends in February. Lula called his departure “shameful.” A Barry University political scientist told CBS Miami that Bolsonaro’s arrival could create complications for the administration because “he was supposed to surrender his passport and didn’t do so.” The visas do not mean he has applied for or received asylum, though his allies have said he plans to seek it.
A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has ordered a police investigation into alleged ties between Bolsonaro’s campaign and the Rockbridge Network, a donor network co-founded by JD Vance, according to the Washington Post. Justice Flávio Dino directed federal police to examine whether Rockbridge or anyone acting for it provided money, staff, or other help to Bolsonaro’s campaign, which would be a crime under Brazilian law, which bars foreign campaign assistance. The probe follows a complaint by former presidential candidate Renan Santos, who alleged that Brazilians claiming to represent Rockbridge discussed U.S. support with Bolsonaro campaign officials and offered him help as well. Rockbridge denied any involvement, saying the Brazilians “made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge.” Vance has spoken at Rockbridge donor gatherings as recently as a year ago, and his office declined to comment. Reuters also reported before the election on a State Department campaign to restore the Bolsonaros to power.
Bolsonaro’s escape mirrors his father’s playbook and threatens to deepen the rift between Washington and Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro also went to the U.S. after refusing to concede to Lula in 2022, and he was later convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. Trump responded to that prosecution by imposing a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods and sanctioning Brazilian officials, but the courts didn’t back down. Flávio ran on promises to free his father, pardon supporters convicted in the Jan. 6-style assault on Brasília, and impeach the justices who prosecuted them. Lula has accused Washington of colluding with the Bolsonaro family to return them to power. Some Brazilians arriving in Miami told CBS that they supported Flávio’s decision, with one saying, “Everyone knew this would happen.”
Former Miss Switzerland Accuses Trump of Rape in House Democrats’ Epstein Report as Survivors Demand a Special Counsel
Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, alleges in a new House Democratic report that Trump violently raped her at his Plaza Hotel in New York in 1993, when she was 24. According to the report, Keul told Judiciary Committee Democrats that Trump grabbed her from behind and forcibly raped her, tearing her dress and leaving her bleeding and bruised. She described the assault as “brutal.” She says that afterward Trump sat her on the bed, repeated promises to help her get a U.S. visa and admission to NYU, and made her promise to stay quiet, saying, “The show must go on.” Keul says she was in New York for Trump’s pageant and met Epstein at a press luncheon, where he introduced himself as “Don’s best friend” and told her, “We organize many parties with Don.” The White House called the report “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans” and said Trump “has been fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.”
Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein are now calling on the Justice Department to appoint an independent special counsel to investigate his network, following the Democratic report. In a statement signed by several survivors and the family of Virginia Giuffre, they asked for a special counsel with the authority to “pursue evidence of criminal wrongdoing by his co-conspirators and determine whether public officials or institutions helped enable or conceal his abuse.” They noted that the attorney general can appoint one when there is a conflict of interest or the public interest requires it. “We deserve an investigation we can trust, one that follows the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of wealth, power or political affiliation,” said survivor Audra Fasano. The request puts pressure on Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who would have to make the appointment.
Meta Under Fire for Suspending Democrat Angie Nixon’s Latino Outreach Account One Week Before the Election
Meta suspended the Instagram account of Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate candidate in Florida, one week before Election Day, then restored it after a public outcry. The suspended account, LatinosConAngie, was the campaign’s main page for reaching Latino voters. It went down during Nixon’s “Boricuas for Angie” rally in Osceola County, home to one of Florida’s largest Puerto Rican communities, which she co-hosted with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nydia Velázquez, and Maxwell Frost. “This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” Nixon wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.” She called on Meta to restore the page and explain why it was removed, and the account was reinstated on Wednesday. Meta has not publicly explained the suspension.
It’s the second time this month that Meta has taken down a prominent anti-Trump account during a key moment of the campaign. On Oct. 17, Meta suspended the No Kings movement’s Instagram account for several hours in the middle of nationwide protests focused on getting out the early vote. Meta apologized and blamed an automated system that mistook “intense bursts” of activity for bot traffic, but organizers said they had “posted only a handful of times” and that “restricting communications about voting in the middle of an election is unacceptable.” Sen. Chris Murphy called for an investigation, saying Meta “spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” and Bernie Sanders blamed “billionaire ownership of the media.” Meta has also faced scrutiny abroad: earlier this month, a judge on Brazil’s top electoral court ordered Meta to treat both presidential candidates equally after it was accused of suppressing Lula’s content while boosting pro-Bolsonaro posts. Democrats in Congress are now demanding answers from Mark Zuckerberg.
U.S. Reportedly Tells Gulf Allies to Prepare for an “Intense” Strike on Iran After the Midterms as War Costs Top $47 Billion
The U.S. has told its Gulf allies to prepare for a brief but intense military campaign against Iran after next week’s midterm elections, according to The Wall Street Journal. People briefed on the matter told the Journal that the U.S. military is shipping a Patriot antimissile system from Texas to Israel and has moved troops off bases where they may be vulnerable. American forces across the Middle East have been restocking munitions, and aircraft have been preparing for strikes. Another aircraft carrier strike group and a Marine unit are set to join the roughly 20 U.S. warships already in the region, though some other vessels could be withdrawn. The report lines up with Trump’s own comments this week that he is deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or “finish them off.” It also suggests a major escalation may be timed for after Americans vote, not before.
The eight-month war with Iran has now cost the U.S. military at least $47.1 billion, according to a new U.S. Central Command estimate obtained by CBS News. The bulk of that, $29 billion, is for replacing munitions fired during the war. The figure doesn’t even include damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East, which were repeatedly targeted at the height of the fighting. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that the war could cost $2 billion to $3 billion for every month it continues. Those costs would climb further if the U.S. launches the new campaign the Journal described. Meanwhile, Americans are paying for the war at the pump, with oil holding around $116 a barrel.
Diplomacy appears to be stalling as Iran rejects what it called “unacceptable” ideas from Qatari mediators. Reuters reported that Qatar handed Iran a new draft deal on Sunday to end the war and that Tehran was expected to respond by the end of the week. A senior Iranian official denied that any new proposal had been presented and said Iran would show “no flexibility on the nuclear issue.” According to the Reuters source, there were concerns in Tehran before the meeting that Israel could resume bombing Iran this week. Elsewhere, the conflict keeps spreading: Yemen’s Houthis called for the immediate evacuation of Aden International Airport, claiming a Saudi military cargo plane there was carrying weapons. In Israel, exit polls show a majority voted against Netanyahu’s coalition, but neither bloc has a clear path to forming a government.
Netanyahu Defiant as Vote Count Points to Deadlock, With Anti-Netanyahu Parties Holding a Majority but No Clear Path to Power
With most of the vote counted, Israel is headed for a political deadlock, and Netanyahu’s bloc has lost ground but not been defeated. With roughly 70% to 80% of ballots counted, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc is projected to win 54 seats, down from the 68-seat coalition he led in the outgoing Knesset but still short of the 61 needed to govern. His Likud party is still on track to be the single largest party. Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc is now projected at 47 seats, and Arab parties are set for a record of about 17 to 19. Turnout reached 77.7%, the highest since 1999. Netanyahu was defiant, claiming a “decisive majority among the Zionist and Jewish public” and thanking Trump and God for making him Israel’s leader.
Parties opposed to Netanyahu hold a clear majority of about 65 seats, but they can only oust him if they work with Arab parties. Eisenkot said “the public has voted for change” and that Netanyahu’s “coalition of failure has lost the people’s trust,” but he would likely need Arab support to govern. Left-wing leader Yair Golan is pushing the opposition to do exactly that. “Netanyahu lost. I know how to count to 120,” Golan said. “We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes.” Arab lawmaker Ahmad Tibi said “the change bloc can form a government, we are willing to help,” and the Joint List declared it had sent “the fascist right-wing government to the dustbin of history.”
The final result could still shift, and the next move belongs to Israel’s president. A record of up to 650,000 “double envelope” ballots, mostly from deployed military reservists, are still being verified and could account for as many as 15 seats. These ballots typically move the results by one or two seats and could be decisive for parties near the 3.25% threshold. Once the count is final, President Isaac Herzog will choose the candidate with the best chance of forming a coalition, and that person will have up to six weeks to try. If both sides fail, Israel could head to yet another election, after five rounds between 2019 and 2022. Herzog has said he will do everything he can “to establish a stable government,” and he may push for a unity government between the two largest parties.
Other news:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing widespread backlash for falsely claiming that Arabs “don’t produce science” and don’t win major international prizes. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” Kennedy said Monday at a Michigan campaign event for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers. Arabs have won every one of those prizes, and a Baylor professor noted that his late colleague Ahmed Zewail, an Arab Nobel laureate, “would disagree.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the remarks “a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry.” The comments come as Rogers’s opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim U.S. senator, faces a wave of anti-Muslim attacks, including Trump repeatedly and falsely calling him a “jihadist.” El-Sayed’s campaign said it’s “rich to have an anti-scientist come to Michigan to lecture a doctor with two doctoral degrees.”
Trump’s ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, privately warned that Canada could be blamed if Republicans lose key midterm races, according to three sources who spoke to CTV News. Speaking at a closed-door business lunch at his Ottawa residence on Tuesday, Hoekstra singled out the Senate races in Michigan and Maine, two border states Republicans need to win to keep the Senate. According to the sources, he said that if those states go to Democrats, things will likely get harder for Canada after the midterms, because the president will not be happy. Trump’s tariffs on Canada have become a major liability for Republicans in both states: Trump reversed some tariffs affecting Maine last week to help Sen. Susan Collins, and Michigan Republican Mike Rogers is campaigning against them. The U.S. Embassy said the comments were “grossly taken out of context” but declined to say what the context was. It’s the latest in a string of attempts to shift blame away from the White House, after Hoekstra previously accused Canada of election interference and told it to “keep your nose out.”
A federal judge ruled that Bill Essayli, Trump’s top federal prosecutor in Southern California, is “unlawfully serving” in the role and disqualified him from overseeing two criminal prosecutions. Essayli, a former Republican state lawmaker and Trump ally, was never confirmed by the Senate, and the administration has kept him in charge by moving him from “interim” to “acting” to “first assistant” and then “special attorney.” Judge Michael Seabright said none of those titles make his service legal, citing an August appeals court ruling against a similar arrangement in Nevada. “Trump and his Department of Justice violated the law again and again in an effort to install minions as chief federal prosecutors,” said defense lawyer H. Dean Steward, calling the ruling “a victory for the rule of law.” Essayli said he will stay on until the Supreme Court decides the issue, and the DOJ plans to appeal, so the order won’t take effect immediately. He follows Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who was disqualified as New Jersey’s top prosecutor in December, and Essayli has recently pushed to set aside California ballots from voters he claims are “likely non-citizens.”
Progressive streamer Hasan Piker has sued CNN commentator Scott Jennings for defamation, accusing him of falsely claiming Piker called for lynching Black Americans by airing an edited clip of his remarks. The 38-page lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, centers on an Aug. 11 episode of “The Scott Jennings Show.” That episode played a clip captioned “Let’s go back to a better time when lynchings were happening,” and Jennings accused Piker of “calling for Black voters to be lynched.” According to the complaint, the original 2024 livestream showed Piker sarcastically mocking a conservative commentator by saying, “He said, ‘We need more Klansmen, OK? Can we go back to a better time when lynchings were happening?’” The edited version cut out “He said” and Piker’s laughter to make it look like his own view. Jennings used the clip to attack Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling Piker his “best pal and campaign partner,” in a post that has drawn about 2.5 million views. Piker’s lawyers say Jennings refused to retract the claims after receiving a written demand in August.
At least 64 people were killed when two high-speed trains collided in Spain’s Toledo province, according to local government sources cited by Reuters, El País, and RTVE. The crash involved an AVE train carrying 397 passengers that reportedly slammed into the back of a stopped Iryo train carrying 146 passengers on the Madrid-Seville line. Early reports suggest the Iryo train had stopped after flagging a failure in its signaling system, but the train behind it may not have received the warning because of possible human error. The death toll, which officials warn could still rise, makes it deadlier than January’s Adamuz crash on the same line, which killed 46. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked,” and all of today’s Spanish Cup soccer matches were postponed out of respect. Spain’s high-speed network is the largest in Europe, carrying 25 million passengers in 2024.
Arizona authorities say Mexican police were wrong when they announced they had found Shayna Feinman, a woman feared killed after disappearing in 2024, alive in Tijuana. Feinman, 38, vanished in rural Yavapai County in March 2024, and her car was later found abandoned with her wallet and ID inside. Her boyfriend and another man were charged with second-degree murder, but those charges were dismissed. On Saturday, Tijuana officials released a photo of a woman they claimed was Feinman and said they had confirmed her identity. On Tuesday, the Yavapai County sheriff’s office said U.S. authorities had used physical evidence to confirm that “the individual located is not Shayna Feinman.” Her sister Kara said she was cyberbullied for not reacting more joyfully to the false news, adding, “It’s heartbreaking. It’s terrible, and I don’t wish this on anybody.”
Real estate agents working for Elon Musk’s xAI are offering to buy homes in a Mississippi neighborhood on the condition that owners don’t join a lawsuit over noise from the company’s power plant, according to the Guardian. Residents of Southaven say gas turbines powering xAI’s datacenters sound “like an airplane engine” around the clock, and three locals filed a lawsuit in June over “near-constant noise, vibrations and other nuisance-level harms.” A realtor told one resident there’s a target to buy 418 homes, and at least five have already been purchased, with one resident dubbing the area “Elonville.” The EPA has determined that dozens of the turbines ran without required federal permits, and an environmental group estimates their emissions cause $44 million in annual health costs. “It’s been so torturous I can’t sleep,” said plaintiff Jason Haley, who added that he’s now registered to vote. xAI denies the claims in the lawsuit and says it cares “deeply about being good neighbors.”
More than 180,000 people were evacuated as Cyclone Arnab slammed into India’s east coast on Wednesday. The storm, classified as a “very severe cyclonic storm,” made landfall in Andhra Pradesh with winds forecast at up to 84 mph and gusts reaching 93 mph. No deaths have been reported so far, but trees were uprooted, power was knocked out, and three airports suspended operations. Officials warned of a storm surge of 3 to 5 feet that could flood low-lying areas. “Trees have fallen, houses have been damaged, and all our belongings, including our books, have been destroyed,” said one resident of Kakinada. Neighboring Nepal suspended trekking permits during peak season over fears of avalanches and blizzards.
An Egyptian court ordered the closure of Mada Masr, one of the country’s last independent news outlets, after convicting its editor-in-chief of running a website without a license. Founder Lina Attalah was detained for seven hours, with her whereabouts unknown, until she paid a fine of about $53,400. Rights advocates say the judge rejected every defense request and brought in a court-appointed lawyer over the objections of Attalah and her eight attorneys. Mada Masr says it applied for a license in 2018 and never got an answer, and its website has been blocked in Egypt since 2017. Amnesty International called the ruling “a crushing blow to press freedom” that sends a “clear and ruthless message: critical, independent reporting will not be tolerated.” Egypt ranks 169th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, and Mada Masr plans to appeal.
China is denying Taiwan’s accusation that it orchestrated an attack on a comedian who mocked Xi Jinping. Taiwanese prosecutors indicted five people they say were paid to fake a car accident and “break the arms and legs” of comedian Huang Yi-hao so he couldn’t perform, though he was only lightly injured. A Chinese government spokesperson dismissed the accusations as a fabrication by Taiwan’s ruling party ahead of next month’s local elections, calling it a “tired routine.” Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said China uses “transnational repression” to erode public trust in Taiwan’s democracy. He added that Beijing’s interference aims at “spreading false information, intensifying social divisions, and inciting group hatred.” Other China critics in Taiwan have been attacked before, including Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho in 2019.
A knife-wielding attacker was killed after assaulting a police officer guarding the Israeli Embassy in Belgrade, and Serbia is treating it as a terrorist attack. Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said the attacker, a minor carrying two knives, shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he attacked an officer from an elite unit just after midnight Wednesday. The officer, who was slightly wounded in the face, killed the attacker in self-defense. Dacic said security agencies had been monitoring the attacker, who displayed the Islamic State flag on his Instagram account. Serbia raised its terror threat to the highest level and increased police presence at key locations. It’s the second attack on the embassy’s guards in just over two years, after a crossbow attack in June 2024.
Kylian Mbappé lost brand deals with at least three Chinese companies and apologized after calling a meme of himself as Mao Zedong a video of “a Chinese dictator.” Beverage maker Dongpeng, dairy giant Mengniu, and cheese maker Milkground all ended their deals with the French soccer star, saying they oppose “any words and actions that hurt national sentiment.” China’s state broadcaster also suspended broadcasts of Spanish league matches and games featuring Mbappé, and demanded apologies from him, La Liga, and Real Madrid, which all apologized. “My comment was ill-judged,” Mbappé said. “I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history, and I am sincerely sorry.” China’s Foreign Ministry said it takes the apology “seriously,” but his games remained blocked in China on Wednesday. It’s the latest example of China using its economic power to force apologies, following its blackout of NBA games in 2019.
King Charles III arrived in the Bahamas to protesters demanding slavery reparations as he begins a nine-day Caribbean trip. “Pay us what you owe us!” one protester shouted as members of the Rastafarian community lined the road near Clifford Park, where Charles granted the Bahamas independence as Prince of Wales in 1973. In his first remarks, Charles said it is “only right that we should acknowledge the great suffering and injustices of the past,” but the British government has consistently rejected calls for an apology or reparations. Jamaica recently took its case for reparations to the king, and Guyana’s president, whose country Charles visits next, has said he wants an apology. The trip ends at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua, where some Caribbean leaders say reparations should dominate the talks. Charles also addressed climate change, noting that 90% of the Bahamas sits less than two meters above sea level.
More On U.S. Courtroom Abuses, Scandals
New York Times, Here Are the U.S. Attorneys Who Are Carrying Out Trump’s Grievance Agenda, Devlin Barrett, Oct. 28, 2026. Together, they have pursued cases against the president’s enemies and protesters and amplified false claims of widespread election fraud, often citing thin evidence.
President Trump’s success in demolishing the traditional wall between the White House and the Justice Department is apparent at the helm of the agency, now led by his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche.
Mr. Trump’s reach can also be seen in the network of U.S. attorneys across the country who are flexing their power to pursue the president’s political agenda.
At least eight current U.S. attorneys have played prominent roles in pushing Mr. Trump’s grievances, often citing thin evidence that has subsequently led many of their cases to collapse. Three of those are running their offices without Senate confirmation.
Two have taken up investigations that the president explicitly told them to pursue. In one previously unreported episode, Mr. Trump privately urged the U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, to prosecute Representative Ilhan Omar, who is now under investigation for potential immigration violations.
Taken together, the events and decisions have deepened what current and former officials describe as the stark politicization of a department that had long prided itself on operating with independence in prosecuting politically sensitive cases. The president and Mr. Blanche say they are ending Biden-era “weaponization” of the Justice Department against conservatives, while current and former department lawyers decry what they say is a reckless lowering of standards to pursue Democrats and other political targets.
The actions reflect a radically altered Justice Department, one in which longstanding rules about ethics, investigative procedure and legal standards are changing. The president has asserted sweeping authority to fire career prosecutors and investigators at will, despite years of court precedent meant to prevent such actions.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, said U.S. attorneys have successfully driven down violent crime at a record rate, a key priority of the president, calling their work “a massive success story.”
“These attorneys and their offices are on the front lines every day crushing gangs, violent crime, drugs, human smugglers, illegal immigration and terrorism,” she said in a statement, praising them for “working productively and successfully with state and local law enforcement.”
The U.S. attorneys serving as Mr. Trump’s field commanders have taken up his grievance agenda principally on three fronts:
The Contrarian, Opinion: Losing in Court Isn’t Enough; DOJ Must Be Sanctioned, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 28, 2026. 🚨 6 Days to the Midterms 🚨In the run-up to the midterms, district and circuit federal court judges have done an admirable job in beating back absurd, abusive Trump regime legal maneuvers that are utterly lacking in merit.
Moreover, they are apparently designed to either disrupt the midterms or assure the unraveling autocrat in the Oval Office that his dutiful lackeys at the Justice Department are doing everything possible to try to do just that. Alternatively, the flurry of vindictive actions against long-held presidential enemies — such as Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and former FBI director James Comey — is simply meant to distract the addled president; catnip for a demented feline, if you will.
The range of abusive, nonsensical actions is breathtaking:
Pounding on doors to interrogate suspected noncitizen voters;While it remains a mystery how any federal court official issued a search warrant for Omar’s home, overall the courts — to their credit — have rebuffed DOJ’s legal gamesmanship, often in exceptionally harsh language.
From the 9th Circuit’s snub of the non-emergency, “emergency” appeal in California:
The United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one. At least part of the delay here is attributable to the United States’s own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.
The concurrence from Trump-appointed Judge Bennett was even more dismissive (and on the merits, to boot):
Despite these various mechanisms to challenge the eligibility of a voter, Plaintiff prefers that this court require a different procedure to effectuate a challenge to over 20,000 voters solely because, in a different context, the California Legislature permits the segregation of ballots. See Cal. Code Regs. tit. 2, § 20363 (providing for the segregation of ballots in a recount). But Plaintiff’s preference does not carry with it the force of law. . . .
Beyond the infeasibility of and risks associated with segregating tens of thousands of ballots, Defendants also lack the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State. . . . Plaintiff seeks equitable relief, asking us to order Defendants to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from over 20,000 individuals whom Plaintiff believes are likely noncitizens. But Plaintiff offers no workable plan as to how this could be accomplished, let alone how it could be accomplished without burdening Defendants more than necessary. Instead, Plaintiff simply claims that California has an existing regulation, Cal. Code Regs. tit. 2, § 20363, which provides for ballot segregation. But as discussed, that regulation is inapplicable.
From the golf course case, Judge Ana Reyes all but called the government lawyers a pack of liars (multiple times):
The Government felled hundreds of trees from East Potomac Golf Course without real notice even though it knew of the scheduled removal at least a week prior. And even though the Court literally warned against bulldozers bulldozing on no real notice. … And even though the Court was equally clear that it did not want an act-first-ask-forgiveness-later situation. … All this is concerning. The Government appears to have set the timing of the tree removal and late notice to impede Plaintiffs’ ability to seek Court intervention. And its recent actions call into question other representations it has made to the Court over these many months. …
Government counsel argues that President Trump, who discussed the Plan to redesign the Course no fewer than five times, has “at most . . . has given preliminary thought to” the Washington National Plan. That claim does not square with the record. The Court cannot disbelieve the President’s clear, repeated statements of fact when those statements find support in the record and the Government has presented no credible evidence to contradict him.
And yet, even defeats for the government’s patently frivolous actions and refreshing rebukes from courts leave us unmoved. The government, particularly Attorney General Todd Blanche and his flunkies, suffer no adverse consequences from trying every trick in the book — no matter how frivolous, no matter how legally unsound and constitutionally abusive. Indeed, they may well get ‘atta boys for having angered federal court judges.Donald Trump gives US Attorney General Todd Blanche a pat on the back after a roundtable in the East Room of the White House on October 21, 2026. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)
Unless and until DOJ lawyers themselves face sanctions pursuant to Rule 11 and referral to state bar associations for misconduct, the incentive to keep abusing the federal court system will remain. Frankly, handing out more-than-justified sanctions would stiffen the spines of DOJ attorneys, encouraging them to push back against their political bosses. Ultimately, contempt citations (of the sort now the subject of heated litigation in the D.C. Circuit, concerning the Trump regime’s defiance of Judge James Boasberg’s directive to turn around planes filled with deportees headed to CECOT) may be required to halt this relentless assault on the rule of law.
Aside from a new president, the most effective and entirely justified remedy for such widespread, shameless abuse of the justice system is impeachment of Attorney General Todd Blanche. Even before the current spate of lawless, partisan actions, Blanche’s record (e.g., ongoing defiance of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, refusal to investigate publicly disclosed instances of graft involving the president’s inner circle) and his repeated appearances in partisan campaign settings violate his oath of office and make a mockery of his department’s title (“Justice” Department).
In sum, courts deserve kudos for holding the line against Trump autocratic abuses. But extraordinary times and unprecedented abuse require that they do more. Sanctions and contempt citations must be meted out when appropriate. The new Congress will have an obligation to act as well, starting with the impeachment of an unfit partisan hack occupying the august role of attorney general.
Special Report: The Musk Influence
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Talarico vs. the Tycoon, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 28, 2026. Democrats’ main hope for next week’s elections is to win enough seats to put a check on Donald Trump. But in Texas, James Talarico is trying to create a Democratic template for another problem: How to deal with Elon Musk.
There is no preexisting playbook for dealing with Musk, because Musk is something new in American political life. It’s not just that he’s the richest man in the world and the biggest individual donor in American history. (Musk’s political expenditures since 2024 have already surpassed George Soros’s campaign contributions over his entire lifetime.) It’s also his extraordinary level of engagement. If Musk decides he wants a Democrat gone, he doesn’t just throw a bunch of money behind that Democrat’s opponent—he makes it his personal mission to stamp him out.
This cycle, Musk has trained his sights on Talarico. Of the astonishing $446 million he has plowed into the midterms, around $180 billion has gone to the Texas Senate race—financial life support that Talarico’s opponent Ken Paxton has desperately needed.
Most billionaire political donors would be content to throw their lucre into a PAC to buy up a bunch of ad time and call it a day. Musk goes further. Some of the dirtiest tricks of the cycle seem to be connected to his spending.
Last week, I wrote about a Wyoming group calling itself the Texas Transgender Student Union (TTSU) and its apparent attempt to gin up a new trans panic by impersonating a genuine Texas trans-rights group, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), and sending inflammatory mailers to Texas Republican voters. TENT sued, and yesterday, Texas reporter Steven Monacelli reported that TTSU had retained an interesting lawyer: Chris Hilton, who defended Ken Paxton during his impeachment and represents Musk in a defamation lawsuit against the organization Media Matters.
The trillionaire has other megaphones. On X, where he has 240 million followers and owns the algorithms that ensure everyone sees his posts, he has tweeted, retweeted, or replied to tweets attacking Talarico more than forty times in the last 20 days. That number doesn’t include all the attacks Musk’s shared without mentioning the candidate. Talarico is “a far left extremist.” Talarico “hates Texas and America.” There is something “deeply wrong” with “the creep” Talarico who “supports voting fraud” and “wants to trans your kids and destroy the border.” This last is a recurring theme: Musk has repeatedly claimed that Talarico “will vote to take away your children and transition them.”
Democrats have wealthy donors of their own, of course. But there’s nothing they can do to match Musk in raw wealth and raw rage. Democrats have only one hope: to poison his donations by turning his involvement in their races into a major liability for the Republicans he supports.
That’s exactly what Talarico has been trying to do lately. In his stump speeches and campaign ads over the last week, the Texas Democrat has gone hard after Musk’s enormous investments in Texas, casting him as a shadowy figure single-handedly propping up Paxton’s campaign for his own ends.
“In all likelihood, if you’ve seen an attack ad on your screen, that was Elon. If you’ve gotten lies in your mailbox, that was Elon. If you’ve received a text message saying scary things about me, that was Elon too,” Talarico has been saying on the stump. “Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our taxpayer dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas. But on Nov. 3, we are going to send a very clear message to the world’s first trillionaire: Texas is not for sale.”
These sorts of messages can resonate. Think of the success Republicans have had railing against Soros over the years, or the success many Democrats found in primaries just months ago castigating donations from AIPAC. Nobody really likes to think about the way money shapes our politics—and Musk, the hard-right tech mogul who has tied himself so tightly to MAGA, is a more contemptible target than most. Last year, his heavy spending in a Wisconsin Supreme Court contest turned the backwater race into a referendum on Musk himself—a referendum he lost when the race’s liberal judge won.
Talarico had better hope he can do the same thing again. If he can’t—if Musk’s heavy investment in Texas works—Democrats are looking down a long, grim road of similar interventions in the future. The world’s first trillionaire could drop another half-billion for Republicans on every national election for the rest of his life without breaking a sweat.
Special Reports: Trump Team Election Interference
Proof, Investigative Commentary: Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part IV, Seth Abramson, right, Oct. 28, 2026. The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack.
You can find earlier reports in this new Proof series here: Part I; Part II; Part III.
A full introduction to this pre-election report series can be found here.
It’s a mark of how conclusively and categorically the “election ratfuckery” in 2026 has originated on the Republican side of the American political aisle that even a single instance of such misconduct on the Democratic side has landed in American political discourse like a MOAB—almost as if a blue drop in a bucket of red is some indication of… well, anything meaningful.
And yet.
Proof opposes all election ratfuckery, even in—actually, perhaps especially in—this era of burgeoning fascist authoritarianism. Democracy isn’t going to be saved by abruptly abandoning it when we need to be honoring it most. If pro-democracy forces’ core platform and agenda isn’t popular enough to win in free and fair elections, America doesn’t deserve democracy anymore, and shouldn’t remain a beneficiary of its graces.
With that in mind, Proof notes that a report in the New York Times reveals that the political operation of former Alaska congresswoman Mary Peltola (D-AK) allegedly recruited a man with the name “Dan Sullivan” to join the Alaska Senate race—a race in which the GOP incumbent is named Dan Sullivan. If this indeed happened, it was wrong and shouldn’t have happened. Full stop. It represents a contemptible attempt to confuse voters, even if there’s little evidence (especially in view of the inevitable public education campaign the Republican incumbent has now been running for months) that this gambit will actually alter many votes. In fact, it’s the very inefficiency of this scheme, along with its grotesque moral toxicity, that surely should have militated against its use from the start; “Sullivan” is guaranteed to get precious few votes given his obscurity and the incumbent’s existing motivated voter based—and it’s likely that many of the votes the ersatz Sullivan gets will have been induced by the neophyte candidate’s own idiosyncratic ideas about governance… which means that really any alternative to Peltola and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) might have gotten those ballots.
That this sort of gamesmanship is technically legal is meaningless. It’s corrupt and corrupting, as it corrupts all it touches no matter what the letter of the law says. We Democrats and left-leaning independents mean what we say when we say that we believe in our democracy; it’s not a bumper sticker to be abandoned the moment it becomes inconvenient (as has happened with every supposed “principle” the MAGA adherents claim to hold).
Nor does it matter that Republicans have played this same trick under their own steam, and that in fact the Democrats probably got the idea for it from a MAGA politician. Nor does it matter that Alaska’s paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News, did a deep dive on all this chicanery and found that, well, it’s pretty standard, really.
And if in fact the Peltola staffers didn’t pay the “new” Sullivan—as the former State Senator from Donald Trump’s backyard, Frank Artiles, infamously did—it means that not only did they mimic the MAGA Artiles but also learned how to conduct this sort of ploy legally. But again, voters aren’t inspired to vote for candidates or parties simply because those people and institutions take the same view of electoral politics as a cautious mafioso; a healthy democracy isn’t a frantic race to the bottom of the barrel.
The breaking news about Peltola’s campaign came after the last entry in this report series, which is why that entry’s introduction could accurately say that it’s only MAGA Republicans who are engaged in systemic election ratfuckery. And to be candid, that’s likely still true, as it appears the Peltola scheme was a homespun gambit in a non-contiguous U.S. state that remains closer to a “Wild West” than any other U.S. state or territory. There was nothing “systemic” about what’s alleged to have happened here.
And in fact it was just days ago—see infra—that no less a MAGA Republican leader than Donald Trump himself went to Alaska to state on national television that criming is part of Alaska’s very way of life (in that particular case, Trump was speaking of a vast right-wing conspiracy to criminally violate federal law for a potential six-figure medium-term profit, his implication being that Alaskans don’t and shouldn’t deem themselves subject to the same laws as the citizens of the contiguous 48 U.S. states).
But even Trump, the man who’ll complain about the Peltola campaign’s malfeasance the most, can’t erase the moral stain of it—not even with all his grotesque, grasping, almost unthinkably pathological hypocrisy.
Yet neither can he—or we—see in it any sort of trend.
Election ratfuckery in the 2026 midterms has been, and remains, a clearly Republican phenomenon, most categorically with respect to the sort of systematized election interference that takes advantage of massive federal government resources.
A few Peltola staffers making phone calls to rural Alaska villages in search of men with one of the most common names in the State of Alaska isn’t that.
So with all that said, this series now continues its exploration of Donald Trump’s 100 known schemes to try to steal the 2026 midterm elections on—or after—November 3.
Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026 (#34 Through #48)
(34) The “DOJ Election-Year Sensitivity Policy” (Justice Manual § 9-85.500, “Actions That May Have An Impact on An Election), commonly referred to as Main Justice’s “60-Day Rule,” hasn’t just been breached, abrogated, or ignored by the Donald Trump personal defense attorney—Todd Blanche—now running the Department. It’s been permanently obliterated. Violations of the policy weren’t just systematically encouraged but pursued with every resource at DOJ’s disposal. And Trump has made clear that he’s directing the Department’s flagrant misconduct personally.
It is impossible to count the violations at this point. Former FBI director James Comey indicted over the Trump-Russia investigation—which damaged Trump’s political brand—on the last day ever DOJ could possibly do so under the statute of limitations for the imaginary federal crime alleged by Trump and his agents. (Comey is or was a Republican, but since his firing by Trump in an effort by the then-first-term president to hide his collusion with the Kremlin, Comey has made clear what he thinks of Trump and those who do his bidding). A high-ranking Democratic elected official in Virginia, State Sen. L. Louise Lucas, was charged with numerous federal offenses, along with her daughters, even as NBC News notes that “[Senator Lucas is] a frequent critic of President Donald Trump….[and] one of the most powerful Democrats in [Virginia].” Worse still, Senator Lucas has relatives who are on the ballot in the midterms. NBC writes, “The Justice Department’s move, just 12 days before a midterm election, is unusual, as federal authorities have typically avoided taking overt investigative steps against political figures so close to an election. Lucas is not up for re-election this year but has ties to prominent Democrats who are on the ballot.”
Then there’s the failed indictment of former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, whose prosecution Trump had hoped to use pre-election to establish that claims about his incitement of an armed rebellion on January 6, 2021 are false. Grand jurors were so disgusted by the lack of meaningful evidence that they refused to issue an indictment—a slap in the face of DOJ that was virtually unheard of before the second Trump administration.
A Democratic member of the House January 6 Committee, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), just had his home raided. One of his Democratic donors got the same surprise.
Sitting Democratic representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) just saw her home raided, too—forcing her to move her family for security reasons just days before the midterm vote.
The list goes on and on.
DOJ was just chewed out by a federal judge for gross negligence in their rush to bring new indictments against former FBI agents Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, two public servants whose suffering Trump wants to use to highlight what he claims was media and law enforcement election-tampering in 2020 to hide Hunter Biden’s laptop from the voting public.
DOJ is issuing slews of fraud indictments in healthcare-related cases in purple states, hoping to distract from Trump’s own 34 Fraud convictions, pin Democratic officials in these states as complicit with massive fraud schemes—often perpetrated, per Trump’s selective prosecution(s), by women and non-whites (traditional Democratic-leaning voting constituencies)—and create the impression of the most corrupt presidential administration in America being tough on crime. And it is, if we’re only talking about crimes allegedly committed by those Trump thinks it politically expedient to demonize.
No wonder Time magazine calls these latter two indictments “very suspicious.”
(35) Melania Trump hates politics. And she hates Washington. There are only a few foreign locales she’s willing to travel to; she’s mostly a homebody. After decades in the U.S. on an immigrant visa she didn’t properly earn, she somehow speaks English worse than she did when she arrived. She rarely appears in public. Her only political agenda has been making certain parts of the White House terrifyingly, even obtusely aesthetically gross and sponsoring an anti-bullying campaign that somehow approves of her historically infamous bully of a husband. All of which explains why voters could be forgiven for wondering why, just days before the most important election of her husband’s life—the one that determines if there’ll be a real federal investigation of the Epstein Files that Melania’s name and personal history are all over—she’s suddenly taking credit for brokering a deal in the Russia-Ukraine War.
That’s right, a deal. A peace deal. One that could be a feather in the Republicans’ cap come Election Day.
Well, stop wondering what explains this otherwise utterly inexplicable development.
Melania’s “peace” deal is exactly what it appears to be: another attempt by Vladimir Putin to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections, this time through a former Soviet--bloc model whose dad Viktor Knav was for years and years a major, Kremlin-linked Communist leader (yes, really) and who was introduced to her now-president husband by the most infamous Russian intelligence agent of any of our lifetimes, sex trafficker and serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania may not much care what happens to Donald Trump in the future—though her infamously byzantine prenup probably requires her to care to some degree, both for her own financial sake and that of her son, Barron—but it’s clear that as much as anyone in America, her own personal future could be determined by what happens on November 3.
We already have Republican elected officials from Trump and Melania’s home state willing to look into whether Melania should be deported, and we have congressional bodies revealing that Melania has lied about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We have 2.5 million documents from the Epstein Files still being hidden by her husband, none of which surely have anything at all positive to say about her own shady history in the Kremlin’s sphere of political influence in Eastern Europe or 1990s New York City.
So with all that in mind, suddenly the world has gotten… Melania Trump, diplomat.
It’s a role she couldn’t have been deeded without the say-so of her husband’s ally, Putin, who America’s intelligence services confirm is doing all he can to interfere in the 2026 midterms. A woman close to Trump suddenly getting Putin’s blessing at a crucial moment in 2026 carries with it echoes of Trump business partner and Kremlin agent Felix Sater managing to get Ivanka Trump into Putin’s chair—literally—back in 2006.
(36) The most corrupt, oversight-free, clandestine criminal pardon operation in U.S. political history is working overtime, which has the simultaneous effect of putting several grateful Trump and Republican and MAGA mega-donors back on the board in time to help fund the midterms, falsely feeding into the Trumpist narrative of D.C. Democrats having used “lawfare” to fraudulently charge and incarcerate Republicans—a narrative Trump loves because he can use it at 2026 midterms rallies to bring everything back, once again, to his own supposed victimhood—and ensure that those who might use this pre-election moment to reveal dark secrets about Trump or his top agents think twice about it because perhaps they too, one day, could get some sort of presidential perk (whether a pardon or some other form of venal executive order).
Because pardons are inherently political—and inherently controversial—we mostly see them at the end of presidential terms or, failing that, in large blocs centered on a new administration policy rollout (e.g., some criminal justice reform strategy that makes an entire category of federal crime suddenly seem less grave than previously).
But that’s not what’s happening right now.
Days before a major national election, Trump is throwing open cell doors left and right and pardoning anyone he can get his hands on whose pardon could be deemed a symbolic boost to Republicans’ pre-election spirits. Keeping in mind that pardons have often been the undoing of entire presidential legacies—think Bill Clinton and Marc Rich, or Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, or for that matter Trump and Steve Bannon (Trump’s obscene pardon of Bannon being the very last act of his first term)—seeing such an important presidential authority used as a Las Vegas-style election chit is legitimately unsettling to America’s constitutional order.
How grotesque is what’s going on? Trump actually pardoned two men at a political rally in Alaska just a few days ago. The men, whose crimes would—if popularized—significantly hasten the collapse of Earth’s climate and the demise of the species, were all but treated as heroes by Trump for subverting environmental regulations for profit.
CBS News called the clemency “unusually public” while noting that the utterly unrepentant criminals had made tens of thousands of dollars breaking federal law.
Trump didn’t just pardon them, though; he absolved them. He said they should never have been charged and alleged that federal law enforcement agents upholding federal law constituted “a vicious[ ] target[ing] [of] the Alaskan way of life.”
Sound bad? It gets worse.
Trump used an October rally in Texas to complain about one of his own past pardons, revealing that he had issued it in 2025 to a Democratic congressman solely because he believed that congressman would flip parties if he got presidential largesse. If that sounds to you like Trump at once (a) admitting to the impeachable offense of Bribery, (b) admitting to the federal crime of Bribery, (c) broadcasting just weeks before a huge federal election that he will do favors for anyone who switches parties to help him, and (d) confusing the awesome scope of presidential authority with a schoolyard boast designed to attract voters enamored with supposed “alpha males,” you’re right. It is all of those things.
Putting aside that the volume of Trump’s pardons has been infamous and historic—not just because he pardoned over 1,500 active insurrectionists but because he does not go through the Pardon Office, require contrition, and is said to be selling pardons for millions a pop—it’s noteworthy that since the midterm elections cycle started he has focused on doling on pardons to residents of midterm battleground states. Really, the tendency is obvious and prolonged, with the citizens of Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia getting special treatment.
Only a handful of presidential pardons have gone to the residents of any other state.
(37) Trump and his agents have orchestrated a nationwide plot to invalidate what they perceive to be Democratic-leaning ballot tranches before they are counted.
You read that right. Before they’ve been counted.
Anyone who follows federal elections knows that when a ballot has been put into a “provisional” or otherwise segregated status, the chances of it ever being counted plummet to nearly zero. A rule of thumb in federal elections is that—while voters should cast provisional ballots if that’s the only option left to them—doing so is only a step or two above throwing the said ballot into a garbage can.
So it matters that Trump unsuccessfully sued to have 20,000 ballots in California put aside simply based on his say-so—specifically, his agents’ contention that a voter list they purchased from California (presumably, with American taxpayer money) “proved” that these 20,000 ballots contained some number of registered non-citizens…
…even though they couldn’t point to even 30, and in America we don’t invalidate the constitutional rights of thousands of citizens to try to catch a handful of malfeasors (a term that might be a stretch in this case, as DOJ merely noted that there were 28 individuals on this list of 20,000 voters who had been convicted of voting crimes in the past, not that these people were planning to do so again, had taken any action themselves to remain on the voter rolls, were planning to vote Democratic if they did vote, or indeed had done anything wrong at all besides having their names appear on a list the Trump administration couldn’t even assure a court was current or accurate).
And it therefore matters that Trump is now targeting another blue state—Washington—with the same failed legal gambit. It is clear, now, and clearly horrifying to see, that the current presidential administration would rather that hundreds or thousands of votes be thrown in the trash than have even a single illegal vote be cast… as long as the votes to be thrown in the trash are presumed to be Democratic-leaning. Moreover, it’s clear that this anti-American, unconstitutional, democracy-contemptuous ideology makes no distinction between hardened election criminals (if there indeed are any outside this administration) and people who illegally vote by accident, who illegally vote but negligently rather than intentionally, who are confused by local laws (which sometimes let non-citizens vote in certain local elections but not other ones), who do not read English well or know the law and therefore might inadvertently have been misled into believing they can vote, and so on. In any case, as Trump well knows from his own desperate and failed attempts to find widespread voter fraud in America, the worst-case scenario each election cycle is that a few dozen people vote who shouldn’t, usually by accident, which across a nation of 330 million isn’t nearly enough to affect anything.
(38) We already know, from Proof of Coup (2023), that Trump and his 2016 campaign CEO Steve Bannon spent years coordinating with Brazil’s Bolsonaro [Crime] Family, including in the period of time the Family was plotting the overthrow of Brazil’s democracy. Indeed, Eduardo Bolsonaro—a son of imprisoned would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro—met with Trump and members of his family multiple times during the week the Capitol was attacked in January 2001, and attended insurrection-planning meetings. But the recent revelation that the other key member of the Trump-Vance administration, J.D. Vance, may have been secretly and illegally funding Eduardo’s brother Flávio’s 2026 campaign to end Brazil’s democracy and free his criminal dad underscores a fact no one wants to discuss: the argument Trump and his lawyers made to justify the January 6 Rebellion centered on claims that America’s elections infrastructure had been terminally compromised for years by Brazil’s sworn geopolitical enemy, Venezuela. Supposed evidence for this supposed transnational plot—a plot whose purported existence Trump and his team intended to use as a justification for collapsing America’s democracy—was allegedly transmitted to team Trump through Brazilian intelligence agents controlled by the Bolsonaro Family or by Venezuelan agents more loyal to a leftist Venezuelan government’s Brazilian enemies than their own country.
That the purported evidence Trump personal lawyer Sidney Powell tried to pass off as genuine to U.S. voters in November 2020 included unsigned affidavits allegedly from Venezuelan military officials—even as they would, if real, create a justification for the United States invading Venezuela, something Trump has wanted to do for years and finally did do in 2025 in a series of shocking war crimes—strongly suggests that the actual origin of the “Venezuelan affidavits” was either Brazilian intelligence or men inside Venezuela being paid by Brazilian intelligence. And who was running Brazil’s intelligence agencies at the time? A man who was a co-defendant in a corruption case with, you guessed it, Eduardo Bolsonaro (the latter of whom has since fled to Texas).
In other words, as Proof of Coup details, a second attempt to collapse America’s fragile democracy—a “January 6, 2.0”—would almost certainly again rely on false claims that originate in South America and fraudulently allege that America’s voting machines are being rigged from there. And it would be nearly certain that such false claims would originate, more specifically, from an insurrectionist social and political circle in that part of the world that Donald Trump and his vice president and their leading agents (e.g., Steve Bannon, Jason Miller) have be trying to cultivate relationships with.
It’s with all this in mind that we must analyze the breaking news that Trump has now decided to harbor Flávio Bolsonaro in the United States as a Fugitive from Justice. The Bolsonaro scion (in the forced absence of his father) stands accused of almost every political crime you can possibly imagine, though none that Trump and Vance aren’t also suspected of here in the United States.
Donald Trump’s decision to harbor a Brazilian insurrectionist and fugitive not only underscores his contempt for free and fair democratic elections, for international law, and specifically for the operations of Brazil’s democracy, but it ensures that any past or ongoing Trump-Bolsonaro or Vance-Bolsonaro conspiracies—the latter being, arguably, just as dangerous to the MAGA cause in the medium term as the former—will remain hidden.
It’s therefore impossible to see Vance’s work with Rockbridge or Trump’s harboring of a fugitive as anything but landmark moments in an ongoing Trumpist insurrection.
(39) Imagine a sprawling public-private (i.e., government-Big Tech) election-year conspiracy aimed at deliberately breaking emerging tech that millions of Americans use daily in a bid to advance Donald Trump’s partisan political narrative. Now imagine that Trump, using taxpayer dollars, funded this conspiracy, and that the conspiracy strikes at the heart of Trump’s entire political persona—and the odds of his political party remaining in power in Washington. Well, you don’t have to wonder, because that’s exactly what’s happening right now with widely used AI chatbots.
It’s not just that Donald Trump has repeatedly thrown lavish dinners for tech execs at taxpayer expense. It’s not just that these same people are funding Trump’s political pet projects—like his grotesque, unnecessary, systematically lied-about ballroom-cum-doomsday bunker—in an apparently illegal exchange for giant government contracts.
It’s not just that Trump has gutted the regulations these men want gone, fired the IGs these men wanted fired, and repeatedly received suspicious benefits from their services.
It’s also clear, now, that these men are breaking their own consumer products to please Trump.
The new revelation is that Google’s AI consumer product now refuses to correctly answer questions about the 2020 presidential election because doing so would establish that Trump and his entire political party have lied about that election—including as part of their ex ante, midstream, and ex post justifications for the bloody events of January 6—and voters being told this would consequently undercut many Republican political narratives in 2026. Trumpist claims about election “security,””lawfare,” voter fraud, foreign collusion by the Democratic Party, and much more would fall apart like wet tissue paper if the AI chatbots millions of Americans use daily supplied factual information to their users (including the ones paying for these services, sometimes at great expense). So now these products are simply… broken.
We have become so immune to news of Big Tech working on a clandestine basis to keep its Trumpist gravy train in Washington going that we forget that all of this is (a) illegal, (b) undemocratic, (c) as corrupt as anything that’s happened since Watergate.
(40) Mr. Trump is promising obscene “cash bounties” to anyone who will parrot his 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and/or 2026 election conspiracies in advance of the midterms.
Donald Trump’s thoroughly corrupt, wholly unprecedented $1 million cash bounty for allegations of Voter Fraud implicitly seeks to recruit far-right radicals to the cause of providing a purported justification for invalidating 2026 midterm election results.
As with Mr. Trump’s recently announced bounty for so-called “fraud” whistleblowers, the president has denominated himself the sole decider of which bounty-seekers will be recognized and which will not be, which allegations will be investigated and which will not be, and which eventual payout requests should be honored or not. What this means is that American taxpayers are now footing the bill for yet another slush fund controlled exclusively by Trump and intended exclusively for the advancement of his own ambitions.
There’s no chance whatsoever that an American citizen raising clear evidence of far-right Voter Fraud will even be acknowledged by this administration, let alone listened to and compensated for inspiring a future federal criminal investigation. After all, Trump himself has regularly, in public, urged both mass far-right Voter Fraud and illegal foreign election interference. Is he going to punish those who take him up on his federally criminal Incitements?
Moreover, because Trump alone decides when and how a given allegation is given the imprimatur of the federal government—he says only successful prosecutions will be compensated, but given that almost none of the prosecutions he’s attempted to direct and oversee as president so far have been successful, it’s considerably more likely that he’ll start highly publicly compensating bounty-seekers for the stories they tell rather than the investigations they trigger or convictions they make possible—what’s really happened here is that the sitting President of the United States has found a new way to institutionalize democracy-destabilizing conspiracy theories.
Whereas before Donald Trump had to blithely repeat internet rumors as fact to try to convince his voters that mass voter fraud existed in the United States (when even his own past investigations have confirmed it does not), now he can use the formerly good name of the DOJ and FBI, and legal tender (contributed by American taxpayers) that the federal government controls, to lend significant cultural capital and institutional credence to people who may simply be radical quacks.
Indeed, if past is precedent, some of those quacks we pay for their “evidence” may even end up being found to be Trump agents. The idea of America funding its own internal anti-constitutional rebellion is beyond abhorrent. But it’s what’s happening.
(41) Taxpayers are also funding the rollout of a Trump Organization media operation called “Trump TV” that has (a) gone live just in time for the midterm election season and (b) was partly promoted via Trump’s illegal banning of three major media outlets from the People’s House—an act that not only has now been blocked by a federal judge but was clearly intended as marketing copy for a private Trump business scheme.
Welcome to Trump TV. You pay for it, but the Trump Organization—a private firm—holds the rights to it and will spend decades and decades in the future profiting off it.
As the New York Times reports,
Trump TV is a livestreaming service showing Trump speeches and events at taxpayer expense on the White House website. But just before midnight on September 24, three days after Trump TV went live, Trump’s private business filed a $1,400 application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to assert ownership of the name.
“The applicant has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce,” the application stated.
Josh Gerben, a Washington trademark attorney who first noticed and called attention to the application, said such a trademark could allow Trump’s business to require the government to agree to a licensing deal to keep using the name.
It could also allow the president to essentially take what is currently a government operation with him after he leaves office.
“They’re reaping the benefits from all the taxpayer funds that are being used to create and run that channel,” he said. “Obviously, politics has changed a lot in however many years. But I’m 45 years old and I can’t imagine any president before Trump getting away with this without being eviscerated in the media.”
While this is an older story—from a couple months ago, at the beginning of the 2026 midterm cycle—it’s also very much a developing one, as it underscores some of the mercenary thinking behind Trump’s unconstitutional attempts to ban major media from covering him.
Trump TV was devised as a federally funded media project that promised to give its viewers unfiltered Trump propaganda—as Trump’s consistent false claim again CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, the outlets he’s trying to ban from the People’s House, has been that they misrepresent him; they do not—and in service of that aim Trump has now spent hours and hours of media time continuing to decry major media as “fake news” and implying that only the media venues he specifically delineates are legitimate. But what if it’s now become clear that, as he tears down Americans’ trust in everything they see on the news, and therefore the existence of a base reality in American life, he’s really just marketing his new corrupt corporate venture? And what if, in doing so, he’s not just tearing down American culture but making us pay for it?
And doing all this during a federal election cycle, because that drives more profit to him, both political and pecuniary?
Well, that seems to be where we are.
(42) Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI-training regime is a godsend to Trump and the Republicans, and very much intended to interfere with the midterm elections as Zuckerberg and his company have been accused of doing in the past.
All the above is critical to understanding Trump’s vast election-rigging apparatus, as it places the conspiracy that undergirds it in the context of the AI stock boom, his continued insistence that AI be unregulated—declaiming that it’s no danger to anyone even as those working on it say there’s a notable chance it will destroy all of humankind within a decade—and the fact that (see supra) he’s worked diligently to rake in unprecedented donations from Big Tech titans like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
When people talk about Donald Trump, Big Tech titans, and election-rigging, they’re usually referring to the fact that Elon Musk is the largest mega-donor in Republican Party history by a factor of five or ten, and appears to have told confidants that he in some way meddled with the results of the 2024 presidential election Donald Trump won. But of course the broader story involving Trump and Big Tech goes beyond Musk’s ever-growing empire and into the work of severely disturbed individuals like Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and others in Silicon Valley who are significantly less intelligent than they believe they are and for that reason exponentially more reckless than a healthy democracy can allow any one person to be.
This all came to a head six weeks ago, when the newly minted Trump lobbyist and toady Zuckerberg, having hitched his professional wagon to Trump’s political career in unmistakable ways, announced that his AI consumer product would train itself on a media outlet so far to the political right that it’s not only run by a close Donald Trump friend but was once considered for purchase by Donald Trump Jr. and/or some of his longest and closest friends (e.g., Tommy Hicks Jr., former co-chair of the RNC). The news that Newsmax, an election-denying propaganda outlet, will be a major basis for Meta AI’s (Muse) understanding of American elections is categorically dangerous to American democracy.
And again, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Donald Trump has threatened Big Tech so viciously both in public and in private that it’s little surprise that the sort of moral cowards who tend to rise quickly in Big Tech circles—young white “libertarian” men, by and large, who conflate their egos with their ethics, their ambition with altruism, and their profit margins with personal responsibility—are now taking steps in the business world that are spectacularly politically advantageous to the Republican Party they’re now funding in general and their deregulation patron Trump in particular.
More than this, these new developments are spectacularly advantageous to election deniers.
Facebook is one of the largest companies in the world, and it’s used by a significant percentage of Americans—particularly the slightly older generations of Americans who skew politically conservative, are susceptible to digital-age disinformation and scams, and tend to be informed (when they are) by single-source news streams. If these very consumers also now begin using Meta’s AI products, the odds that they’ll be misled about American elections, including the 2026 midterm elections, are far higher than they would be if these Americans were using a responsibly trained AI.
And we mustn’t forget, in light of all this, that Trump has just put Elon Musk and his shockingly shoddy AI consumer product Grok at the heart of another major American institution—besides America’s elections infrastructure—that being the U.S. military.
This means Musk’s “anti-woke” nonsense machine, which was last seen declaring itself to be “MechaHitler,” is now at the heart of the entity that would be central to any future Trumpist self-coup.
(43) In-court live-posting by the media outlet Lawfare has confirmed that the new DOJ-FBI indictment against two former FBI agents, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, is more than just another example of the second Trump Administration aggressively using “lawfare” against domestic political opponents during a federal election cycle (while falsely claiming and decrying exactly that same activity falsely by exactly those same opponents).
Cross-examination by the agents’ lawyers has now established that in fact the federal criminal investigation into their past conduct began within 24 hours of Donald Trump giving his now-infamous July 2026 mid-midterms-cycle televised rant about alleged Chinese election interference. That rant was intended to (a) discredit the results of the 2026 midterms, (b) open up a pathway to future false claims by Mr. Trump of Chinese interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, and (c) further obscure his attempted past criminal collusion with the Chinese Communist Party.
What this means is that a new, high-profile, DOJ policy-violative indictment is much more than just standard cynical and hypocritical lawfare, but was coordinated with the most significant disinformation campaign Donald Trump himself has launched in the 2026 midterm election cycle.
(44) Trump has declined to confirm he will accept the 2026 midterm election results.
This breaking news development matters.
Why? Because we can’t claim that it’s mere rhetoric. The man who said it previously incited an armed rebellion against the government of the United States—a bloody attack that killed several, injured well over 100, caused millions of dollars in damages to the U.S. Capitol, and stands as one of the darkest episodes in post-Civil War U.S. history—and he incited that armed rebellion precisely because he wouldn’t accept a loss in an election. America needed Trump, at a bare minimum, to commit to honor the results of the midterm elections, and he very publicly declined to do so. (His claim that he’ll accept the results if they’re “honest” is literally meaningless, given that he’s repeatedly said that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating—meaning that any Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms is already, by Trump’s own accounting, definitionally not “honest”).ABOVE: CNN reporting on this topic.
But it matters for another reason as well. It matters because Trump well knows, from his own and the nation’s experience, that rhetoric like this leads to violence, election denialism, threats against elections officials, threats against politicians, threats upon polling places, frivolous post-election litigation, notorious election crimes (see, e.g., this and this), mass refusal by Americans to recognize a legitimately elected American government, and more. Refusing to do what every prior president has done—say that they will accept the election results because it’s already presumed that if fraud is ever proven that statement understandably becomes invalid—is Trump’s way of signaling to his people the opposite: it’s okay to cause election-related terror and chaos, before the voting and during the voting and after the voting, whether you have any evidence of wrongdoing or not.
That’s what happened after the 2020 presidential election, and it’ll surely happen now, too.
(45) Trump’s handpicked Fed chair is playing election-year politics in ways we have never seen before.
Readers will be aware of the wild saga that led to Trump getting his chosen Fed chair on a party-line congressional vote (the only exception to this was a Democrat with a severe mental illness, a lingering brain injury, and untreated personality disorder). The saga involved not one Fed board member threatened with a baseless criminal indictment but two—Jerome Powell (link) and Lisa Cook (link)—and attempts to meddle with the independence of the Fed that rattled global markets for months.
So now Trump has his man, Kevin Warsh, atop the Fed. And guess what’s happened:
Federal Reserve officials agree that inflation needs to return to the central bank’s 2% annual target. Instead, the war with Iran has sent gas prices soaring, and price increases are starting to spread beyond the gas station. Last month, that prompted Fed officials to raise rates for the first time in three years to cool the economy and bring down inflation.
Yet this month, even with the inflation picture worsening, the Fed is widely expected to hold rates steady at its Wednesday meeting.
Would that still be the case if the midterms weren’t just six days away?
At his 2:30 p.m. press conference Wednesday, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is likely to face questions about political pressure if the central bank does keep rates unchanged. The Fed’s independence is a cornerstone of its monetary policy decisions. However, in an election year, that independence inevitably comes under the microscope.
Outside of the pandemic, when rates were kept at near-zero levels, the Fed adjusted rates within two months of Election Day in four out of five of the most recent election years.
….
If the Fed does hold rates steady as expected, Warsh may have to work harder than usual to convince Americans that the political calendar played no part in its decision.
“Tightening cannot appear to be a move against the administration, while holding cannot look like accommodation,” EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco said in a note last week.
One would have to be willfully naive to not worry about what Trump has wrought here.
Whether the Fed is cowed by him or not, the mere fact that he threatened to imprison two of their number, made noises about ending the independence of the Fed altogether, and forced through a highly partisan nomination for Fed chair when more than almost any entity the Fed requires bipartisan support and confidence in D.C. and around the country makes Trump’s mercurial fascism a poison infecting every Fed call.
In other words, Trump’s Fed-related election-year tampering already happened.
Now all we can do is speculate about the fallout.
(46) Trump’s harassment of election officials just days before a major federal election is without precedent—and seems engineered to provoke needless mistakes Trump can thereafter make political hay with.
It’s widely understood that elections officials have one of the hardest jobs in local, state, or federal government, a lesson most Americans learned well when the inner workings of our elections were exposed to the nation and the world during the 2021 election crisis Trump incited.
So if there’s one thing America’s leader absolutely cannot do, it’s harass state elections officials at the very moment they’re working 18- to 20-hour days preparing their teams for a national election.
So guess what Trump is doing?
Sending subpoenas to elections officials in 13 battleground states. Subpoenas that have deadlines and legal consequences for missing them. And if you’re wondering why these couldn’t have been sent months and months and months ago—even if 1015—that’s a good question to ask. But the answer is obvious: it wouldn’t be the degree of federal harassment Trump and his agents are looking to subject hardworking civil servants to, and it wouldn’t get the news coverage these subpoenas are getting. That news coverage helps advance Trump’s pre-midterms rhetoric about elections officials having something to hide; this false narrative will be critical to Trump invalidating this election cycle before all votes are in, as votes are being counted, and between now and the next Congress is seated in January 2027.
(47) There are lies a political candidate can legally tell, and lies that constitute a form of election tampering. Trump has made the latter a mainstay at his midterms rallies.
Imagine if Trump were to say something (else) that is utterly odious at a midterms rally, like, for instance, if he were to make the claim that all trans persons in America want to victimize American children sexually. Such an obscene lie would of course be both morally grotesque and of only dubious value politically—given its obviously ethically irresponsible hyperbole (and beyond hyperbole)—but it would be covered by the First Amendment. So it would not be seen as a form of Fraud. Donald Trump, president or not, or any American politician for that matter, is allowed to express deranged and bigoted viewpoints in public as long as they don’t imminently incite a criminal act.
But what if the man in charge of the federal government—who’s more gregariously than any of his predecessors made clear that he personally directs and is familiar with the major federal criminal investigations underway at the FBI and the major federal criminal prosecutions underway at DOJ—repeatedly indicates in nationally televised rallies that he has used federal taxpayer resources to investigate systemic crimes against American children and found that not only are certain crimes now routinely happening but are in fact being actively sponsored (and exclusively, too) by Democratic politicians?
And what if every word in the proceeding paragraph were a vile lie? What if nothing like what the president claims his investigations have uncovered has ever happened, and he’s only in the position to convince tens of millions of voters otherwise because his Oath of Office—which this particular form of lying would seem to flagrantly violate— puts him in charge of sufficient federal investigative resources that the idea that he and his team might uncover a novel breed of wrongdoing domestically is plausible?
Below is one example of what we’re talking about here:
Some version of this premeditated disinformation has been presented by Mr. Trump to the voters of the United States at every one of his midterms rallies—most of which have been nationally televised on taxpayer-funded airwaves. Note here that Trump is very clearly not just expressing a fear about something he thinks could happen, but stating as the President of the United States that he knows for a fact that something dire is indeed happening to America’s children, and happening on a regular basis. He then goes on to indicate that this purported mass violent mutilation of children too young to make medical decisions for themselves is being actively sponsored by Democratic politicians, voting blocs that are associated with the Democratic Party, and laws on the books in multiple jurisdictions that have been—and will surely continue to be—advanced by Democratic politicians if they’re elected in the 2026 midterm elections.
Of course, all of the foregoing Trump claims are lies. Frauds. None of it is happening; none of it has ever happened; neither Donald Trump nor anyone at the FBI or DOJ has ever received any information whatsoever indicating that this has happened anywhere, and indeed there’s no danger of this ever happening at any point in time anywhere in America from now until eternity. So the question then becomes, at what point does President Trump abusing his power and violating his Oath of Office to intimate that federal investigations are underway—or have already happened—that in fact are totally imaginary become not just an impeachable offense but also an election-rigging?
Proof contends that we’re already at that point—and that if, for instance, a Democratic president were to fraudulently say at 25 consecutive pre-election rallies that federal investigations have found that Christian evangelicals are regularly drinking the blood of circumcised Jewish children, every Trump supporter in America would deem that premeditated domestic psyop it to be not just a criminal Fraud but an illegal attempt to alter the outcome of a federal election… and using the Office of the President to do so, no less. So why is Trump allowed to do this? Why are journalists and voters and politicians and courts left with no better a response than to simply “fact-check” him?
(48) Breaking news has Trump now called for an entire Senate election to be called off, all opponents to the candidate he endorsed tossed from the ballot, voters precluded from being able to cast any ballots at all, and a Senate seat simply awarded to his chosen office-holder. Yes, all of that really happened just tonight.
Proof began this report by noting that what the Peltola campaign allegedly did in Alaska was unethical and profoundly wrong, even as there is no evidence yet that it was illegal—that would require the sort of cash payments Republicans have offered to “ghost” candidates under other circumstances (see supra)—and certainly the MAGA “movement” has no moral standing to complain about any of it. Proof also, in the earlier-written introduction to this report-series entry and introductions to prior entries in the series, has underscored that Donald Trump (a) has no sense of history, (b) no shame, (c) no aversion to hypocrisy, (d) no interest in proportionality, (e) no awareness of (or willingness to learn) the fine points of the state and federal statutes he loves to declaim about, and (f) virtually no grasp of the facts of any developing situation beyond the one he needed to acquire to try to cynically yank the situation to his own venal advantage. This author has also often noted that Trump has no ethical code, no moral framework to which he describes, no coherent ideology—political or otherwise—and no principles. He’s a moral cipher in an oddly shaped business suit.
So of course he’s calling for the 2026 Alaska Senate race to be cancelled.
Of course he’s pretending to know all the facts just hours after the story broke. Of course he’s saying that the recent Times report on Peltola confirms everything he said in his personal lawyer’s recent filing in federal court in Alaska—which not only preceded these new revelations but isn’t actually necessarily changed much by them (as the standing legal question is whether it is legal for two men with the same name to be on the ballot at once if the one who’s an incumbent is clearly listed as such and middle names are used to distinguish the two similarly named individuals; it seems very clear that there is nothing at all illegal about any of that, either pre-Times report or after it).
Given how predictable all this is, what makes it newsworthy isn’t so much that Trump has said all of the foregoing—because, again, of course he has—but that the “seal has now been broken” (as it were) on Trump demanding that certain federal elections be cancelled in 2026 not because the law requires it but because he believes his political team is going to lose that particular contest. Trump is not just trying to pre-invalidate a very possible Peltola win, in other words, but lay the groundwork for using the same rhetoric with respect to other races where the Democrat might eke out a win, whether or not there’s any legal basis for the remedies he’s demanding. And frankly not only is there likely no legal basis for any of his filings in Alaska to date, but it’s actually not at all clear what new developments would have to arise there to actually invalidate Peltola or the non-incumbent “Dan Sullivan” as candidates.
Even Trump is arguing only, for now, that certain Peltola staffers may have lied on federal documents, which not at all coincidentally may be the most common crime he and several members of his family and administration have committed between 2016 and the present—and never once has anyone said that it means they can’t be in office.
Heck, all three of Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court Justices stand accused of committing Perjury with respect to their plans for abortion rights—among other things (Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, also stands accused by members of the public of lying about a series of sex crimes)—and nothing has ever happened on that score or ever will. If Sullivan didn’t lie about his name, didn’t lie about the signatures and/or payments required to get himself on the ballot, and hasn’t actively misrepresented his identity or his eligibility for office, it’s not clear that any of what the Times reported would be handled as anything more than a congressional ethics referral for Peltola if she’s elected. As bad as the allegations are, they pale in comparison to dozens of offenses for which members of Congress—and Mr. Trump himself—have exhibited no interest in seriously looking into at all.
Child Rape Ad Political Disaster and Scandal In Ohio
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticUSA, News and Comment: Ramaswamy’s Amy Acton Ad Backfires So Badly That It May Hand Democrats, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Oct. 28, 2026. The Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad attacking Amy Acton for being abuses as a child has not only hurt him in the governor’s race, but has damaged the entire GOP ticket in Ohio and could cost Republicans the Senate.
Vivek Ramaswamy thought that an ad attacking his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, above, for abuse that she was subjected to as a child was a game-changer. He was behind the ad, and the candidate did not listen when other Republicans tried to talk him out of it.
From the moment that the ad was released on the Internet, it has been a disaster for Republicans. Ramaswamy has refused to take the ad down and is being cheered on by Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Ramaswamy was already losing in Ohio before the ad, but now he has become radioactive, and a new internal Republican poll shows that he is hurting the entire ticket in Ohio.
Axios reported:
The private poll, commissioned by a Republican group and obtained by Axios, found Acton leading Ramaswamy by eight points — up from a two-point lead in the same poll earlier this month, before the ad began circulating on Oct. 19.
The ad “is having a significant effect on the gubernatorial race,” a memo attached to the poll states.
Republicans could likely live with Ramaswamy nuking his own campaign. There would be no tears shed over his defeat in quite a few Republican circles.
The problem that Republicans have is that Ramaswamy’s toxicity has spread to the rest of the party’s ticket in Ohio.How Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ad Could Win The Senate For Democrats
Trump’s crush, Sen. Jon Husted, is trailing his Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown, so the last thing he needed is the nuclear fallout from Ramaswamy’s ad coating his campaign, but that is what has happened.
More from Axios:
A memo attached to the poll said that 86% of the survey’s 800 respondents said they had seen, read or heard something about the ad.
By a 2-to-1 ratio, those who said they were familiar with it said it made them more likely to vote for Acton.
…
National Republican operatives fear the backlash against Ramaswamy over the ad could also hurt U.S. Sen. Ohio Jon Husted’s reelection bid in a state that could be key in determining control of the Senate.
“Vivek’s ad put the whole Republican ticket on defense. He better hope Ohio doesn’t decide the Senate majority,” said a GOP operative who has been briefed on polling in the race.
The Republican solution to the crisis is to send the president who has five new rape allegations against him, some of them involving minors, to campaign for Ramaswamy and Husted.
It looks like the Republican ticket in Ohio could be nearly wiped out because of Ramaswamy’s ad, gas prices, tariffs, and the economy.
Ramaswamy could take Husted down with him, and if Democrats end up picking up exactly four seats and holding a one-seat majority, they can thank Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump, and JD Vance for their unwavering support of child predators.
The billionaire-owned and operated Republican Party continues to create one crisis after another and reminds non-MAGAs why they can’t support this party.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Marshall purchased stock in obscure pharma company just before it secured key FDA approval, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 28, 2026. In the Senate, Marshall has oversight of the FDA.
On November 8, 2018, then-Congressman Roger Marshall (R-KS) and his wife completed a purchase of 1,250 shares of Ionics Life Sciences, a privately held company, according to documents from the Irish Companies Registration Office obtained by Popular Information. The Marshalls spent $250,000 to acquire the stock at a price of $200 per share.
It was an impeccably timed purchase.
Ionics Life Sciences is an Irish holding company with no employees. Its wholly owned subsidiary, Genzada Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., is a Kansas-based firm that is developing GZ17-6.02, an experimental cancer treatment developed from plant extracts, including the black calla lily. The company was founded by Gene Zaid, who has donated $6,800 to Marshall during his career in Congress.
On November 16, 2018, about a week after the Marshalls were allocated their shares, Genzada Pharmaceuticals USA announced the FDA “approved” its application “for a Phase 1 human clinical trial of the company’s flagship molecule GZ17-6.02 (6.02) for patients with advanced solid organ tumors or lymphoma.”
The approval of clinical trials on humans is a major benchmark for the development of any new drug. It typically increases the value of a company by clearing a major regulatory hurdle, moving the drug from the preclinical to clinical stage. Investors value companies like Genzada based on the odds of the drug ultimately reaching the market and, while still a long shot, being cleared for human trials improves those odds.
During a January 2019 visit by local lawmakers to Genzada’s offices in Sterling, Kansas, weeks after the FDA clearance, Zaid described the company as a newly attractive investment. “Now we have something,” Zaid told the lawmakers, according to the Hutchinson News. “Now, if you want to invite friends to invest, you can.”
Under the STOCK Act, Marshall was required to disclose his joint purchase of stock in Ionics Life Sciences within 45 days of his purchase. Marshall did not file his required transaction report, however, until August 28, 2019, more than 240 days late. Subsequent disclosures reveal that the value of his Ionics stock, by 2020, had increased and was now worth up to $500,000.
On the disclosure, Marshall lists the initial purchase date as October 1, 2018, and incorrectly lists its location as Sterling, Kansas. It is Genzada that is based in Kansas, not Ionics. Marshall did not report that Genzada was a subsidiary of Ionics until his August 2026 report.
Marshall’s campaign and Senate office did not respond to detailed questions about Marshall’s purchase of Genzada stock.
Marshall now oversees FDA, proposed bills that could benefit Genzada
When Marshall joined the Senate in 2021, he joined the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which oversees the FDA, the organization that will ultimately determine whether Genzada’s GZ17-6.02 will be approved.
While in this role, Marshall has sponsored legislation that could ultimately benefit Genzada. In 2025, for example, Marshall co-sponsored the Small Biotech Innovation Act. It would exempt drugs created by small pharmaceutical companies from having to negotiate their prices with Medicare. In 2022, Marshall offered an amendment to a reconciliation bill that would similarly exempt “breakthrough treatments and life-saving medicine” from “federal government-controlled drug pricing.” He highlighted that his amendment would benefit emerging cancer drugs. “If Congress eliminates incentives for an industry with a 95-100 percent fail rate in cancer drugs, we’ll never get a cure,” Marshall said. “Americans deserve better.”
He has also publicly advocated for greater access to experimental drugs, a category that includes Genzada’s GZ17-6.02, once they have been determined to be safe. “I think this is the balance here,” Marshall told the right-wing website Just the News in May 2026. “Let’s make sure the drug is safe, but then let the doctors and the patients have more skin in the game and make that determination if they think they should try it or not.”
He has also spoken about his role in evaluating complaints from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs are rejected by the FDA. “[T]he people that struggle to get their drugs approved blow up my office, but then I dig down with the FDA,” Marshall said during an April 16, 2026 committee hearing. Marshall praised the FDA for approving drugs in record numbers despite funding constraints.
This is not the first instance of Marshall’s official advocacy overlapping with his personal financial interests. Last week, the American Prospect reported that Marshall has introduced legislation benefiting Nueterra, a Kansas private equity firm run by Marshall’s longtime business partner and donor Dan Tasset. Marshall’s family has invested in Nueterra funds.
Democracy Docket, Opinion and Advocacy: The shark I’m watching most closely, Marc Elias, Oct. 28, 2026. Democratic attorney and Democracy Docket founder, Everything is free this week, which makes now the best time to share. Forward Marc’s analysis to a friend who needs to know what’s at stake before they vote.
We are six days away from the midterms, and Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on free and fair elections are continuing to escalate. Many of you have asked what to watch for and what to expect next.
A colleague of mine once coined the phrase “shark closest to the boat” to help focus on the most immediate threats. It doesn’t mean it is the only concern, but it is the most immediate.
Here is my guide to the sharks closest to the boat carrying our democracy in these troubled waters:
1. The Department of Justice’s lawsuit over ballot counting
The Department of Justice’s lawsuit blocking ballot counting in California is the shark closest to the boat. This is the shark from “Jaws,” and it threatens to sink our democracy if we don’t call up Captain Quint.
And yes, we’re going to need a bigger boat. Especially because the DOJ has already spread this playbook to Washington State, where the DOJ demanded that the state set aside ballots from more than 400 voters it claims are noncitizens. No matter where you live, your vote is not safe.
I am certainly concerned about this shark. My legal team is already running from the beaches into the water to fight back.
U.S. District Judge David Carter is expected to issue a ruling today. The DOJ will likely lose. But that will not be the end of this shark. The department will take this case to the Supreme Court, where I am certain this shark will meet its end.
2. The DOJ’s lawsuit to block Alaska from certifying the Democratic Senate candidate
This is a frivolous case, but be warned: The shark is still circling the boat.
As a reminder, Trump’s DOJ is suing to block certification of the Senate election if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. The DOJ’s argument is baseless and weak. This case never should have been filed in the first place.
But that doesn’t mean we should rest easy. Trump is invested in this case because he is determined to steal the Senate. He claims that he’s the one who gave the go-ahead for the DOJ to file.
My law firm has moved to intervene on behalf of Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC. The DOJ must respond to the motion to dismiss by tomorrow. I expect we will see the last of this shark soon enough.
3. DOJ threats to state election officials for following state laws
The DOJ has been threatening state election officials who are simply doing their jobs. They warned election officials they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, and as we get closer to the election, those threats are only ramping up.
On behalf of the DSCC, DCCC, DGA and Nevada Democratic Party, as well as Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries, my law firm sued to stop these threats. Trump and the DOJ are clearly using intimidation to dictate who can vote and how elections are run. We will not let them win.
This is a pretty big shark that should unsettle all of us. Right now, this shark is a little further off the coastline, but it’s moving fast and picking up speed. We need to keep an eye out.
4. Red states colluding with the DOJ and Trump
There is a shark keeping a low profile on the ocean floor. That shark is red state officials colluding with the DOJ and Trump to subvert the election results in their states.
In some states, that looks like willingly handing over voter data. In others, it’s delaying mail ballots. As early voting starts, that could be welcoming federal agents at polling locations.
While this shark hides from view of the public, we need to be aware of it and keep our eyes peeled. It could make the difference between a Democratic or Republican victory.
5. Ballot seizures
This is the great white shark haunting our elections. We have not seen it yet, but the sea shanties worry us. This is the shark we fear the most.
If ballot seizures happen, it will be in the days following the election. The Tina Peters of the world — MAGA election clerks colluding with Trump — will mobilize and cause mayhem at the local level. Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott will likely not stop them.
I worry because our attention will be divided. We will be fighting a lot of battles on a lot of different fronts. The sharks will attack before we see them.
But that does not mean we are not ready to fight back.
When the sharks attacked in 2020, I won 64 out of 65 cases. And we will win again.
The sharks may be circling, but they are no match for us.
New York Times, Kennedy to Allow Broad Use of Unapproved Peptide Injections, Christina Jewett, Oct. 28, 2026. In a unilateral declaration by the health secretary, several injections promoted by online influencers will become widely available. The F.D.A. had advised against the move.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Wednesday that he would allow widespread patient access to unapproved peptide injections made popular by internet influencers, sparking serious concern among drug safety experts.
The plan would bypass the most standard Food and Drug Administration safeguards for approving drugs, such as tests to see if the compounds work better than a placebo and whether they might cause cancer or birth defects. To do so, Mr. Kennedy announced “enforcement discretion,” meaning he will tacitly allow companies to produce the unproven injections without going through the usual review process.
Mr. Kennedy, who has said publicly that he has benefited from using peptides, propelled the matter forward, declaring on podcasts early this year that the F.D.A. would lift restrictions to widespread use.
But in a highly unusual turn of events, the document released Wednesday suggested that his action was unilateral and couched the decision as Mr. Kennedy’s alone. F.D.A. scientists previously advised against widespread use of the peptides, and none were present in at least one meeting Tuesday finalizing the policy.
“The secretary has determined that the policy advances patient choice and freedom while appropriately protecting patient safety,” the document posted on the H.H.S. website said.
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the new policy requires “patient-specific prescriptions, traceable ingredients, quality testing and safety reporting to hold compounders accountable and give patients an alternative to unregulated sellers.”
New York Times, Exclusive: Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Alaska’s Ballot, Kellen Browning, Oct. 28, 2026. Operatives aligned with Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, spent months recruiting candidates to peel votes from Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican.
In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.
The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.
This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.
The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.
The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy. But The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.ImageMary Peltola stands at a podium holding a small piece of paper in her hand and smiling.Ms. Peltola’s campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in the other Mr. Sullivan’s candidacy.Credit...Kerry Tasker/Reuters
The endeavor, which was internally called the ballot composition project, involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.
It also involved the Peltola campaign’s lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in Senate races across the country. From Washington to Anchorage, those advisers participated in regular conversations about the effort and even considered forming a new political party to draw conservatives onto the ballot.
Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.
“Alaskan voters need to know,” said Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired amid a staff shake-up in August, and agreed to a series of interviews with The Times since then. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”
Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the project, Ms. Rios said, but she was “definitely aware.”
The operation had impact. On Tuesday, Ms. Peltola will be the only Democrat on the ballot, facing off against the two Mr. Sullivans and a long-shot candidate named Gerald Heikes who was also recruited into the race, according to The Times’s reporting. Polls give Ms. Peltola a strong chance of winning.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win.
Both the Peltola campaign and the D.S.C.C. denied participating in efforts to recruit spoilers to the ballot in Alaska. Neither group addressed a detailed list of questions provided by The Times.
“The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign and did not recruit any candidates into the race,” the campaign wrote in a statement.
The D.S.C.C. sent a similar response, saying it had “no involvement” in recruiting Mr. Sullivan “or any other Republican candidate.”
This article is based on interviews over the past two months with 12 people who participated in or were told of the plan, or were would-be candidates that the team tried to recruit. The Times also obtained dozens of text messages that provided updates on the progress of the effort. The reporting included the extensive interviews with Ms. Rios, during which she shared details of the operation.
Last week, as The Times prepared to publish this article, Ms. Rios, who had been planning to file a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Peltola campaign, contacted The Times and said she wanted to take back her previous statements.
“As discussed on our call earlier today, I am confirming that I have retracted all statements made regarding the 2026 Alaska Senate Race in connection with any article you may or may not be writing,” Ms. Rios wrote. “I am not willing to be a source for any story in any capacity.”
It is rare for a source to seek to retract comments made in previous interviews, and The Times’s standards do not obligate reporters to comply with such requests. The Times had never agreed that those previous interviews could not be published, and informed Ms. Rios last week that they would be a part of this story.
New York Times, McMahon Spends $43,000 for New Furniture as She Looks to Close Her Department, Michael C. Bender, Oct. 28, 2026. The education secretary says her old furniture “cannot be configurationally or aesthetically integrated” into new office space.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, plans to spend $43,000 on new furniture for her government office, a work space makeover that comes as she lobbies Congress to shut down her department.
Ms. McMahon’s team has informed Congress that her current furniture is worn out and “cannot be configurationally or aesthetically integrated into the agency’s new office space,” according to Education Department records reviewed by The New York Times that have not been publicly disclosed.
A senior official at the Education Department said the costs included a new desk, conference table, chairs and other items. Ms. McMahon’s communications department did not respond to a request for a detailed breakdown of the $43,278.64 in expenses.
The education secretary, a former professional wrestling executive, announced in March that she was moving the department out of the seven-story, concrete-and-glass building in southwest Washington where federal education employees have worked since construction was completed in 1961.
The department’s new headquarters will occupy a smaller space, one block south, in a privately owned building that was once home to the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration closed last year.
Ms. McMahon has said that the move would save about $5 million in annual operating costs following “unprecedented progress in reducing the federal education footprint,” a reference to her work toward President Trump’s campaign promise to close the Education Department.
After this article was published, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the Senate’s education appropriations subcommittee, sent a letter to Ms. McMahon urging her to “reconsider this wasteful purchase.”
“The American people are sick of the corruption, sick of the waste and sick of the hypocrisy coming out of all corners of this administration,” Ms. Murray and Ms. Baldwin wrote.
Federal law requires the executive branch to operate the department. The Republican-controlled Congress has not approved legislation to close it, and the Senate’s education committee has advanced legislation to block the administration from transferring major Education Department offices to other agencies
Still, Ms. McMahon has supervised a systematic dismantling of her department during her nearly 20 months as education secretary, firing hundreds of workers and dispatching the department’s most significant functions to the Labor Department, Justice Department and other parts of the executive branch. Her decision to move special education services to the Health and Human Services Department has drawn sharp rebukes from advocates for disabled students.
The Education Department employs about 2,300 workers, according to federal work force data, down from about 4,100 at the start of Mr. Trump’s second term. In March, Ms. McMahon said 70 percent of the department’s existing headquarters was vacant.
In its new location, the department will occupy 80 percent less space than it did in its previous building, which has about 386,600 square feet of usable space, according to the General Services Administration, which manages federal property.
In response to questions about Ms. McMahon’s office purchases, Savannah Newhouse, the Education Department’s press secretary, said the agency was “saving taxpayers millions of dollars.”
“Believe it or not, just like in the private sector, new federal offices need places to sit, write and meet,” Ms. Newhouse said of the new furniture.
Rachel Gittleman, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,000 current and former Education Department workers, said Ms. McMahon’s furniture purchase was “incredibly wasteful.”
“It’s not only insulting to the civil servants trying to administer the Department of Education’s programs through two years of chaos but also to the students and parents depending on the department and to the taxpayers funding it,” Ms. Gittleman said.
During President Trump’s first term, several cabinet officials faced ethics and spending questions involving office furniture and costly renovations.
In 2017, Ben Carson, the housing secretary, planned to spend $31,500 on a custom mahogany dining room set for his office as his agency cut programs to support the homeless, elderly and poor. Mr. Carson ultimately canceled the purchase.
In 2018, Scott Pruitt resigned from the top job at the Environmental Protection Agency after facing heavy criticism over spending, including $43,000 on a secure, soundproof phone booth in his office.
The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, said the purchase broke the law because the E.P.A. hadn’t notified Congress of cumulative office expenditures exceeding $5,000. Congress has long included the cap on office redecorating to limit spending on executive office upgrades.
Ms. McMahon’s department notified Congress of her redecorating plans in September, according to the records The Times reviewed.
On her first day as education secretary, Ms. McMahon informed staff that their “final mission” was to help shutter the agency. But during Mr. Trump’s first term, the administration spent millions on renovating the education building to consolidate workers under one roof.
That remodeling cost nearly $50 million, which the administration justified at the time with a similar goal of saving money in the long run.
The first $36.7 million was budgeted to consolidate work spaces into a more modern open-concept floor plan and upgrade to the electrical and HVAC systems in 2019, according to G.S.A. records. The government funded another $12.5 million in 2020 to expand the open-concept plans to additional floors in the building.
U.S. Civil Rights
New York Times, Dolores Huerta, Labor Leader and Force for Civil Rights, Has Died, Robert D. McFadden, Oct. 28, 2026. She founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. In early 2026, she told The Times that she had been raped by him decades earlier. She was 96.
Dolores Huerta, who with Cesar Chavez founded what became the United Farm Workers and led strikes and boycotts in the 1960s and ’70s that unionized many California table-grape growers, changing laws and the lives of thousands of migrant laborers, died on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 96.
The cause of death was cancer, Erik Olvera, a spokesman for her family, said.
Ms. Huerta, who became a kind of Mexican American folk hero, depicted in murals and ballads, was the union’s vice president for nearly four decades and, until Mr. Chavez’s death in 1993, his second-in-command. He was the charismatic — and, it was later revealed, abusive — leader; she, the skilled organizer who coordinated walkouts and boycotts under a black Aztec eagle banner and negotiated pathbreaking contracts with agribusiness.
But there was a long-hidden dark side to her years by Mr. Chavez’s side. She was, by her account, raped by him — an assault she never spoke about publicly until early 2026, when she was interviewed by The New York Times as it was reporting on the extensive evidence that Mr. Chavez had also groomed and molested underage girls as young as 12.
“I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” Ms. Huerta told The Times. “I never
In addition, Ms. Rios’s interviews were consistent with The Times’s other reporting. She has not filed a lawsuit against the campaign.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Civil Discourse, Analysis: Another Really Bad Day in Court for Trump, Joyce Vance, right, Oct. 28, 2026. Today, word leaked out that a grand jury in the District of Columbia refused to indict Cassidy Hutchinson. There — if you need it — is the explanation for why the government used an information to charge Jim Comey, bypassing the grand jury. This was the third attempt to prosecute Comey, and the case was apparently too weak for even this Justice Department to think it could get it past a grand jury.
It used to be unusual for a grand jury to refuse to indict. Now it’s becoming increasingly common, and the government’s new move to bypass grand jury scrutiny altogether speaks volumes about the quality of the revenge docket cases DOJ is willing to bring to please the president.
The fact that Comey is charged in an information, and not an indictment, has legal significance. As a reminder, here’s the difference: An indictment is a criminal charge issued by a grand jury that hears the prosecutor’s evidence and makes a finding that there is probable cause to support the charges. An information is a document drafted by prosecutors and signed only by them. It looks similar to an indictment, but at the top it reads something along the lines of “The U.S. Attorney charges” instead of “The Grand Jury Charges.”
Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 7(a) generally requires an indictment for felony cases, and Rule 7(b) permits prosecution by information if the defendant waives indictment. The Fifth Amendment requires the government to go to a grand jury to charge a federal felony. Informations are used when a defendant has cut a plea deal with prosecutors and agreed to waive indictment. Comey did not. So this is a “waiverless information.” Prosecutors, as those of you who heard Preet Bharara’s and my podcast discussion today on the Insider podcast know, could not proceed with this case without taking it to the grand jury for indictment first.
Comey is charged with two counts of violating 18 U.S.C. § 793, which covers crimes involving receipt, possession, transmission, etc., of National Defense Information. (If it sounds familiar, it might be because it was one of the charges against Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case.) Here’s where it gets a little tricky legally. Prosecutors have said they filed the information to stop the statute of limitations, which was going to run out the very day they filed. Prosecutors must charge on or before the last date in that statutory period, or it’s too late, and they lose their ability to charge.
The statute of limitations for this particular crime is unusual. It’s ten years. The general federal limitations statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3282(a), is five years for non-capital offenses: “Except as otherwise expressly provided by law, no person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished for any offense, not capital, unless the indictment is found or the information is instituted within five years next after such offense shall have been committed.” (emphasis added) But for espionage crimes, like the ones Comey is charged with, it’s ten years. Here’s the statutory language: “An indictment for any violation of title 18, United States Code, section 792, 793, or 794, other than a violation constituting a capital offense, may be found at any time within ten years next after such violation shall have been committed.” You can see the difference in the language I put in italics. For the first five years, an indictment or an information will do. But from years five through ten, Congress expressly provides that only an indictment will qualify.
Comey’s lawyers explain how the courts should view this kind of language in the laws Congress passes. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in Russello v. United States that when Congress includes specific language in one law but omits it from another, there is a presumption that Congress meant for the laws to be different. In other words, the use of “indictment” and “information” both in one law, but only “indictment” in the other, is not unintentional. The Court reinforced that rule in 2014 in Loughrin v. United States, where it directed courts to interpret laws by giving meaning to the language that is used in them and avoid construction of the laws in ways that treat Congress’ choice of words as meaningless. So, when Congress only uses the word “indictment” in a law, as it did here, it means it, and an information does not ring the bell to keep the statute of limitations from running out.
The government relies on a trio of cases that allow an information to keep the statute-of-limitations from running out. But those cases were governed by the general five-year statute of limitations rule that specifically designates both “indictments” and “informations.” None involved the ten-year statute of limitations that applies to the Espionage Act. And that’s a key difference that makes the government’s cases inapplicable here. Comey’s defense team has the better of the argument by far, and it would be unsurprising to see the judge dismiss the case. In the reply brief that they filed tonight, Comey’s team put it succinctly: “Here, the government seeks to take advantage of the special extended ten-year limitations period in Section 19, but it has not secured the legal instrument that Section 19 requires: an indictment. Instead, it filed a waiverless information at the ten-year deadline. That information does not satisfy Section 19’s explicit requirements and must be dismissed as time-barred.”
Friday morning, Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, will hold a hearing in the case. We’ll be watching closely.
The government also had a tough time at a hearing before District Judge David Carter over its California gambit to interfere with the vote after the Ninth Circuit declined to hear its appeal. Judge Carter appointed a special master to investigate the process DOJ used for determining who on California’s rolls is a suspected noncitizen voter. That process will permit him to develop a record to support whatever ruling he makes; he did not rule today.
But the judge did admonish the government, “This court thinks it would be wise that any threats to state or local officials should cease immediately.” That’s judge-speak for “you’re in deep trouble.” I don’t think it’s an empty threat here. Judge Carter is 82 years old. Bill Clinton appointed him to the federal bench. He’s been a judge in California’s Central District, which includes Los Angeles, since 1998. Judge Carter is a former U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. If the Justice Department thinks it’s going to push him around, I suspect it’s in for a rude awakening. He closed the hearing by promising a decision tomorrow.
My Brennan Center colleague Wendy Weiser got this one just right
We all owe respect and appreciation to our friends and neighbors who are running our elections. It’s a good thing Judge Carter spoke up on their behalf. It’s too bad Republican elected officials lack the courage to do the same.
A federal judge disqualified Bill Essayli, Trump’s stand-in as U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, from overseeing several cases. Essayli is technically the First Assistant in the office, but they Judge found that he is acting as a U.S. Attorney in violation of the Vacancies Reform Act. The order is stayed for a week to give the government time to appeal. Former DOJ employee “EagleEdMartin” on Twitter, who the Senate declined to confirm as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, reposted the news, writing,
Defiance.org, Opinion: Under Trump, FBI agents admit they're being asked to perform “witch hunts,” Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 28, 2026. The White House continues to demand revenge against Trump's foes. But agents, judges, and grand juries are pushing back.Something remarkable happened in a U.S. courtroom yesterday. An FBI agent blurted out the truth about Trump’s politicized investigations.
That agent took the stand in Washington, D.C. to defend a case that he admitted his own office didn’t believe was legitimate. Under cross-examination, Special Agent Bryan Witt acknowledged that the prosecution of two former FBI officials (accused of lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop) was commonly regarded inside his office as a “witch hunt.” He also confirmed who had ordered it: FBI Director Kash Patel, who issued the directive the day that Trump himself demanded a probe.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is to the FBI’s case. It’s not like Special Agent Witt’s words were a leak from some anonymous source. He said it under oath, and he’s the very same agent who filed the criminal complaint on behalf of the FBI in the first place, alleging that two ex-FBI officials misled Congress about the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, something those two individuals vehemently deny. Under cross-examination, Witt confessed to worries that the whole thing looked “political.”
Let me step back for just a moment because two things happened yesterday that are historically significant.
The first is that Donald Trump’s Justice Department has shown, once again, that it will not relent in its campaign to prosecute the president’s perceived enemies. The second is that the American people, in the form of federal agents, grand jurors, and judges, are refusing to go along with it.
This duality was shown last night with breaking news about Cassidy Hutchinson. A federal grand jury in Washington declined to indict her for the testimony she gave the January 6th committee about Trump’s conduct that day. Prosecutors were attempting to charge her with lying to Congress. Yet when they brought in a panel of ordinary citizens, as a grand jury, those citizens refused to accept the facts of the government’s case. They said “no.”
Grand juries almost never do this. The old line is that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. Yesterday, the sandwich gave the middle finger.
I didn’t know Cassidy well in the first Trump administration. She started working in the White House just a few months before I resigned in protest. But we share plenty of former colleagues, including several who have since spoken out against Trump, and I’ve never heard anyone question her character. She told the truth about what she saw on January 6th at enormous personal cost, and the White House’s response, four years later, is to try to put her in prison for it.
The grand jurors who listened to that case understood exactly what they were being asked to do. And they refused.
Then there’s the case I mentioned above, against ex-FBI agents Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides. Unlike Cassidy, I know them well. We worked closely together on protecting the security of our elections from foreign interference, when Nikki was deputy assistant director and Brad was section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. These are two people who spent their careers in the shadows, dedicating their lives to protecting Americans from threats most of us won’t hear about for decades.
They’re among the most honorable public servants I have ever worked with. I mean that. And their reputations among other FBI agents are sterling. When the charges dropped last week, I was gobsmacked. I texted a former top FBI leader the news, and his response was the same as mine: Those two are the best of the best.
Last week, the Justice Department charged them with lying to Congress in 2023 about what they knew of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Then, in the middle of the night before their hearing, prosecutors filed a “superseding complaint” tacking on an obstruction charge, without bothering to get a judge’s approval. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui was not amused. He refused to sign off on the new complaint, called the maneuver unusual, and reminded prosecutors that if they want to charge a case like this, it has to go to a grand jury.
Given what grand juries in Washington have been doing lately, the department might want to think about that.
The whole case couldn’t be more profane. The administration is pouring the resources of the FBI and the Justice Department into a six-year-old grievance about a laptop. Meanwhile, a new book excerpted in Vanity Fair alleges that Jared Kushner, the president’s own son-in-law and Middle East envoy, had access to undisclosed foreign bank accounts holding hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati money, intended to buy influence inside the U.S. government. (Kushner of course flatly denies the allegations, says they are fabrications, and has threatened to sue.)
Ask yourself which story deserves the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice that you pay for. The government’s answer tells you everything you need to know about the DOJ we actually have.
In the end, I believe Nikki and Brad will be vindicated. But they should never, ever have been dragged into a courtroom in the first place. The fact that the lead agent assigned to their case openly confessed that his FBI colleagues called it a “witch hunt” should be enough for all Americans to see this for what it really is.
Despite the pushback, we all know Trump will keep trying. He’s made clear that the Justice Department’s mandate is to punish the people who crossed him.
But yesterday showed us that his intimidation isn’t working anymore. Grand jurors are saying “no.” Judges are saying “no.” Even the FBI’s own agents are sitting on the witness stand and refusing to toe the party line. The American people are done with this lawless circus, and they’re saying so — inside and outside the system.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: How Jeanine Pirro Offered Up Evidence to Indict Kash Patel, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 28, 2026. Weaponized Justice Department.
Back in 2020, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides worked hard to prevent foreign governments from tampering in US elections.
Jeanine Pirro and Todd Blanche and Kash Patel were so determined to ensure nothing like that happens between now and Tuesday — to ensure that no one at the FBI would reject frivolous claims of election fraud by criminalizing doing so — that they flubbed the charges they filed against Floris and Benavides last week.
Assuming frivolous claims of election fraud and hacks like this one Kash failed to prevent and ginned up political violence don’t prevent voters from ousting the GOP next Tuesday, DOJ may have caused serious problems for themselves.
I’ll explain the proof that’s what Kash and the others were doing, warning FBI agents that they will be prosecuted if they reject frivolous claims of election fraud.
But first I want to explain how the attorneys for Benavides and Floris used the preliminary hearing to collect evidence that will surely be used in lawsuits and, hopefully, impeachment or criminal indictments in the not too distant future.
It’s not yet clear what shenanigans Trump will attempt to prevent Jamie Raskin from getting a gavel in January — though it is clear these charges are part of that.
Yet because Pirro is such a reckless, hubristic dumbass, the lawyer representing a goodly number of the FBI Agents Kash Patel has purged turned it on its head, into an opportunity to lay out Kash Patel’s crimes.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: The truth is closing in on Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 27, 2026. Just before 6:30 Central Time tonight, Donald Trump emerged from the parting curtains as “God Bless the USA” blasted from the speakers. In his hand, and up his entire arm, were red-and-white Make America Great Again hats that he stopped to throw at the audience on his way to the podium. Once there, he spoke for an hour and forty-five minutes, repeating the same stories he has been saying for weeks to distract us from the damning news stories that were just released.
He focused on important matters like telling the audience at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, in Texas, “I don’t like handsome young men.” When he heard a sound outside the building while he was talking, he stopped mid-word and asked, “Could that be Iran dropping something? Did you hear that? A lot of noise going on,” before telling the people in the audience that although everything is more expensive, we are in another never-ending war, and masked men are grabbing people off of our streets; he told them, “We are right now in the golden age of America. This is the golden age.”
But none of that could distract from the reality of what is happening around him. Over the past few days, we have learned even more horrifying details about what Donald Trump has spent the past decade trying to keep hidden from the American people and just how far he will go to protect himself from accountability and to keep unchecked power.
Yesterday, Jamie Raskin and the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a very detailed investigative report about Donald Trump’s connection to his friend Jeffrey’s trafficking ring. They titled the report, “We Have Certain Things in Common, Jeffrey”: The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up. It includes interviews with survivors, FBI records, and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In the report, investigators examine evidence and accounts involving 11 women connected to Trump and Epstein’s abuse network, with 5 of them directly accusing Trump himself of horrific assaults while with Epstein. A former Miss Switzerland, Beatrice Keul, accused Trump of violently attacking her in 1993 at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Committee staff interviewed her about the alleged assault, and there are other women in the report who describe their own encounters that suggest that Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell attempted to traffic them to Trump. It was very difficult to read through these accounts and imagine what these women must have experienced, and even more so to think about what it must be like for them to watch the man they have accused of these terrifying assaults be elected president of the United States.
The report also raises questions about whether Donald Trump and Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent, longtime Trump associate, and past U.S. special envoy who was just removed from that position earlier this month, worked with Epstein to traffic and abuse young women in the 90s.
It also alleges that the Department of Justice has been trying to cover up what happened by shutting down investigations and keeping evidence from the public. One of the most disturbing allegations is that Attorney General Todd Blanche personally stopped Ghislaine Maxwell from talking about a woman who connected Trump to Epstein’s abuse. If this is all true, it directly connects the very people who are supposed to investigate and prosecute these crimes with working to protect the president of the United States instead.
Every time we think we have seen the worst of what these files contain and what actually happened, the next thing we learn is even more disturbing. When this is all said and done, and the investigations actually happen, and all the pieces are put together, we may very well look back and see how everything that is happening today can be tied back to what happened all those years ago. This is what Trump and his enablers are trying to bury, and why the rallies have gotten louder and more absurd. It’s working too. Most legacy media outlets and journalists aren’t covering it because it can be dangerous to do so. Just look at what these brave survivors have been put through.
While Trump was on stage in Lubbock tonight throwing hats and cracking jokes about handsome men, Flavio Bolsonaro, the far-right son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who lost Sunday’s presidential election, was, according to CNN, on his way to Florida. This was after Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered him to surrender his passports within twenty-four hours as part of a money-laundering investigation. He didn’t comply, and his passports were canceled, yet he left the country anyway, seeking refuge in the US. The Trump administration confirmed that the United States would issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family.
The United States of America is now functioning as a safe house for authoritarians who lose elections and flee criminal investigations. This is who Donald Trump aligns himself with and where he wants this country to go.
Before Bolsonaro left, he had challenged the results and tried to have them annulled, and we also learned that Donald Trump may be planning the same thing if his party loses in the midterms. In a report published today by The New York Times, and confirmed by multiple other outlets, election officials across the country are preparing for possible federal interference in next week’s midterm elections. They are training poll workers on federal laws that restrict armed federal agents from appearing near voting locations. They are practicing responses to federal attempts to seize ballots or voting machines, including preparing legal documents and emergency court challenges that can be filed immediately. The Justice Department plans to deploy approximately one thousand election monitors, an unusually large federal monitoring operation, and states including California and Minnesota are preparing to observe those monitors. A group of approximately ten current and former national security officials has been privately advising officials in ten states on how to protect their own elections from their own federal government.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told The New York Times, “This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections.” She added that the federal government now appeared adversarial toward the states.
A separate Associated Press report published yesterday says tens of thousands of volunteers have been trained to monitor polling places and report possible intimidation or disruptions. While this sounds alarming, and it is, it is also very encouraging. We should not be in a position in the United States of America where we have to go to such great lengths to make sure that our federal government doesn’t interfere with our elections, but the fact that all of these people are stepping up to protect our right to vote reminds us that there are far more people willing to protect our democracy than those trying to destroy it.
There was another concerning news story today. Reuters reported that the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) electronic filing system was taken offline following attempted hacking, just seven days before the midterms. The FEC confirmed the outage but did not publicly say what caused it. While the FEC doesn’t run elections or count votes, it tracks the money flowing into political campaigns. With new reports unable to be filed online, Americans could be left in the dark about who is spending money to influence the election and where that money is coming from.
I know this is a lot. We are being inundated with disturbing news at every turn. When we step back and look at these stories and how they are all connected, they all come back to Donald Trump and how he really is ruling through fear and intimidation, with very little concern for the law or the people he is supposed to serve. A president who shelters people who try to overturn elections also tries to overturn elections. A convicted felon who has also been found liable for a horrific assault now faces even more serious accusations. The only way he can survive is to keep spewing lies and distractions with absolutely no impulse control whatsoever.
Donald Trump is vulnerable, and we have to keep the pressure on him, especially after the midterms. I know that between the nonstop political ads on TV, the ugly attacks some candidates have launched against their opponents, and the constant lies and cruelty coming from MAGA Republicans, we are simply exhausted and starting to tune it all out. I understand that. Sitting here day after day, night after night, I sometimes question whether I will be able to keep going, and I know others who are doing this work are feeling that too. I know many of you care deeply, but every day feels like déjà vu, and we all could use an escape from the constant barrage of lies, threats, and cruelty.
When I feel that way, I remind myself why I write these posts, and maybe that’s why you are still in this fight too, and part of the resistance. I don’t think that any of us are going to change the minds of Donald Trump’s most devoted followers, at least not right now. But we are here because we care about our country and the people in it. We care about how this is impacting the entire planet, and we want better for future generations.
Sometimes, knowing we aren’t alone in feeling this way helps us find the strength to keep going. I write each night for the people who see what is happening and sometimes feel completely alone. For those of us who are exhausted and frustrated and angry, but who know in our bones that we cannot stay quiet in the face of what is being done to our country. I write because beneath all of the propaganda and the lies, the truth is still the truth, no matter what Donald Trump or his enablers say or do.
I write because I hope these nightly posts will become a lasting record of what happened and how close we came to losing our democracy. But maybe even more importantly, how we all looked at what was happening, stood up to the authoritarian in the White House, even while under great threat, and took back our country from this evil takeover. Maybe decades from now, these posts and all the comments will be seen, and someone will recognize the signs of another rise of authoritarianism and see them for what they are. Maybe people will rise up earlier and stop it before this same damage can be done.
Above all else, maybe it’s enough for us to be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye, and know that we could have stayed quiet and instead we chose to speak out and take a stand.
Seven days from now, we have the chance to change the direction of this country, and thanks to thousands and thousands of people who are working around the clock right now to plan for whatever Trump throws at us, we will still be able to have our voices heard and our votes counted. History will remember how we faced this moment. It will remember that we never gave up on ourselves or our country. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
Picture of the day: We dropped our ballots off this afternoon. We had planned to do it a couple of days ago, but other things came up, which is a good reminder to vote as early as possible because life has a way of throwing unexpected things our way, and in this election, we can’t afford to miss the chance to have our voices heard. I realized after we left that I forgot to take a picture of us dropping off our ballots like I normally do, but I did take a picture of the view from the drop-off location, so at least we have that to remember this day.
More On Artificial Intelligence, U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Hack Apocalypse Now, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 28, 2026. The dark side of AI is already here.
Like everyone who has been paying attention, I have worries about the possible negative effects from AI. And it’s a long laundry list of worries. One, there is the technology’s anti-labor bias, which may accelerate our downward spiral into oligarchy. Next, there is the fact that the data center boom is crowding out investment in almost everything else, yet data centers employ hardly any workers. Third, I’m worried about the high probability that AI looks like a bubble, particularly given the sheer size of the AI boom. If it is indeed a bubble, it will inevitably burst and will probably plunge the U.S. economy back into a liquidity trap due to its size.
Oh, and Anthropic tells me that AI may well wipe out the human race, which is why I should invest in the company’s IPO.
But I guess I haven’t been talking enough to the technologists, because I wasn’t aware until last week of the strong possibility that AI will render the internet as we know it unusable — not at some point in the distant future, but in a matter of months.
It has already started. Reuters reports:
Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems.
Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes to vulnerabilities that had been lurking in their software for years until they were uncovered using AI, saying all users were “encouraged to update immediately.”
With tech firms warning that some hackers were already exploiting the flaws, government agencies across Europe were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.
Because a fix is now public and artificial intelligence tools are able to reverse engineer the bug with little effort, experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers jumped to get ahead of the updates.
AI was powering a “race to exploit,” said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP:Black. He said the next step was the “mass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet.
And this is just the beginning of what Zvi Mowshowitz calls The Hackening. Two days later, Reuters reported that:
Advances in artificial intelligence have uncovered a stream of new software vulnerabilities that are almost certain to trigger more disruption along the lines of the outages that percolated across global government websites this week, according to seven cybersecurity professionals who spoke to Reuters.
It quoted one expert as saying “I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling.”
Azeem Ashar, whose Substack Exponential View has been one of my main guides to what is happening with AI, calls what happened last week “The internet’s Wuhan moment” — as in the emergence of the coronavirus that caused the Covid pandemic, which killed millions and also temporarily plunged the whole world economy into a deep slump.
I’m not a technologist, but here’s how I understand the problem: Websites run on complex, multi-layered software that, because of its sheer complexity, inevitably contains security flaws that bad actors could potentially exploit. Worse, much of the software is old — PHP dates from the early 1990s — and was hence designed in an era in which modern hacking techniques didn’t exist.
And AI models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful hacking tools. Merely human evildoers may lack the time, patience and attention to detail to go over old code line by line, finding security flaws that may have gone unnoticed for decades. AI models suffer from no such limitations. Institutions that learn about security threats may be able to install patches that block them — but the very act of disseminating a patch gives hackers the information they need to go after institutions that didn’t apply those patches immediately.
And Azhar tells us that regulating AI by requiring “safety training” — instructions to the models that deter destructive actions — will be far less effective than one might hope. Why? Because such training is relatively easy to “abliterate,” which means reversing a few key prompts in a way that undoes most of the safety training.
So what are we going to do? I don’t think we’ll be going back to carbon paper and filing cabinets. For the most part we probably won’t even have to rely on air-gapped local networks that are fully cut off from the internet. Azhar thinks that we’ll move instead to a system of partially closed domains, like AOL in its early years or the SABRE system used by travel agents, which are difficult but not impossible for people and institutions outside those domains to access.
Such closed domains are often called “walled gardens,” but I’d suggest that a better analogy is “gated communities,” like the one my late parents lived in toward the end of their lives. People who didn’t live in their community could visit them, but only if my parents had provided their names to the staff manning the gate. It worked — they could invite friends from outside over — but it was annoying and time-consuming compared with life outside the gates, where everyone could come and go freely.
Similarly, a digital society that imposes annoying security restrictions and checks but is much less vulnerable to AI-powered hacking should be workable. But security will come at a cost. How much of a cost?
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I won’t share here, suggest that the advent of the open internet raised GDP by around 10 percent. A more secure system of gated digital communities will mean giving up only part of that gain — in the long run.
But I’m much more worried about the short run, because our whole economy is currently designed to work with an open web. Suppose, for example, that we’re forced to revert to the old system in which you had to physically visit a travel agent with a secure SABRE link to buy plane tickets. I remember that world, and it wasn’t horrible. But most of the travel agents and offices that used to perform that function are gone and can’t be instantly conjured back into existence. And you have to imagine that problem occurring all across the economy.
Again, this isn’t a hypothetical future risk. It’s happening as you read this.
Just the other day AI enthusiasts were talking about how their miraculous technology would soon generate 10 or 15 percent a year economic growth. That was always silly. But now there’s a very real prospect that for the next few years AI, by empowering bad guys and forcing us to suddenly adapt to new threats, will make us poorer.
More Global News
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 27, 2026 [Global Election Results, Implications], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 28, 2026. On Sunday a student-led democratic movement ousted Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, a key ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, from power. Today Serbian TV started its news program by apologizing to viewers. “For years, we failed to fulfill our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask necessary questions. We owe our viewers an apology.”
Also on Sunday, right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro lost to leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Despite what appears to have been the restriction by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, of social media accounts that promoted Lula and its promotion of pro-Bolsonaro accounts, Lula pulled out a victory.
Tiago Rogero and Tom Phillips of the Guardian reported that Lula’s victory came, in large part, from street protesters who helped different factions come together against Bolsonaro and from Lula’s supporters’ use of social media to override Meta’s restrictions and make pro-Lula content perform well on social media. Lula ally André Janones created a WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” that organized more than 10 million followers to push back against Bolsonaro content and boost Lula.
Three weeks ago, many observers thought Bolsonaro would win the election. Bolsonaro and his supporters had cultivated the idea they were allied with Trump in fighting off a perceived communist threat. A victory for Bolsonaro would help to spread the idea of Trump’s control over the Western Hemisphere as he helped to install right-wing leaders across Latin America. But in the end, the vote was not close. Lula supporters organized voters, explained what social media was suppressing, helped folks get to the polls, and Lula won by more than 4 million votes.
Initially, Bolsonaro said that he would not accept defeat and would ask for the result of the election to be annulled. In that refusal to accept the results of an election, Bolsonaro echoed his father, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who in 2023 launched a coup to remain in power after voters elected Lula. The elder Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year sentence for his role in that coup attempt.
As Megan Messerly, Daniel Desrochers, Ari Hawkins, and Phelim Kine of Politico reported, the younger Bolsonaro had the support of MAGA insiders in the U.S., who claimed the Brazilian election had been stolen. On Sunday, Trump himself told reporters that Brazil’s election “looked so, so corrupt, so terrible.”
But on Monday, Trump suggested to reporters he would not intervene in the election, and as Michael Birnbaum, Marina Dias, and Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post reported, minutes later, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. A Bolsonaro advisor told the reporters: “Flávio has given up. He’s terrified. He is worried his father will die in jail, that he himself will be jailed this week and that he may have a long prison term ahead.”
Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, to surrender his passport and stay in the country. Bolsonaro posted a video saying he would comply and that he had never thought of leaving Brazil. But today he went missing. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled his passports and began to look for him.
Bolsonaro and his family turned up this afternoon in the United States, where a senior State Department official told reporters the State Department would offer the family visas to enter the country. Bolsonaro’s allies cheered that he would lead Brazil’s right-wing opposition to Lula from the United States.
Meanwhile, concerns are circulating about a manipulation of information in the U.S. before the midterm election, similar to what happened in Brazil. As Kevin Frey of MS NOW reported today, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are demanding that Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg explain why the main Instagram account of No Kings was suspended earlier this month during the October 17 No Kings rallies around the country that were encouraging Americans to vote. The representatives wrote that the “apparent” act of “corporate censorship of political speech raise[s] serious concerns about Meta’s dedication to ensuring free and fair elections.”
The representatives dismissed Meta’s explanation that the outage was caused by an automated action triggered “when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies.” Garcia and Raskin wrote that such an explanation strained “public credulity,” and noted that Meta appeared to have interfered in Brazil’s election.
“Technical glitches occur,” the congressmen wrote, “but at Meta they are happening frequently and, curiously, seem to disproportionately impact the political opponents of President Trump and his authoritarian political alliances.” Garcia and Raskin noted that the interests of Zuckerberg and Meta in government contracts mean they have a financial incentive to cooperate with Trump.
In addition to the suppression of information, disinformation is also a concern. As George Chidi of the Guardian reported today, disinformation, driven by AI, is running rampant on social media in the U.S. in the runup to the midterm election. Social media companies reduced their efforts to stop the flood of disinformation in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Chidi writes, and now official government sources like the Department of Homeland Security sometimes amplify the lies.
Trump and his allies have always relied on a false narrative to gain and then to keep power. They adopted a strategy developed by Russian political theorists to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to an authoritarian.
Political strategists who were key to the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation “political technology.” They perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Trump ally Steve Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to distinguish what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.
Trump’s allegiance to Putin continues to be on display. Today journalists reported the administration is considering lifting sanctions on Russia’s multibillion-dollar government investment fund. Anton Troianovski of the New York Times explained that the Biden administration placed sanctions on the fund immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, cutting it off from the West’s financial system. Lifting those sanctions would be an economic boon to Russia in the midst of its war on Ukraine.
Peter Andringa, Chris Campbell, and Eenee Purevdorj of the Financial Times reported today that Donald Trump Jr. took a hunting trip in Mongolia this August with Umar Kremlev, the man who helped to finance Don Jr.’s wedding party in May. Kremlev is a boxing promoter with a criminal record of extortion and battery, and is close to Putin. The journalists called the relationship between Trump and Kremlev “remarkable.”
On the trip, Jr. shot and killed an endangered sheep prized for its large horns. According to the Financial Times, this was at least the third Altai argali he has killed.
Tonight Angie Nixon, the Democratic state representative who is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida wrote in a social media post addressed to Meta that her campaign’s Instagram page “was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from” a “get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community.”
“This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community,” she wrote. “With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.”
She continued: “The stakes are too high to take down pages encouraging people to vote in seven days, Meta & Instagram.”
New York Times, Israel’s Election: When Will We Know Who Will Be Prime Minister? Ephrat Livni, Updated Oct. 28, 2026. Most votes were expected to be counted by Wednesday, but forming a government could take weeks of negotiations — or require another election.
Israelis turned out in huge numbers on Tuesday to choose their next government. But with exit polls suggesting no clear winner, it could take weeks, months or longer to determine who will be prime minister.
The exit polls showed that the right-wing alliance of the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the opposition bloc led by a former military chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, were nearly even, with neither in a firm position to form a government. Most votes were expected to be counted by Wednesday, though it could take longer to reach a final tally.
In Israel’s parliamentary democracy, voters choose a party or alliance, and the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset, does not automatically become prime minister. Forming a government could take lengthy negotiations among the various factions — and if those fail, the country could face another election.
Turnout nationally was 77.7 percent when the polls closed, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee, the highest since 1999.
Both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Eisenkot struck triumphant notes in speeches to supporters. Mr. Eisenkot declared that “the public opted for change,” while Mr. Netanyahu said that his party, Likud, had emerged with the most seats and called for “a strong right-wing government.”
Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population, voted in large numbers with the stated desire to oust the far right. Exit polls pointed to a strong showing by Arab parties, putting them in a position to play a possibly decisive role in forming a government. Mansour Abbas, the leader of Raam, an Islamist party, told a television interviewer on Tuesday night that the turnout showed that “frustration and despair” in Israel’s Arab society had “turned to hope.”
No single party has ever won a majority on its own in Israel. That means parties have to negotiate to forge coalitions that can reach a majority in the Knesset of at least 61 lawmakers.
Historically, it has taken about 20 to 100 days to form a government, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
The initial exit polls do not always give an accurate sense of the final results, so it may be some time before the picture becomes clear. For example, exit polls do not reflect the votes of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who cast ballots at special polling stations, including on military bases and in hospitals, prisons and embassies abroad.
Some of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies have floated a unity government with Mr. Eisenkot and other centrists that could keep him in power. But that would carry a heavy political cost for Mr. Eisenkot, who has said Mr. Netanyahu is unfit to lead.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Back to the Future, William Kristol, right, Oct. 28, 2026. In yesterday’s elections in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and the opposition bloc both seem to have failed to win a clear governing majority. So there will be complicated and confusing maneuvering over the coming weeks and probably months, and it’s unclear who will end up as the next prime minister.
What we know is that Israel is pretty evenly divided between (to oversimplify) a nationalist, religious, and authoritarian-inclined coalition on one side, and a liberal, secular, and democratically-inclined coalition on the other. We are familiar with this division: Red America and Blue America. And we’re also familiar with the fact that the two “parties,” to use the term broadly, are pretty evenly balanced. That seems to be the case around the world. One side, one party, prevails—but then loses. The struggle is not resolved once and for all.
Here’s the lesson I take from this: We are not getting beyond nationalism, or nativism, or populism, or authoritarianism, any time soon. We can defeat these forces at times, maybe even most of the time and in most places—and it’s very important to do so! But such impulses, such beliefs, such movements are not going away. Neither, as events this year in Hungary and Serbia remind us, are the forces of democratic liberalism.
So “normalcy” is no longer what it was for much of the last half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first: a party system, consisting of two or more mainstream parties, basically committed to a system of liberal democracy, with extremists on the fringe but rarely able to acquire real power. We were fortunate, in many parts of the world, to enjoy such a happy situation in recent decades. But there’s no evidence we’re getting back to that anytime soon.
What we seem to be getting back to is the nineteenth century. Then politics tended to be centered on the fight between liberals (broadly speaking), and illiberals or anti-liberals. That struggle, and the various victories and defeats of each side, defined the history of many nations throughout that era. We thought for a while that we’d moved beyond that. We were wrong.
It’s important in such a circumstance 1) for the liberals to win more often than they lose, and 2) for liberals to succeed in establishing and strengthening alternate power centers within the government and in the broader society so that one authoritarian victory isn’t the end of the story, but allows for a subsequent liberal victory.
One could say much the same thing about international affairs. It seemed for a while that a “rules-based international order” had replaced power politics. But to the degree that was even true, it was temporary. It now turns out that the two views of the world—the liberal and the predatory, to oversimplify again—are in a contest for supremacy, and that neither party clearly has the upper hand. The bad news is that the Putins of the world aren’t going away. Nor is Putinism. The good news is that the Zelenskys of the world are fighting back.
So we can no longer assume, in 2026, that liberal democracy is the norm, and that occasional authoritarian threats can be disposed of quickly or with finality. We are engaged in an ongoing contest, and one that seems pretty evenly matched. A couple of days ago I quoted James Madison on “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” It was the struggle of Madison’s epoch. It will be the struggle of ours, as well.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Break them up! On Receipts, MARK CUBAN joins CATHERINE RAMPELL and goes nuclear on America’s healthcare giants.QUICK HITS
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).
FLÁVIO FLIES THE COOP: A few days ago, Brazil’s Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president and convicted coupster Jair Bolsonaro, seemed on the brink of taking power himself. Yesterday, on the heels of his shock loss to incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro fled the country.
The former candidate was not supposed to leave. Although he had not been charged with a crime, Brazilian police had asked him to surrender his passports amid a money-laundering investigation into one of his associates. Instead, Bolsonaro split—crossing the border into Argentina, then boarding a plane bound for the United States.
Typically, the Trump administration has not been crazy about Latino men showing up unexpectedly at the U.S. border. But the State Department told reporters that it would issue visas to Bolsonaro and his family. It’s nice to have a guy on the inside.
ANOTHER ENEMY ESCAPES: Donald Trump has suffered a lot of defeats in his first two years back in office, but none more stinging than his near-total failure to bring successful criminal charges against the enemies he’s desperate to punish. Still, he seems determined to keep trying, no matter how slim the odds of success. Yesterday brought another clunker: A federal grand jury in D.C. declined to sign off on an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide and key witness to the January 6th Committee. Here’s the New York Times:
Some Justice Department prosecutors had been deeply skeptical that there was a case to be made against Ms. Hutchinson for lying to Congress. They had concluded that it would be difficult to win a conviction against her.
But in an unusual arrangement, the investigation was directed to the department’s civil rights division, which typically focuses on issues like police violence and election integrity. The civil rights division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump loyalist who has effectively reoriented the unit to align with Mr. Trump’s agenda, including by extracting agreements from elite universities that were favorable to the administration.
It was once rare for grand jurors to rebuff prosecutors and turn down a request for an indictment, given that the Justice Department has traditionally sought criminal charges only in cases it expects to win. But such failures have become more common for the department under Mr. Trump, who has pushed prosecutors to seek indictments even in cases in which evidence is lacking.
As always: Utterly insane that Trump is this hell-bent on punishing former junior staffers who “betrayed” him; extremely satisfying that he continues to fail. Read the whole thing.
Oct. 27
Top Headlines
The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack. "When Trump Attacks Our Elections, We Will Have No Excuse": Democracy Docket.Special Reports: More On This Week's 11 Rape Allegations Against Trump
The Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The Trumpstein Sex Trafficking Network, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer,
Oct. 27, 2026. The major points and players contained in the House Judiciary Committee’s Minority Report.
and Noel Sims, Oct. 27, 2026. A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats contains new details about the Trump-Epstein relationship — and an alleged cover-up. Oct. 27, 2026. House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that new evidence is strong enough for Trump to be investigated by a grand jury for Epstein-related sex crimes.
Oct 26, 2026. Host Michael Popok reports on a devastating new 53-page report issued by the House Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Jamie Raskin that -- based on new evidence never disclosed before from sex abuse survivors of Trump -- Trump committed sex abuse alongside Epstein in dozens in cases. The Report calls for the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to go after Trump and others.Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.Special Report: Former Trump Appointee Launches "Corruption'" Documentary
Oct. 27, 2026. Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.Trump Continues KowTows To Putin
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s envoys, with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, in Moscow last month (Ramil Sitdikov photo via Reuters).
News Roundups
right, Oct. 27, 2026. It’s Tuesday. You know what that means, right? We are ONE WEEK out from the midterms. Trump’s morning has been a mess from start to finish, and his allies have been going down, one by one.Throw salt. Cross your fingers.Oct. 27, 2026. Election Day is one week away, and today’s news shows why the stakes have never been higher. Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with a Kremlin-linked oligarch who helped pay for his wedding celebrations. Former counterintelligence officials are sounding the alarm, and Trump’s Justice Department won’t investigate.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Oct. 27, 2026. Donald Trump really wants to see James Comey go to jail, and he’s not about to let a little thing like “Comey never committing any crimes” stop him from trying. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Comey for a preposterous third time, now over threadbare old accusations that he ordered his staff to leak information to a reporter while serving as FBI director in October 2016.Oct. 27, 2026. Trump and Ken Paxton barned stormed through Texas like a political natural disaster that was designed to help Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 26, 2026 [Trump Hurts Republicans], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.At 12:42 this afternoon (Monday), the Vice President of the United States stood at the podium inside an airport hangar in Belgrade, Montana, with bleachers full of supporters behind him and a much thinner crowd of people on the floor in front of him.Trump To Reduce Rules For U.S. Methane Leakers
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Oct. 27, 2026. The people of Hungary chose wisely. The people of Serbia and Brazil also chose wisely. May the people of Israel choose wisely today, and let the American people continue to choose wisely in these final seven days of the 2026 Election.Oct. 27, 2026. We’re a week out from election day, and things continue to look good. In fact, I’ve got to say, they’re looking a little bit better every day. Oct. 27, 2026. New polling shows Abdul El-Sayed’s lead growing in the Michigan US Senate race, which explains why JD Vance was desperately blaming the Democrat for high gas prices.More On Middle East Wars
More Global News
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).
New York Times, Live Updates: Israeli Exit Polls Show Strength of Opposition to Netanyahu but No Clear Winner, David M. Halbfinger, Leo Sands, Max Bearak and Isabel Kershner, Oct. 27, 2026. A bloc of opposition parties, including two predominantly Arab parties, appeared to be leading over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and his allies. Here’s the latest.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Oct. 27, 2026. Here’s why the latest docket may have the shortest shelf life. The latest criminal case brought against ex-FBI director James Comey may be the most foolish, idiotic and lawless brought by the Trump Justice Department to date.More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets`New York Times,
Oct. 27, 2026. As the midterms loom, he’s finally admitting the obvious. If Republicans do implode as badly next Tuesday as the current polls suggest, there will be two main reasons. One is Trump’s epic corruption, which finally seems to be getting traction as a campaign issue, second only to the cost of living. The other is soaring energy prices, which are both a major cause of overall inflation and especially visible since they’re posted on big signs in front of every gas station across the country.More On U.S. Media, Free Press, Religion
I’m not worried, but I do worry about everyone who’s vulnerable to Musk, Trump, and the other bullies in this might-makes-right era. On Saturday’s “Coffee Klatch” podcast, I said: "Democrats ought to “defund Musk” and lay “the groundwork for nationalizing” Starlink and SpaceX." (My full Coffee Klatch argument is here.) This seems to have set Elon Musk off. He posted to his 241,700,000 followers: “Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”
Top Stories
President Trump frequently portrays himself on his Truth Social or via White House as an all-powerful king (as at top) or emporer annointed by God and backed by security forces and the military, as in this portrayal above by former Repubicans who organized the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. The political, military and economic chaos extends to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, selective tariffs helping insiders and Trump's transformation of U.S. longstanding alliances with Canada, Europe and NATO into adversaries whom he disdains while courting profitable deals from Russia, as newly documented this week, benefiting his family and allies.
PROOF EXCLUSIVE: Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part III, Seth Abramson, right, best-selling Trump biographer, attorney and professor, Oct. 27, 2026. The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack. When Trump Attacks Our Elections, We Will Have No Excuse: Democracy Docket.
Introduction
It’s too late in the day for American democracy for America to place any faith in polls. Or even in history.
Yes, traditionally a president’s party does poorly in the midterms; yes, Donald Trump is historically unpopular;yes, he has betrayed his voters—his own campaign promises from the 2024 presidential election campaign—on everything from foreign wars to data centers, tariffs to assurances he’d only seek to deport “the worst of the worst” undocumented persons—and we might even note that, for as unreliable as general-election polling has been in presidential-election years, it has been far more reliable during midterm elections.
But the fact remains that polling generally is in a woeful state because few have landlines, few answers unsolicited texts or cell-phone calls, there is an ever-increasing tendency to lie to pollsters, the American electorate is increasingly mercurial and thus (at the margins at least) more likely to change its mind post-polling, more Americans than ever before are independents, and it seems somehow as though computer-aided electorate modeling has gotten worse, not better over the last quarter-century. All of which urges voters to conclude that voting is the only anecdote to pre-election and Election Day anxiety; pollsters to hedge their bets in public statements even when their data strongly points in one particular direction; and journalists like this author to make one statement and one statement only about what’s likely to happen in the 2026 midterm elections: no one really knows, so just vote.
But some things are clear.
Some historical comparisons are still reliable.
Shown above is the cover of Seth Abramson's 2018 book documenting Russian collusion with Donald Trump and his campaign to win the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The book is part of a series of other "Proof" books documenting crimes and dirty tricks by the Trump Team.
And with that in mind, we can say that the 2026 midterm elections are under greater threat of illicit theft than any elections in modern American history, and that we know beyond any doubt that the culprit in this would-be heist is Donald Trump and his longtime lackeys and lickspittles. Observing that this gang of ne’er-do-wells is intent on subverting—even ending—American democracy is not the same thing as lying down helplessly before their schemes. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: Proof is running a pre-election series of reports on the one hundred schemes Donald Trump is using to steal the 2026 midterms not to spread dismay or paranoia but to emphasize that no matter what happens, indeed even in the event of a blue tsunami as some pundits (not this one) are raucously predicting, it will remain the case that Trump and his political party-cum-cult should have gotten fewer votes than they did, and their pro-democracy opponents more votes than they did, and this would have happened had not the former launched the most treacherous attack on America’s democracy since…
…well, since the armed rebellion against the United States that Trump incited at the start of this decade.
While watching and then remembering the events of January 6 should be more than enough to confirm that the Republican Party in its current incarnation has zero interest in free and fair elections or even democracy as a form of government—the pleasant pro-democratic sounds certain Republican politicians made in the hours after the failed, deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol gave way, please recall, to a nearly party-wide refusal to convict Mr. Trump of impeachable offenses and thus ensure he couldn’t terrorize America again, which is exactly why he could and did and now is.
But citing January 6 isn’t sufficient. Not for us now in 2026, and not for Americans who may read about this time in the future. Proof has often written that January 6 was merely the first day of a rolling “Trumpist” insurrection that never ended, and that view has since been substantiated, with mountains of reliable evidence, by the full-length Proof Series books Proof of Coup (2023) and Proof of Destruction (2025), as well as the pre-January 6 tome Proof of Corruption (2020), which exhaustively established just how much of the Trumpist scheme to end American democracy in January 2021 preceded the events of January 6… indeed, was visible to all even before that day came.
Thus with the November 3, 2026 midterm elections in America.
We do not know how many bomb threats Republicans and foreign interlopers will call in to majority-minority precincts in 2026, as happened across the country in 2024.
We do not know how many voters will be wrongly purged from the voter rolls—except to be fairly certain it will be in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions—or how many people will be wrongly turned away from the polls once there because of illicit shenanigans by election-ratfuckery-trained Trumpist “volunteers” or observers.
We don’t know if the electrical grids will go down. We don’t know if Elon Musk will again do—or try to do—something nefarious with his space “lasers,” like he told his intimate romantic partner he had done on Election Day in 2024. We don’t know if the pro-Trump foreign election interference Trump has long welcomed from murderous autocratic friends abroad, which welcoming has resulted in its flooding the American zone for the sixth straight federal election of Donald Trump’s always-already foreign-compromised political career, nor do we know whether Trump will steal ballots after the fact (as he told NBC News earlier this year he wishes he had done in 2020) or if he will continue to deploy armed troops to block and/or hamper access to ballot drop-off sites (see infra). And most of Trump’s election-theft, Election Fraud, Voter Fraud, and FARA-violative schemes don’t carry a clear “votes cost” tally alongside them in any case. We can see what he’s doing, and know why, and ascertain whether it is criminal and deserving of impeachment and imprisonment, but determining the extent of the damage is notoriously hard… even deliberately so.
But we can catalogue.
Because if the Democratic Party achieves historic gains, Trump will say it is evidence of fraud by the Democrats.
And if the Democratic Party achieves modest gains — few enough that litigation and post-election ratfuckery could even keep Republicans in control of one or both houses of Congress — Trump will say it is evidence of fraud by the Democrats.
And let’s be clear: if Republicans eke out a stunning victory, or even a historic victory of such improbable proportions that given all the early-voting and approval-rating and electorate-composition data we have now it’s almost certain that someone somewhere did indeed mess with the election somehow — whether Elon with his boasted-of tech interference, Vladimir Putin with his long-denied military hacking and propaganda campaigns, the Saudis and Emiratis and Israelis with their lavish illegal funding for otherwise seemingly above-board (if grotesque) disinformation campaigns — Trump will say “we would have won by more,” or words to that effect, had the Democrats not “cheated.”
So whatever happens going forward, cataloguing the historic and infamous ways in which the Republican Party — yes, the Republicans and only the Republicans—tried to demolish America’s democratic processes pre-election, mid-election, and post-election will be helpful to Americans now and Americans in the future. Americans in both temporal situations deserve to know exactly what was done to us, especially under circumstances in which we already know what the rhetoric will hold, regardless.
With this in mind, Proof here continues its accounting of the one hundred schemes Trump and his allies are using to steal the 2026 midterm elections—the most vile betrayal of our democracy since the U.S. Civil War. Parts I and II are here and here.
And yes, there are a hundred.
Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026 (#23 Through #33, continued below)
New York Times, The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference, Richard Fausset, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David W. Chen, Oct. 27, 2026. State and local plans for Election Day include how to react to potential I.C.E. raids, misbehavior by federal election monitors and attempts to seize votes or machines.
State and local elections officials regularly plan for floods, fires and computer glitches.
This year, they are teaching poll workers what to do if immigration enforcement officers show up. They are drilling them about the statute that bars federal agents from voting places. They are running through the limits of what federal monitors may and may not do on Election Day.
Much of the preparations for Nov. 3 can be distilled into one overarching concern — that the Trump administration will somehow attempt to meddle with the voting process or the results. The tricky part, officials said, is predicting what shape that interference might take while also recognizing that it might not materialize at all.
“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” said Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state in Maine. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”
It remains to be seen whether any of these scenarios will play out. Many federal officials have dismissed the idea that agents or soldiers could be sent to the polls, and the courts have blocked most of President Trump’s efforts to insert the federal government into state and local election administration.
And some of the country’s most prominent voting advocates have sought to assure the public that election administrators are well-prepared to protect the vote. David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department, said the most chilling possibilities are unlikely to come to pass because the courts would likely block them.
“But election officials feel more comfortable to know they’ve thought about this, and discussed it,” said Mr. Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works to support election officials in both parties.
Even so, the Trump Administration has already taken significant steps to try to shape the voting process this year. Mr. Trump has sought to sow doubt about the security of elections. His administration has demanded that states turn over voter lists, and has tried unsuccessfully to change mail voting rules. Last week, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in Alaska seeking to pre-emptively block the certification of the Senate race there if the Republican candidate loses by a narrow margin.
With one week until Election Day, officials around the country say that they are bracing for even more unwanted and potentially undemocratic federal intervention — even as they can’t be sure what, if anything, the Trump Administration might do. To prepare, secretaries of state and other state and local officials have met with lawyers and local law enforcement agencies, trained poll workers and held meetings to consider what could come next.
Among their top concerns: that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the integrity of American voting systems could form the basis for challenging the legitimacy of the results. Along with that unease comes the worry that any federal intervention could further undermine public confidence in elections and cause voters to stay home.
The next step is a guessing game, they said.
Could federal officials try to seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Ga., as part of a criminal investigation that thus far hasn’t resulted in any charges?
Could Mr. Trump deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel or other federal agents to polling sites, even though his homeland security chief has said I.C.E. will not patrol polling stations and would be deployed to such an area only to investigate “specific threats?”
Might he invoke the Insurrection Act and somehow summon the military in connection with the election? Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility.
“We really are shadowboxing here, because we don’t know when or if the blow is going to land,” said Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state. “We don’t know the character of, or content of, what might be headed our way.”
Mr. Trump, who has long claimed without proof that U.S. elections are rigged, sought to overturn his 2020 election loss. Earlier this year, he said the federal government should “get involved” in elections, even though the Constitution empowers the states and Congress — not the executive branch — to govern elections.
Special Reports: More On This Week's 11 Rape Allegations Against Trump
The Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The Trumpstein Sex Trafficking Network, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 27, 2026. The major points and players contained in the House Judiciary Committee’s Minority Report.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The rape allegations against Trump: what we know and what is still being hidden, Rebecca Crosby, right, and Noel Sims, Oct. 27, 2026. A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats contains new details about the Trump-Epstein relationship — and an alleged cover-up.
On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new staff report about President Trump’s alleged relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The report details allegations involving 11 women, including five of whom accuse “Trump of rape or sexual assault in Jeffrey Epstein’s close company or presence.”
The report is based on interviews conducted by Judiciary Committee staff, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records, released documents, and survivor accounts. While the majority of the allegations included in the report were already public, it includes a new allegation that Trump raped a young model at a 1993 pageant.
“The report concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s,” a press release states.
The report alleges that “Trump has lied about the nature and extent of his relationship with Epstein dozens of times.” For example, Trump has claimed that he kicked Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago. But according to the report, members of Congress reviewed a 2009 document that reveals that Trump “stated unequivocally that Epstein ‘was never asked to leave’ Mar-a-Lago.” The file is redacted in public documents. Trump has also denied ever being on Epstein’s plane, but files show that Trump is listed on the plane’s flight logs “at least eight different times” throughout the 1990s.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are now asking for a new independent investigation. The report calls for an independent special counsel to be appointed to investigate potential co-conspirators.
A press release argues that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) “conflict of interest and obstruction make clear that Trump’s appointees cannot be trusted to pursue accountability.” The report alleges that the DOJ “actively obstructed the Epstein investigation into any co-conspirators, attempted to prevent the release of the Epstein files, and then released an incomplete and heavily redacted set to the public.”
The report also reveals that documents in the Epstein files allege that Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Deputy Attorney General at the time, “likely knew about certain survivors’ claims against” Trump when he interviewed Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. According to a transcript, Blanche, on at least three occasions, “directed Maxwell not to discuss” an individual whose report to the FBI implicated Trump, but whose allegations were not yet public. The report alleges that by doing so, Blanche “may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice.”
“The bottom line: there is more than sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation,” the report states.
“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard, Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice,” Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said.
The White House has denied the allegations laid out in the new report. “None of these allegations are true. This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” a White House spokesperson told NBC News.“I will take care of you”
The report reveals new allegations against Trump from Beatrice Keul, a former Swiss model who participated in the Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant in 1993 at age 24.
According to an interview she gave to committee staff, both Trump and Epstein introduced themselves to Keul when she arrived and promised to take care of things like her travel and education. Keul said Trump told her “I will take care of you” several times. So, when a Trump representative asked her to come to his room later in the day, she assumed he was following up on his promises to get her a visa and a New York University education.
Instead, Keul alleges that Trump raped her in a “brutal” assault that left her bleeding and covered in bruises. She said she went through the rest of the pageant in a “daze” because her passport had been taken from her and she did not want to raise alarms. After the pageant, she got her passport back and returned to Switzerland. She declined to participate in another Trump-sponsored pageant a few weeks later, but Trump called her and repeated his offer to take care of her.
In 2024, Keul told a different version of this story to the Daily Mail. At the time, she said when she arrived in Trump’s room, he “jumped” on her and began “grabbing and touching” her, but that ultimately she was able to hold him off. “I’m very tall, that’s what helped me a lot,” Keul said to the Daily Mail. The report does not say why Keul changed her story.
The report also includes the stories of four other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault.
Stacey Williams, a swimsuit model who dated Epstein in the early 1990s, has accused Trump of groping her when she and Epstein visited Trump’s office in 1993. According to CNN, three friends of Williams have separately confirmed that she told them about the incident, which Williams later described as “trophy hunting” for the two men.
Jill Harth, who recruited young models for Trump’s pageants, filed a lawsuit against Trump in 1997 claiming that he had “forcibly kissed, fondled, and restrained” her at a Mar-a-Lago party in 1993 when she was 31. The lawsuit also claimed that the same year, Trump had demanded Harth provide him with access to an 18-year-old contestant “whom Trump referred to as a ‘sex object.’” Harth’s lawsuit was resolved as a part of a settlement by Trump in a separate contractual suit brought against him by Harth’s then-partner.
A woman identified by the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” filed a lawsuit against Trump in 2016 accusing him of raping and sexually abusing her in 1994 at a party hosted by Epstein when she was 13 years old. According to DOJ documents, Johnson “was asked to strip down to her underwear and give a massage to Epstein” and “massage the penis of Epstein’s guest, Trump, with her hands.” Johnson later dropped the suit.
In 2019, a woman described as Jane Doe 4 came to the FBI with claims that in 1983, when she was 13 or 14 years old, she “bit [Trump] while performing oral sex” and that he “hit [her] in the face after she laughed about biting [him].”
Although Jane Doe 4’s claims have not been substantiated, the report alleges that the DOJ may be “still withholding a huge number of documents related to the allegations,” stating that the Post and Courier reported that it had reviewed FBI agents’ notes that contained new details about Jane Doe 4’s interview, but that those notes have been withheld by the DOJ for being “duplicative.”
In addition to these five women who claim to have been abused by Trump, the report also details the accounts of three Epstein survivors who believe that Trump participated in Epstein’s crimes.
Maria Farmer, a former assistant to Epstein who was abused by him, has said that on one occasion she went to meet Epstein in his office and Trump approached her there. But Epstein told Trump, “No, no. She’s not here for you,” before taking Trump to a different room. Farmer believed that there was a different young woman in that room waiting for Trump. She has said that she urged authorities to look into Trump decades ago. According to the report, Farmer’s “reports to FBI appear to be unlawfully omitted from the files released by DOJ pursuant to” the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).
DOJ documents released under the EFTA detail other concerning incidents involving Trump. In one case, Trump was accused of agreeing with Epstein that one of Epstein’s victims, who was 14 at the time, was a “good one.” In another instance, a Jane Doe described how she was introduced to Trump by Maxwell and felt she was being offered to him for sex. She recalled Maxwell saying “things like, ‘Oh I think he likes you. Aren’t you lucky. This is great.’”
The report also provides three additional examples of women who seemed to have connections to Trump and Epstein. The first woman, Lauren Petrella, has never made accusations against Trump herself, but Harth’s lawsuit claimed that he sexually assaulted her. The other two women, Jane Does 5 and 6, spent time with Trump and Epstein during the 1990s, but have not accused Trump of any wrongdoing.
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying together at Mar-a-Lago, along with an artist's rendering of a birthday card that the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent Epstein in 2003 boasting of their shared secrets.
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Could Face Criminal Investigation For New Epstein Allegations, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 27, 2026. House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said that new evidence is strong enough for Trump to be investigated by a grand jury for Epstein-related sex crimes.
America had ample warning about Donald Trump. The Access Hollywood tape should have been enough to disqualify him from ever being president. The E. Jean Carroll verdict, when he was found to be a rapist, should have been enough to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.
The millions of COVID deaths and economic suffering could have been prevented if so many Americans didn’t hate women so much that they disregarded the warnings about Donald Trump.
The United States could be in a different and likely much better place if Trump had been kept away from the presidency. All it would have taken was about 100,000 men in three states to believe women in 2016, and Donald Trump would never have been president.
With the surfacing of new evidence and witness statements that accuse Trump of five rapes as part of the Epstein scandal, America might get another chance to right this wrong.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) was on MS NOW’s Deadline: White House where he was asked about what Trump and Vance supporting the horrid ad against Amy Acton in Ohio says about the culture in the Republican Party toward women.
Raskin went beyond culture and talked about a potential criminal investigation into Trump.
Video: The Maryland Congressman said:
It's completely contaminated and toxic. And, when historians look back on this miserable period of our history, they might say that the first problem was disregarding all of those women who told us back in 2016 that they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Donald Trump. But he got elected even after he was adjudicated civilly responsible for sexually penetrating and attacking E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room in a department store in New York City. And there are reports in the report that we just released, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee there are accounts by specific survivors and victims which very much resemble this.
That is, at a kinda public event or public place, cornering someone in something like a dressing room or a hotel room and then sexually attacking them, and that's pre- precisely what Beatrice Keul says in her account of what took place back then. Look, the evidence is certainly enough to justify an investigation. It's a, it's overwhelmingly likely it's enough to justify going to a grand jury to see if a grand jury agrees. But it certainly is not reconcilable in any way with sweeping the whole matter under the rug.
And I just wanna thank these survivors, these victims of these terrible events when they were mostly girls, some of them were young women, but mostly they were girls, they were minors, for coming forward and hanging tough and saying, "This really happened, and the country's gotta pay attention to it." My responsibility as the ranking member in the House Judiciary Committee and our responsibility as Democrats on the Judiciary Committee is to make certain that the Department of Justice is not able to sweep this under the rug.
And we also show evidence in this report about how the White House was actually calling all the shots and was essentially dictating or editing the statement that there was nothing to see here and that there was no basis for further investigation, and that's just scandalous that took place.
In fact, the White House had to order them to use Department of Justice and FBI letterhead because they didn't want to. Nobody wanted to be associated with this extraordinary act of cover-up in the, the service of Donald Trump and against the service of justice and the rule of law.
Donald Trump only has immunity for official acts as president. He has no immunity for actions he is accused of committing when he was not president. The grand jury would need to be a state or local grand jury, because Trump’s DOJ is carrying out the Epstein cover-up.
If America wants to remove a tiny bit of the stain that Trump has placed on it, the country can begin by, for once, believing women and at least seriously investigating the allegations against Donald Trump.
Oct 26, 2026. Host Michael Popok reports on a devastating new 53-page report issued by the House Judiciary Committee led by Rep. Jamie Raskin that -- based on new evidence never disclosed before from sex abuse survivors of Trump -- Trump committed sex abuse alongside Epstein in dozens in cases. The Report calls for the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to go after Trump and others.Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.Special Report: Former Trump Appointee Launches "Corruption'" Documentary
Defiance.org, We added up the corruption in Trump’s Washington. The number will blow you away, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.
We added up the corruption in Trump’s Washington. The number will blow you away.
Our documentary, CORRUPTIONLAND, reveals for the first time how deep the D.C. swamp got under Donald Trump. And now voters can do something about it.
Nobody in Washington ever bothered to add it all up, so we did. The volume of alleged corruption in Donald Trump’s Washington is now roughly $377 billion.
In fact, we put it on a map. That’s what the CORRUPTIONLAND ledger came to when we analyzed 100 documented episodes of alleged corruption and abuses of power since Donald Trump was re-elected. Each of those episodes was built from court filings, government records, congressional documents, or reporting by established news organizations. And we released them today alongside a documentary film about all of it: CORRUPTIONLAND.
Before you go look, I want to tell you about that figure and why it surprised me.
First, $377 billion is a measure of scale. It shows you how breathtaking the corruption has become and how the swamp Trump promised to “drain” has gotten deeper than ever. This includes public money, private benefit, and the transaction volumes tied to those 100 episodes. Some of it landed with the president’s family. But the bulk of the ledger is money that belongs to you that has been misappropriated, mismanaged, or used as a tool of political coercion. (Our friends at States United and Grant Witness Project have already documented the up-to $170 billion in taxpayer dollars wiped out by Trump.)
Second, as staggering as that figure is, it’s not even the full picture. We only picked 100 alleged instances of corruption to measure. And fifty-nine of those entries have no dollar figure at all, because you can’t put a price tag on a fired inspector general or a presidential critic thrown in jail or the many thousands of federal employees fired or pushed out of their jobs. What’s more, the figure excludes hard-to-measure acts of corruption, which nonetheless have seismic economic implications. For example, Trump’s retaliatory tariffs surely add up to untold billions in costs for Americans and the global economy, yet they’re excluded from this tracker because of that immeasurable magnitude.
We’re living in one of the gravest periods of corruption in American history.
And here’s what surprised me most in filming CORRUPTIONLAND and researching these cases. The individual scandals aren’t really the story. Yes, they’re shocking — from the ballroom and the jet to the Trump-branded monument arch and the fishy pardons — and any one of them would have consumed a normal presidency for months. But when you put it all on a map you see that it’s become systematized.
When I first started working in Washington, I learned that there are five basic layers, or “corruption filters” as I call them, designed to catch wrongdoing before it happens or gets too far. That includes ethics lawyers in the White House… prosecutors and agents at Justice and the FBI… “inside watchdogs,” like inspectors general and whistleblowers in the agencies themselves… “outside watchdogs,” like a free press and the groups that sue a law-breaking government in court… and finally Congress. The film walks through these layers and shows how the filtration system has been deliberately sabotaged. The result is a seemingly endless stream of filth — wrongdoing, self-enrichment, weaponized power — into our republic.
But something else changed while we were making this film. Americans caught up.
We were the first to observe that all of this “corruption” has set a record in the eyes of the people. Never before has the issue been the number-one voting issue headed into an American election, at least not since polling began in the 1930s. Yet today it is. Survey after survey finds that supermajorities of Democrats and Republicans are furious about corruption in the United States, even more so than economic conditions, and it’s led to a hyper-populist, anti-incumbent mood across the nation. The president’s own approval has sunk to 30 percent in Pew’s latest survey, which only happens when millions of his own voters walk away in disgust.
I hope you’ll use this documentary and the data for what they are: alarm bells for our democracy. Last night, we premiered CORRUPTIONLAND for thousands of DEFIANCE.org Members, and we heard from Rep. Jason Crow and other people from the film. This morning, all Americans get a chance to see it, and hopefully they will be stirred to action.
So here’s my ask, one week out from the election:
Watch it. It’s 35 minutes and it’s free at corruptionland.org as of right now.
Send it to one person who needs to see it. The point is to wake more Americans up to the fact that our republic is in danger from grift, graft, and the people perpetuating it.
Then vote. Early voting is open almost everywhere. Four of the five corruption filters have been nearly destroyed. The fifth one is on your ballot, and you can actually do something about it.
They kicked us out of the Washington Monument for filming this (true story). But they cannot stop you from watching it.
Trump Continues KowTows To Putin
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s envoys, with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, in Moscow last month (Ramil Sitdikov photo via Reuters).
New York Times, Exclusive:The U.S. Called It Putin’s ‘Slush Fund.’ Now Trump May Drop Sanctions on It, Anton Troianovski, Oct. 27, 2026. The move would be the latest U.S. concession to Moscow as President Trump pursues economic incentives he hopes will secure an end to war in Ukraine.
The Trump administration is exploring a new concession to Russia: lifting sanctions on the country’s flagship government investment fund, long viewed by U.S. officials as one of the Kremlin’s most powerful tools of international influence.
Russian officials have pushed for the move as part of broader talks about the fund’s involvement in shipping Russian diesel fuel to the United States, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
A U.S. official confirmed that the administration was assessing the fund’s application for sanctions to be removed through established procedures as part of an effort to “improve U.S.-Russia relations and help end the war.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, praised the fund’s chief, Kirill Dmitriev, as “a helpful envoy” to U.S. negotiators in discussions to end the conflict.
The consideration of more sanctions relief for Russia, which has not been previously reported, shows how the Kremlin is using a recent flurry of diplomacy over the war in Ukraine to advance an agenda that appears to have little to do with securing peace.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s envoys and Mr. Putin have discussed the sale of part of a Russian oil giant to a well-connected investor group; an effort to produce natural gas in Alaska, from which several executives resigned amid concerns about hidden Russian financing; and a proposal to increase Russian gas exports to Europe that has stunned European governments.
Removing sanctions on the multibillion-dollar fund, called the Russian Direct Investment Fund, would be a significant unwinding of the yearslong U.S. effort to use economic pressure to get Russia to change its behavior. The fund has invested billions of dollars in Russian companies, often alongside investors from the Middle East and elsewhere, pushing to expand Russia’s global influence.
The Biden administration imposed sanctions on the fund days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, calling it “a slush fund” for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that was “emblematic of Russia’s broader kleptocracy.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Eric Green, who oversaw Russia policy as part of the White House’s National Security Council at the time, said targeting the fund was an early priority because its access to the Western financial system could help Russia finance the war and because of its “association with projects closely identified with Putin.”
Now the fund has taken a lead role in implementing Mr. Trump’s diesel deal, helping to arrange the first shipments of Russian diesel to the United States after Mr. Trump suspended sanctions on it on Oct. 9, a key Russian official has said. The fund’s head, Mr. Dmitriev, has acted as Mr. Putin’s economic envoy to the Trump administration, leading the Kremlin’s effort to convince U.S. officials of the great potential of business deals with Russia.
“It’s been really, really good dealing with Kirill,” Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, told Mr. Putin at the negotiating table in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week.
In the Trump team’s view, negotiating business deals with Mr. Putin now can help end the war in Ukraine by showing the Russian president that the United States is serious about building a new and prosperous relationship with Moscow. To the many critics of that approach, including some Republican lawmakers, Mr. Trump is simply ceding economic benefits to Mr. Putin without pressuring him to end the war.
Mr. Green, the former Biden administration official, said lifting sanctions on the fund would be a “real strong message that we are relaxing the previous position that we weren’t going to relax the economic sanctions and other costs until there was a settlement in Ukraine.”Speaking at a conference in Moscow on Oct. 16, Mr. Dmitriev boasted that the diesel deal was among the “concrete examples” starting to convince Americans that “sanctions are, in principle, philosophically wrong.” He said that his fund was prepared to handle U.S. payments for the Russian diesel, despite “a sea of sanctions restrictions.”
Mr. Dmitriev left unmentioned that he was trying to get sanctions removed on his own fund amid the talks over the diesel deal, according to the people familiar with the negotiations. Mr. Dmitriev’s fund offered to serve as the go-between for Russian diesel being sold to the United States, while also asking for American sanctions on the fund to be relaxed, the people said.
The talks played out as Mr. Dmitriev helped put in motion an effort to hand Mr. Trump a visible win at a time of record high diesel prices.
Three tankers carrying Russian diesel have set sail for the United States this month, according to Russian officials. The shipments were made “with the significant support” of Mr. Dmitriev’s fund, a Russian vice prime minister, Aleksandr Novak, said on Friday.
The diesel was shipped without any U.S. buyers having paid for it, according to some of the people familiar with the negotiations. One of the tankers, the Agioi Fanendes, was scheduled to arrive in the United States on Nov. 7, after leaving Primorsk, Russia, on Oct. 23, according to Kpler and TankerTrackers.com, two ship tracking firms. The ship recently changed its destination from New York to “for orders,” meaning it had not yet received instructions on where to discharge.
New York Times, European Leaders Split Over Phone Call to Putin, Jeffrey Gettleman, Paul Sonne and Jeanna Smialek, Oct. 27, 2026. The diplomatic outreach was part of an effort to push talks to end the war in Ukraine, though it was not welcome by all European leaders.
The leaders of Finland and Norway made a rare phone call to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday as part of the ongoing efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
As President Trump has tilted more toward Russia in recent days, casting doubt on Ukraine’s president and agreeing to buy diesel from Russia, European leaders have tried to step into the peace process to assure European interests are taken into account and protect Ukraine from being steamrolled.
According to the Norwegian government, the purpose of the call was “to convey messages directly to President Putin regarding future negotiations to help to end the war.” The call was supposed to last 20 minutes but ran for 90 and was an extension of a high-level meeting last week in Oslo. More meetings on the Ukraine war are scheduled next month in Abu Dhabi.
But not all European leaders were happy about the phone call. It immediately reopened a sore subject: Who should be the one to talk to Mr. Putin?
“I am very skeptical about this Norwegian and Finnish initiative,” said Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister. “It is not coordinated with the rest of us.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Finland and Norway? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
She said that she couldn’t see “any signs that Russia wants peace” and that “we should keep Europe together instead of going solo.”
Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, piled onto the criticism.
“Holding talks that risk dividing a united European voice is risky,” he said.
He added, “I’m not saying they have done that at all. I don’t yet know what those talks were about.”
Europe has been flailing to find a way into the Ukraine peace process. The war has been grinding on for almost five years, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. And the consensus is growing that Mr. Trump is too pro-Russian and not a reliable mediator to bring it to a just end.
Mr. Trump recently insisted that Ukraine “get a new president” and he continues to shift his position in favor of Russia. Earlier this month, he opened the doors for the United States to buy billions of dollars of Russian diesel, which European countries and Ukraine especially saw as a boost for the Russian war machine. Mr. Trump also recently used a crude word to refer to Norway, one of the most developed nations on the planet.
While Mr. Putin clearly benefits from all this, the Russians are increasingly aware that they need to negotiate with Europe as well. In Moscow’s view, the unwavering support — financial, diplomatic and military — that Europe has given Ukraine has enabled Kyiv to withstand pressure from the United States to make certain compromises in a peace deal.
News Roundups
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Wave Goodbye to a Republican Congress, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 27, 2026. Knock wood. Throw salt. Cross your fingers.
Can Bibi Netanyahu hang on? Israel’s six-term prime minister faces a stiff challenge in Israel’s elections today. Polls show the bloc led by Netanyahu’s Likud party neck and neck with the bloc led by former military chief Gadi Einsenkot’s Yashar party, and voters are turning out at levels not seen in Israel for half a century.
Meanwhile, Yair Golan of the Democrats party faced an apparent assassination attempt at an election-day campaign stop just hours ago. Happy Tuesday.
Meidas Touch Network, Tuesday Afternoon Updates: Trump’s Allies Fall Apart Around the World, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 27, 2026. It’s Tuesday. You know what that means, right? We are ONE WEEK out from the midterms. Trump’s morning has been a mess from start to finish, and his allies have been going down, one by one.
Before we get into the news, some exciting personal news. Our book WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy is now officially an Audible best-seller! Thank you to everyone who’s been reading the book, whether in hardcover, e-book, or audiobook. Your feedback has been so amazing to see. If you haven’t ordered yet, you can do so here or find it in your local bookstore.
Here are the top headlines so far:
A few important notes before we dive in:
Again, our book, WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy, is OUT NOW!!! If you’ve been considering ordering, go ahead and grab your copy now! Thanks for helping us get the word out!
Trump’s Midterm Hedge
A reporter asked Trump whether or not he’ll respect the election results regardless of what happens. Trump’s response: only “if they’re honest elections.” So that’s a no. And we all know what Trump means by honest. If he wins, it’s honest. If he loses, it’s rigged.
JD Vance was at Joint Base Andrews before heading to Michigan. A reporter asked him why Alaskans shouldn’t be insulted that the Trump regime thinks they are unable to read the word “incumbent” on their ballot and figure out how to vote for Sen. Dan Sullivan. Vance’s reply was that people are too busy and have lives and jobs, so they are unable to read. ???????US Vice President JD Vance speaks at a midterm campaign rally at CHI Aviation in Howell, Michigan, October 27, 2026. Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS
Vance then accused Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of “explicitly anti-white racial hatred.” This is where they are. They’ve got nothing else after gutting your healthcare and sending prices through the roof.
Abbott and Musk’s “Intimate and Embarrassing” Messages
Gina Hinojosa, the Texas Democrat running for governor, sued Greg Abbott to get his emails with Elon Musk, which Abbott’s office refused to release because they would be “intimate and embarrassing” if seen by the public. Abbott exchanged around 1,400 emails with Musk, then handed him about $2 billion in tax breaks. State law bars the governor from keeping public records away from sitting legislators and Abbott did it anyway.
The court ruled against Abbott. It found he “is illegally preventing” Rep. Hinojosa from doing her job, that his obstruction is against the public interest, and that immediate relief is needed. The emails have been ordered turned over by Thursday, though Abbott and Musk will likely try to block it on appeal. What exactly is in those emails, Greg?
Don Jr.’s Russian Hunting Trip
Don Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with Russian businessman Umar Kremlev. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the guy who paid for part of Don Jr.’s wedding celebration in the Bahamas. The Financial Times says that the two of them tried to avoid photos together. Kremlev brought along Artur Martirosov, a partner at the U.S.-sanctioned venture fund Voskhod. Don Jr. brought GOP donor Kevin Small.
Trump’s “Gift,” Waltz’s Meltdown
Trump bragged that “we took over Venezuela very successfully” and that Venezuela sent him “a gift” of a million barrels of oil, which he says he’s passing along to the country. Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly rattled that María Corina Machado is back in Venezuela, threatening his arrangement with the Delcy Rodríguez puppet government.
At the UN General Assembly, Ambassador Mike Waltz got into a screaming match with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who approached the podium and accused Waltz of lying about Cuba’s real estate holdings. Waltz yelled, “DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH?! THIS IS AMERICA! BACK UP!” while the presiding officer pleaded with everyone to sit down. So embarrassing.
Diesel at Record Highs…Thank God, says the GOP
A graphic on Fox Business gave viewers a rare glimpse of reality, showing the national average at $4.26 for regular gas and $6.35 for diesel. Over that graphic, Texas Rep. Jodey Arrington thanked God for a commander in chief willing to do things not in his political interest.
Iran, Hormuz, and a Gulf Moving On Without the U.S.
The war keeps getting worse. Data from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy shows October is the WORST month for attacks on commercial shipping since it began tracking in 2017. More than 30 supertankers have been damaged, roughly 3.5% of the global fleet. Only five commodity vessels crossed Saturday, none Sunday. Trump keeps claiming more oil is moving than ever. The numbers say otherwise.Türkiye’s Ibrahim Kalin, Saudi Arabia’s Khalid bin Salman, Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei and Pakistan’s Asim Munir at a four-way meeting in Tehran.Türkiye’s Ibrahim Kalin, Saudi Arabia’s Khalid bin Salman, Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei and Pakistan’s Asim Munir at a four-way meeting in Tehran.
Meanwhile, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was welcomed by Putin in Moscow as a guest of honor at the Gas Exporting Countries Forum summit, where he bragged that Iran has increased gas production to around 300 billion cubic meters despite sanctions. He also met with Qatar’s emir.
Then Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, the man who mediated the failed U.S.-Iran talks in February, gave a speech at Cambridge calling for a non-aggression pact among the six Gulf states plus Iran and Iraq, ending the U.S. role as the region’s primary security provider. The Guardian described it as an indirect challenge to Trump’s case for new strikes. Albusaidi said an agreement was within reach when the war launched, and that Oman still stands by that judgment.
Europe Sounds the Alarm
In Warsaw, British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting warned NATO to prepare for the worst, reminding everyone what Putin said about Ukraine just days before the invasion. Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski was even more blunt about the U.S. approach to ending the war, warning that yes, you can end any war by surrendering. That’s why the terms matter. That’s a shot directly at Trump’s plan. On a better note, Ukraine launched Obria Nano, its first sovereign communications satellite, with Denmark’s GomSpace, to begin the process of cutting its reliance on foreign systems (*cough* Elon *cough*).
Elections in Israel
It’s Election Day in Israel and Netanyahu is already claiming on TV that “they” are trying to steal the election. Netanyahu warned that Arab turnout in the south was high and fear mongered that the left and Arab parties want to end the Jewish state. Turnout hit 55.7% by 4 p.m., the highest at that hour since at least 1969. The Trump playbook knows no borders. We will be following this closely.
Bolsonaro on the Run?
Trump’s guy lost in Brazil, and he may now be running. We don’t know for sure just yet. The NYT reports Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Flávio Bolsonaro’s passport seized over an inquiry into his ties to lawyer Willer Tomaz, accused of laundering more than $1 billion. Separately, Justice Flávio Dino ordered police to investigate alleged foreign financing of Bolsonaro’s campaign and social media algorithm manipulation. Folha de S.Paulo reports police are checking border crossings after Argentine media said he may have crossed into Argentina to catch a private jet to the U.S. Authorities as of now have found no record of that, and an ally denies he left. Keep in mind his brother Eduardo, who lives in Texas, was already convicted for lobbying the Trump regime to interfere in their father Jair’s coup trial. Flávio is apparently now terrified, per the Washington Post, and he thinks his father may spend the rest of his life in prison, and that he may soon be headed to prison as well.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Alarm Bells Go Off as Trump Jr. Hunts With Russian Oligarch, Court Orders Release of Musk’s Election Emails, Trump has Brutal Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Election Day is one week away, and today’s news shows why the stakes have never been higher. Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with a Kremlin-linked oligarch who helped pay for his wedding celebrations. Former counterintelligence officials are sounding the alarm, and Trump’s Justice Department won’t investigate.
In Texas, a former Republican House speaker says his party is “freaking out” about losing the state for the first time in more than 30 years. Trump also had a bad Monday. A federal judge blocked his D.C. golf course project after his own posts contradicted his administration’s sworn testimony, and a heckler at his Mississippi rally told him exactly what to do with his ballroom. Overseas, Israelis are voting today in an election that has become a referendum on the war with Iran and Netanyahu personally.
The Trump Jr. story isn’t happening in a vacuum. We went back 50 years and documented exactly how Donald Trump is connected to the Russians, from Soviet spy operations to Trump Tower. We named the names, followed the money, and laid it all out. We don’t have corporate owners or billionaire backers telling us what to cover, and we won’t back down when the stories get uncomfortable for powerful people.
It’s just the beginning. Some people want us to stop. We’re only going to push harder. One more thing: I’m scheduled to interview Kamala Harris this afternoon. Stay tuned, because you won’t want to miss it.
Let’s get into the news.
Counterintelligence Officials Sound the Alarm After Trump Jr. Goes Hunting With a Kremlin-Linked Oligarch
Donald Trump Jr. spent two days hunting in Mongolia with Umar Kremlev, the Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch who helped bankroll his wedding celebrations, according to the Financial Times. The trip took place in late August, after the wedding, at a remote camp in western Mongolia. Kremlev flew in on a charter from Kazakhstan with Arthur Martirosov, a partner in Voskhod, a venture fund under U.S. sanctions. One participant said Trump Jr. and Kremlev took care not to be photographed together at the camp. Trump Jr. also killed an endangered Altai argali mountain sheep and had dinner with Mongolia’s president, while the U.S. Embassy paid $18,715 for hotel rooms tied to a Secret Service “visit” during the trip. A spokesperson for Trump Jr. said the two have “a personal friendship, not a business relationship,” built on their love of hunting, and said it “shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that they went hunting together.”
Former counterintelligence officials warn that Russia will try to exploit the relationship, whatever Trump Jr.’s intentions. “It really doesn’t matter if people have the most above board intentions,” said Holden Triplett, who served as director of counterintelligence on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term. “The moment the Russian security and intelligence services figure out someone has a relationship with anyone of high value, they will try to weaponize that.” Intelligence experts consulted by the FT said relationships like this create favorable conditions for manipulation. Kremlev is a close Putin ally who has traveled in Putin’s official delegations, and ProPublica reported last month that he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump Jr.’s post-wedding celebrations. Kremlev later said Trump Jr. paid him back, while President Trump said he had “no idea who Umar is.”
Despite the concerns, Trump’s Justice Department has signaled it won’t investigate. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has indicated he won’t open an investigation into the wedding payments. That leaves Congress: the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee opened an inquiry after ProPublica’s report, and Democrats have promised a broader investigation if they win the House. The trip adds to a pattern of Trump family ties to Russia that critics say deserve scrutiny. A New York Times report in August, based on FBI memos released by the White House, showed that a 2017 FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s own ties to Russia was effectively shut down before it got going. Trump has always dismissed claims that he was compromised by Russia as baseless smears, and no publicly known investigation found he acted at Russia’s direction.
The revelations land as Mitch McConnell blasts Trump’s approach to Putin as “factually wrong, strategically naive and morally bankrupt.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Republican senator, who chairs the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee, said Trump’s “obsequious accommodation of Russia” won’t persuade Putin to stop. He criticized Trump’s claim that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine,” his diesel deal with Putin, and his sanctions relief, warning that threatening to cut off Ukraine’s intelligence and satellite access “could prolong the war, not shorten it.” McConnell also mocked envoy Steve Witkoff’s description of Putin as a humanitarian: “Mr. Putin is many things, but he is no humanitarian.” He warned that “ending the obeisance to Mr. Putin may be table stakes” for the year-end defense bill. “The president should plan accordingly,” he wrote.
Texas Republicans Scramble as Trump Rallies in the State and a Judge Orders Abbott to Hand Over His Elon Musk Emails
A judge has ordered Gov. Greg Abbott to let his Democratic challenger, Gina Hinojosa, see his office’s unredacted communications with Elon Musk. Travis County Judge Catherine Mauzy issued a temporary restraining order Monday giving Hinojosa, a state legislator, access to the records by 10 a.m. Thursday. The dispute centers on 1,374 pages of communications that Abbott’s office gave to The Texas Newsroom, all but about 200 of which were redacted or completely blacked out. Abbott’s office had argued that some of the withheld material was “intimate and embarrassing” and not of legitimate public concern. Hinojosa, who must sign a confidentiality agreement and can’t publicly release the contents, points to billions in state incentives for Musk’s companies, including a reported $1.66 billion tax break that followed a $500,000 Musk donation to Abbott’s campaign. Abbott’s spokesperson called the lawsuit “baseless” and “an act of desperation,” and Abbott is expected to appeal, with a hearing set for Nov. 2. Here is Hinojosa’s response:
Trump is heading to Texas for the fourth time in recent weeks as Republicans fight to hold a state they’ve dominated for decades. He’s holding rallies Tuesday in Lubbock and Corpus Christi, while Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico campaigns in nearby Midland. Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton by less than three points in the Decision Desk HQ polling average, in a race that is also a test of Trump, who backed Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn in the primary. The Corpus Christi stop is aimed at Hispanic voters, who helped Trump make big gains in South Texas in 2024. But a Cook Political Report and TelevisaUnivision poll finds Talarico leading Paxton 63 percent to 30 percent among likely Hispanic voters, with the economy ranked ahead of immigration as their top concern. Abbott, who has won every previous race by double digits, is now running neck and neck with Hinojosa, according to Texas Monthly.
Former Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan says his party is “freaking out” about losing statewide for the first time in more than three decades. “It’s real. People are freaking out. You see it in their faces. There’s serious concern like I’ve never seen before,” Phelan told Texas Monthly. He blamed the economy, saying the Trump administration “just did not deliver” and calling it “a bust” on gas, diesel, and groceries, along with an Iran war he called “grossly unpopular.” He said Hispanic voters, suburban women, college-educated voters, and voters under 45 who backed Republicans last cycle “are not with us this cycle.” Phelan warned that if Talarico wins by six or seven points, “it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot.” He said it took “half a billion dollars to defend Texas,” which “tells you where we are as a party.”
Phelan, who led the impeachment of Paxton, says he won’t vote for him and that other Republicans are telling him the same. “There’s not a world in which I can vote for a Ken Paxton,” Phelan said, adding that he’s skipping the race for now and has never voted for a Democrat. He called Talarico a friend who has run “a better job than any Democrat I’ve seen in thirty years.” Phelan said Fort Worth Republicans have approached him at football games saying they’re skipping the race or “may actually vote for a Democrat the first time ever,” something he said no one told him about Ted Cruz in 2018. He also criticized his party’s messaging, saying Republicans have spent “$100 million, $125 million in ads” on issues like transgender athletes that swing voters “don’t even know what you’re talking about.” “This is either going to be the worst polling that I’ve seen in modern history or I think Democrats can actually win a seat or two or maybe more,” he said.
Trump Takes Two Personal Hits as a Judge Blocks His D.C. Golf Course Project and a Heckler Mocks His Ballroom
A federal judge has blocked Trump’s pet project to rebuild a public golf course in Washington and said his own Truth Social posts contradicted sworn testimony from his administration. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a preliminary injunction that bars the Interior Department and the National Park Service from removing or damaging any more trees at East Potomac Golf Links. Her order also requires 10 business days’ written notice before any “irreparable modification” to the park while the case continues. Reyes had already found that the government acted in “bad faith” when it cut down more than 400 trees over the Columbus Day weekend. In her 70-page opinion, she found the government likely violated federal environmental law by taking a “chop-first, review-later approach.” “The Court still does not speak for the trees,” she wrote. “It speaks only for the rule of law.”
Trump’s own words sank his case, with the judge writing that his Justice Department was effectively asking the court not to believe the president. DOJ lawyers told the court there was no renovation plan and that the tree removal was routine maintenance. But Trump posted that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and an architect had “developed a plan to build a World Class Championship Golf Course,” then said work would begin “IMMEDIATELY!” “Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President,” Reyes wrote. “And yet, here we are.” She also rejected the administration’s argument that her order infringed on presidential power, writing that “’Separation of powers’ is not a talismanic incantation that permits the Executive to run amok, unchecked.”
Trump lashed out at the ruling in a late-night post and vowed to close the course anyway. Shortly before midnight, he wrote that Reyes “has absolutely no right to hold up this very important and beautiful Project” and called the notice requirement “time-consuming, unnecessary, expensive, and unconstitutional.” He said his administration would “immediately appeal” and would still close the course on Nov. 15 for renovations. The fight had already gotten personal: last week Trump called Reyes, a Biden appointee, “a crazed lunatic” and suggested she “may be insane.” He also posted overnight photos of debris and flooding at the course, claiming it had earned the nickname “Trash Island.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs, called Monday’s ruling “a big win” against the administration’s “greed and lawlessness.”
On the same day, a heckler at a Mississippi rally interrupted Trump to mock his White House ballroom. Speaking in a noticeably hoarse voice in Corinth while campaigning for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump was cut off by a protester who shouted, “Shove that ballroom up your fat a**!” Trump snapped “Oh, go home. Go home. Go home,” and then claimed without evidence that protesters are paid “$250” and that “they think it’s Soros.” It is the latest in a string of hecklers at his midterm rallies, including in Republican strongholds, as his party faces grim polling heading into November. Trump also fired back at Barack Obama, who mocked him over the weekend by saying, “Guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House.” The ballroom, which required tearing down the East Wing, has faced legal and political opposition from the start.
Israelis Vote as Netanyahu Pushes to “Finish the Job” in Iran and Trump Weighs Whether to Restart the War
Israelis went to the polls Tuesday in a tight election that has turned into a referendum on the eight-month war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has campaigned on his security record. He says only he can “finish the job” against Tehran and argues that his main challenger, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, “will not strike Iran.” Defense Minister Israel Katz urged voters to back the government, saying Israel had “struck Iran twice” and needed to continue on “this path in order to finish the job.” Eisenkot has accused Netanyahu of playing politics with national security on the eve of the vote. President Trump has endorsed Netanyahu enthusiastically, and Netanyahu told him last week that they have “a job to finish” in Iran. Iran’s foreign ministry said the outcome “makes no difference” to Tehran. We will have first results today at 4 PM EST. Netanyahu is appearing nervous today:
Trump says he is deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or “finish them off,” and observers warn the weeks right after the midterms could be especially dangerous. “I have a decision to make: Do I finish it off, which would be very easy to do, or do I make a deal?” Trump told Fox News on Sunday, after suggesting Friday that the U.S. “may do another little Epic Fury.” The U.S. has sent more forces to the region, including a third aircraft carrier group. At the same time, CBS News sources say the overall American military footprint in the Middle East is being quietly reduced. According to CBS, some observers believe the period between next Tuesday’s midterms and the start of the new Congress could be especially fraught. Iran’s foreign minister said renewed strikes wouldn’t change Tehran’s position: “They have already done so twice and have seen the results.”
There are signs of a rift inside Israel’s own military over the timing of new strikes, even as Netanyahu dismisses the reports as “rubbish.” Israel’s Channel 12 reported that army chief Eyal Zamir clashed with Netanyahu over an unspecified new directive on Iran. According to the report, Zamir demanded a detailed discussion, legal guarantees, and the signatures of political leaders before he would carry it out. A senior Israeli source says the report seems credible, noting that it passed Israel’s military censor, which would normally block a false national security story. The source said Zamir is not opposed to renewed attacks on Iran but objects to the timing, and that the military doesn’t believe anything requires a response before the election. Netanyahu and Katz have both denied any gap between the army and the government.
Across the region the war keeps spreading, with Egypt sending troops to Saudi Arabia and oil holding at around $116 a barrel. Egypt’s parliament authorized President el-Sisi to deploy forces to defend Saudi Arabia from Houthi missile and drone attacks, and a Houthi official called the move a “declaration of war.” Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan sent top officials to Tehran on Monday to try to keep the war from reigniting, and Iran called the talks “very good,” though they produced no concrete agreement. Air defenses at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shot down two drones on Tuesday, according to Al Arabiya, and an oil slick from an attacked tanker has reached UAE beaches and is threatening desalination plants. In Britain, two men were charged over an alleged Iran-linked plot targeting RAF Fairford, the base the U.S. used to launch strikes on Iran. U.S. Central Command says the naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue.
Other news:
The Trump administration is asking Washington state to set aside ballots from more than 400 people it claims are noncitizens, less than two weeks after making a similar demand in California. The Justice Department says it found 1,500 votes cast by 405 people in past elections, and the acting U.S. attorney in Seattle called that “the tip of the iceberg.” Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said one person on the list last voted in 1994, and he said the timing a week before the election “is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.” This is the third time this month the DOJ has challenged a state with competitive races while voting is already underway, after California and Alaska, where a lawsuit seeks to delay certification if the Republican incumbent loses. Washington’s third district, where Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is defending a seat Trump has won, is one of the most competitive House races in the country. In California, an appeals court panel questioned the timing and constitutionality of the DOJ’s demand and declined to fast-track it, and Los Angeles County found the federal list included inactive registrations and voters who appeared to be born in the U.S.
Former officials and scientists warn that Trump’s cuts to NOAA have left the country exposed to a potentially historic El Niño this winter. NOAA has lost more than 3,000 staffers since January 2025, about 20% of its workforce, and has hired only 525 replacements. The National Weather Service has about 10% fewer meteorologists heading into the fall, with hundreds of positions still vacant across its 122 forecast offices. This super El Niño is expected to supercharge storms in the West, raise sea levels in California by up to a foot, and set the stage for landslides and flash floods. “The system has not really been tested since all the cuts happened,” said former NOAA climate scientist Tom Di Liberto. Trump has proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by another $1.6 billion next year, and a former top NOAA official warned that if this is a real test, “we’re going to flunk.”
Jay-Z will headline the 2027 Super Bowl halftime show after years of producing it through his company, Roc Nation. The NFL, Apple Music, and Roc Nation announced Monday night that he will perform at Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. “From Reasonable Doubt to standing on the Super Bowl Halftime stage, this has been a journey,” the 56-year-old rapper said. Commissioner Roger Goodell said his only request when the NFL partnered with Roc Nation in 2019 was that Jay-Z take the stage himself one day. Jay-Z has won 25 Grammys and just wrapped his Jay-Z 30 tour at SoFi Stadium over the weekend. He follows Bad Bunny, who headlined last season’s show with guests including Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, and Cardi B.
China’s stock markets have lost $2.4 trillion since May, according to Bloomberg, as anxiety grows over the country’s AI race with the United States. The STAR 50 index, which tracks tech companies in Shanghai, has plunged 40% since June. AI stocks make up more than 40% of market value in China and Hong Kong, according to Goldman Sachs, so the slide is dragging down the whole market. Beijing has poured money into AI, including a new 60 billion yuan state-backed fund, but weak consumer demand means many tech companies struggle to turn a profit. U.S. bans on Chinese technology, including humanoid robots, are adding pressure, and shares of the leading robot maker Unitree have halved since they began trading in August. Meanwhile, Anthropic filed paperwork Monday for an IPO that could raise as much as $100 billion, and China has no blockbuster listings of its own on the horizon.
Flávio Bolsonaro was banned from leaving Brazil and ordered to surrender his passports just hours after losing the presidential election to Lula. The order came from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the same judge who oversaw his father Jair Bolsonaro’s trial for attempting a coup. The ruling cites a federal police investigation into whether he was involved in a money-laundering scheme tied to betting companies suspected of laundering about £680 million. Bolsonaro blamed his brother Eduardo, who told a U.S. podcast that Flávio should leave Brazil if he lost, and insisted “I never said that.” Like his father four years ago, he has not conceded, though his party said it recognizes the result. Folha de S.Paulo reported that allies and lawyers talked him out of trying to annul the election because the argument was legally weak, and he will lose his immunity when his Senate term ends early next year.
Owners of Apple’s new $2,000 iPhone Duo say its folding screen is cracking, sometimes within hours, in what users are calling “crackgate.” Photos of cracked screens spread across social media within hours of Apple’s first foldable going on sale last week. “Maybe folded it four times, hinge got tight and then made a loud pop,” one owner wrote on Reddit. Apple told 9to5Mac it is “aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units” and told affected users to contact AppleCare for a replacement. The repair site iFixit suggested that dust and debris getting into the hinge could be one cause, and said the “hinge started crunching” when it tested the phone in fluorescent powder. The phone sold out within minutes of launch, and Apple had called demand “nothing short of extraordinary.”
International tourism to the U.S. kept falling in September, with overseas visitors down 5.7% from a year earlier. The National Travel and Tourism Office figures exclude visitors from Mexico and Canada. Visitors from Western Europe, the largest overseas market, are down 8.7% so far in 2026. The slump follows 2025, the first post-Covid decline, when 4 million fewer foreign visitors came than in 2024 and their spending fell by more than $8 billion. The World Cup gave only a brief boost, with arrivals up 2.7% in June. The U.S. remains well below its pre-pandemic level of more than 79 million visitors, and the World Travel & Tourism Council has warned that the country “is now at a crossroads.”
The FTC and 20 states are suing Dollar General, alleging it charged customers more at checkout than the prices on its shelves for years. The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in Tennessee, says the chain received at least 29,265 complaints about incorrect prices between January 2023 and March 2026, from all 48 states where it operates. Regulators say the overcharging hit low-income shoppers and people on fixed incomes especially hard. “Dollar General has betrayed the trust of millions of American consumers,” said Christopher Mufarrige, who leads the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. The suit follows an $8.5 million class-action settlement over similar claims and more than $6 million in penalties from seven state settlements since 2019. Dollar General said “occasional price discrepancies can occur” and vowed to “defend this litigation vigorously.”
Republican Rep. Randy Fine says the government should re-examine everyone naturalized as a U.S. citizen since 1990, and that even Melania Trump and Elon Musk should be deported if they lied on their paperwork. Fine made the comments on NewsNation while discussing the Oct. 12 raid by Homeland Security Investigations on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington. “I think Ilhan Omar needs to be the first. She certainly should not be the last,” he said. When asked about Melania and Musk, he said he knew of no allegations against them, but that “anyone who lied on their paperwork to become a citizen should be denaturalized and should be deported. Anyone.” The Washington Post reported that the Omar investigation concerns whether her father misstated her birth date on immigration paperwork, and she has not been charged. Omar denies any wrongdoing and says she has received death threats and is afraid to go back to her home after the raid.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Third Time’s the Charge, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Donald Trump really wants to see James Comey go to jail, and he’s not about to let a little thing like “Comey never committing any crimes” stop him from trying. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Comey for a preposterous third time, now over threadbare old accusations that he ordered his staff to leak information to a reporter while serving as FBI director in October 2016.
The filing, called a “criminal information,” isn’t the same thing as an indictment. To indict someone, prosecutors typically need to get the approval of a grand jury convened for the purpose. And while that’s usually a trivial barrier—prosecutors, they say, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich—the DOJ hasn’t met it yet here. Instead, the “information” is DOJ’s attempt to get around a deadline: The ten-year statute of limitations for the crime they want to charge Comey with, which expired earlier this month.
Even this is a major procedural stretch. “Typically an information must be agreed to by a defendant—and Comey did not consent here,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN yesterday. “It therefore likely cannot extend the statute of limitations.” Not that the charges would be likely to stick anyway: If Trump’s DOJ mooks thought this was a more promising route to jailing Comey than the “86 47” charges that were already laughed out of court, they would have gone with this one first. But the mooks don’t want to be the ones who have to tell Trump it’s a ridiculous prosecution; they’d much prefer to leave that task to a judge.
The new case, Comey said in a video posted online, “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.” His lawyers have already asked a judge to dismiss the charges.
Trump himself denied knowledge of the case. “I don’t know much about it. I just heard about it,” Trump said, adding a minute later: “I know nothing about it.” Not all of these statements can be true at once; in all likelihood, none of them are.
Meanwhile, other Comeys keep slipping through Trump’s fingers. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Comey’s daughter, former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, was unlawfully fired by the Justice Department last year.
The younger Comey, who has since taken a private-sector job, will not return to Justice. But Judge Jesse Furman granted her a retroactive reinstatement anyway, ordering the administration to give her back pay covering the period from her firing last summer through the end of last year. The court also declared that the government had violated her Fifth Amendment due process rights in firing her, as well as some other laws.
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Teams Up With Ken Paxton To Turn Texas Blue For James Talarico, Sarah Jones and Jason Easley, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Trump and Ken Paxton barned stormed through Texas like a political natural disaster that was designed to help Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
Donald Trump and Ken Paxton have been holding a series of rallies on Tuesday in Texas to try to stop the bleeding and prevent James Talarico from becoming the first Democrat to be elected statewide in Texas by flipping a US Senate seat.
Trump and Paxton were a nightmare for Republican hopes in Texas.
Here was Trump’s message on affordability:
You could even come to Mar-a-Lago. I said it the other night. You'll be my guest at Mar-a-Lago. The problem is that for $5,000 the most you'll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I'm not even sure you could buy that! No, don't go there. It's not a good place if you're price-conscious.
That was Trump’s message on costs and affordability in Corpus Christi.
When Trump wasn’t telling non-billionaires to go F themselves, he was making deranged claims about James Talarico.
In Lubbock, the president said Talarico would:
Confiscate your guns and stop all ammunition sales. As your Senator, Ken Paxton will have only one thing to say to any Democrat who wants to destroy your Second Amendment. It's called, "Go take a hike. Go take a hike" The term he uses. He uses that term often, I think.
Trump then tried to blame Talarico for illegal immigration:
If Tallarico gets in, he'll immediately vote to open the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, child predators, brutal killers pouring into Texas just like they did just two years ago. So two years ago, there's never been anything like it. Twenty-five million people during the Biden term, at least in my opinion. I think they hold it down. Twenty-five, they came in totally unchecked, totally unvetted. Nobody knew anything about them. But you could see when they were coming in, these were not oftentimes very nice people. I have to always say oftentimes.
Video:
Trump tried to close the deal with voters by talking about Sen. Jon Husted’s backside:
I never knew he even played football. So I'm studying him, and I made the mistake of saying that I started off by studying his ass. I just want to say And then I looked at his feet and they were massive. Then I looked at his hands. See these hands? He said, "Nice hands. They're fine."
He had fingers like sausages. I looked at his hands. I said, "Look at it, guys." And then I patted him on the shoulder. I said, "Great job, Jon." He said a few words. I said, "Great job," and I hurt my hand. It was like I was hitting steel. But I made the mistake of studying his anatomy and explaining it to the audience, and the audience loved it. By the way, he went up 12 points that day. He went from being down to being up.
Jon Husted is currently trailing his Democratic opponent in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, by six points, so Trump’s story is a lie, but his journey to finding his truth seems to be continuing.
Trump’s presence only helps James Talarico.
By reminding voters that he doesn’t care about them while rambling on about who knows what and seeming completely detached from reality, Trump is helping to make the argument for electing Democrats like Talarico.
Trump is winning this election for Democrats one rally at a time.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 26, 2026 [Trump Hurts Republicans], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.
At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.
Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”
Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.
Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.
Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.
The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.
Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.
On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.
The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.
Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.
On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.
Today Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report saying that a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it.” The report offered new information from Beatrice Keul, a former Miss Switzerland, who says Trump used a pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City as a “hunting ground” to prey on young victims and that Trump raped her there in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised.
At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”
And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.
Bill Allison and Dana Hull of Bloomberg reported on October 22 that billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies depend on U.S. government contracts, has poured at least $445 million (not a typo) into the Republican effort to keep control of Congress. That money is swamping Democratic candidates, who nonetheless are holding on to a significant percentage of the vote.
So, last Thursday, the Trump administration sued the state of Alaska and its election officials personally to try to stop the certification of the U.S. Senate election there if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. Unless the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan Sullivan, wins, the Department of Justice says, state officials must not accept the results.
The Republicans’ complaint is that a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan is also on the ballot, and they are currently claiming that if the Republican incumbent loses it will be as a result of voter confusion. But the Alaska Supreme Court has already rejected a Republican attempt to get Daniel J. Sullivan removed, and the Alaska Republican Party chose how to identify the two Sullivans: the incumbent is listed as the Republican incumbent while the other Sullivan is listed without a party affiliation.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that he, personally, demanded the lawsuit.
On Saturday, in an article in Politico titled “Facing an electoral wipeout, Trump goes after the system,” Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, Alec Hernandez, Samuel Benson, and Lauren Fedor reminded readers that under Trump, the Justice Department has tried to get access to state voter files—so far, it has lost every case—and Trump has vowed to refuse to distribute federal funds to state and local governments that won’t make the changes he demands in election procedures.
As Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times noted on Sunday, Trump has also tried to use the United States Postal Service to screen ballots with the potential for rejecting tens of thousands of them. Now the Justice Department is trying to force California election officials to set aside ballots it claims were sent to 20,000 noncitizens, warning the officials they could be prosecuted if they don’t help the federal government identify alien voters.
California officials said the federal government has no authority to oversee their voter lists and note that the federal government has made false accusations against states. In July, officials from the Department of Homeland Security publicly told Nevada officials they had found nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, but ultimately, they could not provide evidence of even one.
On October 22, Madeleine May of CBS News reported that ICE agents, armed and in uniform, are knocking on doors in at least six states—California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin—to ask residents about their immigration status and whether they have either registered to vote or voted in past elections.
It is a crime to vote in federal elections if you are not a U.S. citizen, and the number of times such votes are cast is vanishingly low. As May notes, since the second Trump administration began it has charged—not obtained convictions, charged—just 156 people out of 227 million registered voters.
But Trump has made the Big Lie that Democrats win elections only through fraud central to his hopes of keeping MAGA in control of the government, and he is weaponizing the government against his political opponents by using the idea of illegal voting as justification for trying to intimidate lawful voters. It is a tactic straight out of the Reconstruction South, when gangs of white supremacists, often organized as the Ku Klux Klan, visited Republican voters before elections to make it clear their survival depended on staying away from the polls.
Even so, the Alaska suit was a new level of election interference and may reflect the recently exposed story that the administration is backing the sale of a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska to a sanctioned Russian company. Such a plan will be harder to pull off if there is a Democratic senator in the state conducting oversight.
This transparent attempt to steal the election is unlikely to succeed in court, but it is another way for Trump to sow confusion over the elections and lay the groundwork for challenging a Democratic victory. This afternoon, Trump continued that effort by posting on social media a vow that sounded even more desperate than his repeated promises to pay Americans $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election,” he wrote, “will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!”
Hope for America, Opinion: J.D. Vance told the truth, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 26-27, 2026. At 12:42 this afternoon (Monday), the Vice President of the United States stood at the podium inside an airport hangar in Belgrade, Montana, with bleachers full of supporters behind him and a much thinner crowd of people on the floor in front of him.
For nearly 30 minutes, he made racist remarks and bizarre accusations, engaged in fearmongering, complained about the weather, and shared how excited he was that a congressman had complimented his “beautiful blue eyes,” adding that the president, too, had been “noticing a lot about the physiques of everybody lately.” Then he said something he might not have meant to about the direct correlation between gas prices and Donald Trump: “They skyrocket every time some tin-pot dictator decides to throw a tantrum.”
What he said was even odder when you consider what CNN just reported: American forces in the Middle East are prepared to launch new, potentially major, military operations against Iran “within 96 hours of receiving” an order from Donald Trump. “It will be a big effort,” one U.S. official said, and the plans reportedly include strikes on a range of infrastructure, including nuclear sites. Officials in the report noted it was a question of when, not if, it would happen and said it could come any time before the end of the year. According to an Israeli security source, “The plans are ready, waiting for Trump’s approval, could be after the midterms.” The same reporting says Benjamin Netanyahu tried to convince Trump to launch a joint attack before the elections, and Trump did not give him the green light. Netanyahu’s office has called the report fake news, and Trump has reportedly not made a final decision. But it sounds like the next fuel increase could be right around the corner, maybe soon after the midterm elections, so the worst of the impact wouldn’t be felt until after Americans have cast their votes and the ballots have been counted.
The preparations being made are not being limited to the Middle East, either. Over the weekend, Fox News Digital reported on a Pentagon initiative called FORTRESS, which would require every major military installation in the continental United States to be able to sustain essential operations on its own for at least 90 days in case of a major war, with backup power, strategic reserves of munitions and fuel, and plans for civilian factories to shift to defense production. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Fox, “The next conflict will likely be fought on multiple fronts.” The timing is concerning, and we have to ask the question of whether these preparations have anything to do with the military operations reportedly being considered against Iran.
Vance spent the rest of his half hour telling Americans who they should be afraid of. He repeatedly used the word “sovereignty” while talking about everything from immigration to housing and jobs, invoking America’s right to govern itself while making ordinary political disagreements sound like threats to our country’s freedom and independence. By using the word this way, he suggested that anyone who disagrees with his policies is somehow against America itself. He declared that “we have ended the tyranny of DEI and racial discrimination in jobs and in universities,” later describing diversity programs as “the bureaucracy of DEI and racial hatred.” He attacked transgender Americans, telling the audience, “In this state, we believe there are men and we believe there are women. And anybody who tells you that one can change into the other is a damn fool.”
But one of the strangest moments was when he declared, “I want a healthy two-party system. I want a system where people of different viewpoints can sit across the aisle because they believe in America and they can compromise on how best to serve it.” Less than ten seconds later, though, he accused congressional Democrats of not believing “in the United States of America” and spending decades teaching children to be ashamed of their country. Near the end, he warned Montana about “the crazy Democrats who are going to tear it down.”
The people he treated with the most contempt today were the ones who did the most American thing that there is; they protested. At one point, a woman in the crowd yelled “liars” before law enforcement officers escorted her out. Reports say three protesters were removed from this event, and that it was the sixth time this month protesters had interrupted one of his public appearances. Vance’s response to the increased discord was to tell the crowd, “You are going to have a few yahoos who pretend that the Democrats aren’t who they already have shown themselves to be,” and then to warn them, “Don’t judge them by the yahoos they send to protest our events.”
What I took away from this speech was what he said near the end: “the greatness of this place is something we inherit and something we have a sacred duty to preserve for our own children.” He then spoke about the generations of “ordinary men and women who took extraordinary risks on behalf of people they would never meet because they loved this country and they had faith in its people.” If only he were invoking those words for good rather than turning them into a weapon against his fellow Americans.
When those words are spoken by people who truly care about our country and what we will leave for the next generations, they remind us of the sacrifices made by those who came before us, the ones who crossed oceans chasing America’s promises and the ones who were enslaved and still fought for a freedom this country denied them. We are claiming the same inheritance. The difference is what we believe it requires of us. He uses it to draw the circle of who counts as American smaller and smaller, until it no longer includes Democrats, transgender people, protesters, or anyone who refuses to fall in line. We believe it demands the opposite. This country is big enough for us all. We, as a collective, are what truly makes America great. The Vice President does not get to stand in a hangar and declare that tens of millions of Americans do not believe in their own country, because loving America has never meant loving the people in power. It has always meant holding them to what this country is supposed to be and never surrendering it to the perverted version of America they want it to be.
Thankfully, more people are standing up and refusing to hand it over. A social media creator named Nick Pringle went out onto the streets of Michigan and asked voters a simple question about their state’s Senate race: Abdul El-Sayed or Mike Rogers, and why? What he was told, over and over again, was that this race is about the heart of America. “It’s just more about my morals and values, you know,” one voter told him after saying he would be voting for El-Sayed. Another said choosing El-Sayed was simply “the right thing to do.” Another explained that El-Sayed “cares more about Michigan and represents my values better,” and wanted “competent policies and things we actually want to see get done.” When Pringle asked one young woman which issue she cared about most, she answered, “All of them, including human rights.”
This focus on voting according to their conscience isn’t just happening in Michigan among Democrats and liberal-leaning independents. It is happening in Texas, too. Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, announced that he voted for Democrat James Talarico over Ken Paxton. “I have been deeply troubled by Paxton’s conduct as Texas Attorney General,” he wrote, adding, “My concerns about his judgment and conduct are hardly mine alone.” He pointed to Paxton’s 2020 lawsuit to overturn the presidential election, writing, “I believe that effort was an affront to our democratic institutions and the peaceful transfer of power.” His niece, Barbara Bush, the former president’s daughter, gave $2,500 to Lone Star Rising PAC, a super PAC supporting Talarico. These are people with deep roots in the Republican Party who are making it clear that their loyalty to their country and its democratic institutions matters more than their loyalty to a political party.
There are eight days left before Americans decide what kind of country we are going to be for years, and maybe decades, to come. We must shift our country back to one of decency and compassion, and that starts with voting according to our conscience and reminding others to do the same. We can’t live in a country or a world divided by hate coming from the very people who are supposed to lead it. America belongs to its people, including those who love it enough to tell the truth about what is happening to it, who keep showing up, and who refuse to give up on what this country is supposed to be. That has never mattered more than it does tonight. So vote, and bring someone with you. Drop off your ballot, call your friends, and talk to the neighbor who isn’t sure yet. We still have time to change the direction of our country, but that is going to take us standing together and never letting a president or vice president scare us into abandoning our values, our compassion and care for each other, or our responsibility to the generations who will inherit this country after us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
Trump To Reduce Rules For U.S. Methane Leakers To Boost Texas Candidate
New York Times, Trump to Loosen Rules for Oil Firms on Methane, a Potent Warming Gas, Brad Plumer, Oct. 27, 2026. The Biden administration had sought to crack down on methane leaks, a big driver of climate change. Those rules are now being scaled back.
The Trump administration is set to loosen rules designed to force oil and gas companies to cut their emissions of methane, a gas considered a “super pollutant” because it traps so much heat in the atmosphere.
President Trump is expected to announce the plan at a Tuesday campaign rally in Texas with Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, according to two administration officials who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The move would mark one of the most significant steps by the Trump administration to scale back federal policies designed to tackle climate change.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere in the short term than carbon dioxide does. It is responsible for nearly one-third of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and experts have said that reducing methane leaks is one of the fastest ways to slow global warming.
The Biden administration issued rules in 2023 that would have required oil and gas facilities to monitor their operations and prevent methane from leaking into the atmosphere. The Trump administration has already delayed those rules from taking effect.
Now the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to relax requirements to curb methane emissions from hundreds of thousands of “marginal” oil and gas wells that are nearing the end of their useful lives and have relatively low output. These wells account for around 7 percent of U.S. oil and gas production but produce roughly half of the industry’s methane emissions, the agency has previously said.
The timing of the announcement was first reported by Bloomberg.
Trump administration officials have cast the move as an effort to bolster U.S. oil and gas production and ease prices for consumers. High fuel prices, driven up by the U.S.-led war with Iran, are weighing on Republican candidates ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In Texas, the nation’s top oil-producing state, polls show Mr. Paxton trailing Democrat James Talarico, and Mr. Trump is aiming to boost his campaign.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, previewed the changes earlier this month, saying that some oil and gas producers had called the Biden-era methane rules unworkable and estimated that easing the requirements would save the industry $45 billion through 2050.
“Americans must be able to afford to heat their homes in the winter and fill up their car and drive to work,” Mr. Zeldin told a gathering of oil and gas producers in New Mexico. “They can’t do that when the people producing the energy are weighed down by unnecessary burdens. The Trump E.P.A. is committed to fixing this so the U.S. can reach its full energy potential.”
Oil and gas production is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. Methane can leak from wells, pipelines, storage tanks and other fossil fuel infrastructure. The gas can also come from natural sources such as cows, rice fields and wetlands.
Environmental groups have urged the Trump administration not to loosen the Biden-era rules, saying that methane leaks from oil and gas operations were a form of waste that it made sense to curb. They said the methane rules were also expected to cut other harmful pollutants such as volatile organic compounds, which can form smog, and benzene, which has been linked to cancer.
“Methane leaks are the dumbest kind of pollution because the industry is losing the very product it is selling,” said David Doniger, senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Many large oil and gas companies have said they support at least some limits on methane emissions, noting that they have already invested in expensive technologies to monitor and capture the gas.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With Seven Days To Go The GOP’s Battlefield Keeps Deteriorating And Democrats Are Driving Deep Into Red States And Red Places, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 27, 2026. The people of Hungary chose wisely. The people of Serbia and Brazil also chose wisely. May the people of Israel choose wisely today, and let the American people continue to choose wisely in these final seven days of the 2026 Election.
I sat down with Greg Sargent of The New Republic late yesterday afternoon to talk about Trump’s closing struggles, our opportunities, and what we are seeing in the early vote. You can find our discussion here, and also catch me talking in recent days to Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen over at The Contrarian and with Alex Wagner for her Substack, How The Hell.
With just seven days to go I remain very bullish on our chances this year. Trump is ending the campaign in places like Mississippi and South Carolina, fighting to hold on to Senate seats that one ever imagined would be in play this cycle. The Senate GOP SuperPAC just announced buys in these four states:
Trump and his regime continue to produce a deeply negative vibe each day, as the media is full of stories of their corruption, the failed war, the crap economy, their infighting and chaos, and his rancid ramblings from his rallies. As Greg and I discuss the early vote looks promising, as Democrats are running ahead of 2024 at this point by 11 points:
turnout is outpacing 2022, and the electorate that has voted so far is much younger and less white than our last midterm. Here’s this morning’s update on the demos we are tracking. This is very encouraging stuff:
But as we enter this final week we must keep this data from the 2024 Exit Polls in mind. We won September and October in 2024 but lost the final week of the election:
And while we lead in all these critical Senate races, and Rs are acting panicked and scared, all these Senate races are close, and we need to learn from 2024 by winning this final week and closing strong. A new poll of Michigan has El-Sayed up 3 today, and another in Maine has Troy Jackson up 2 - things are close! Yes, we can win all these Senate races and have the election we all want to have but we need to keep the pedal to the metal, brothers and sisters, keep driving the early vote, run up the score, and win this thing in October. No letting up!Subscribed
In our discussion with Leon Krauze and Maria Cardona this afternoon we will be talking about the implications of the restoration of Dem margins with young and Hispanic voters, margins that we see in recent polling, and the clear intensity both groups are bringing to the election right now. For the last time we saw a structural shift of young people and Hispanics to the Democratic Party was in 2006 and 2008, and look what it did - it produced our best national popular vote run of the post WWII era, and a majority of the vote over the last five elections, even including 2024:
The restoration of our pre-2024 margins with young people and Hispanics is an essential piece in making us the majority party again, as is our deep drive into red places and red states throughout the country. More on all this with Leon and Maria at 230pm today, and in the days ahead. We will also be taking a look at what we are seeing with Black voters in the South later this this week. For in states like Louisiana and South Carolina we are seeing a very elevated and encouraging black voter turnout so far, and Republicans are clearly worried by what they are seeing.
A few other things we are tracking today…..
Signaling that a new era of accountability is coming House Judiciary Democrats released a 50 page report yesterday about Trump and Epstein. Here’s more from MS Now:
House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.
“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”
The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.”
In Brazil Trumpist Flávio Bolsonaro has functionally conceded the election while the Supreme Court ordered him to surrender his passport and barred him from leaving the country due to an ongoing corruption investigation. He may soon be joining his father in jail.
The NYT has a fascinating article about the importance of a raucous social media campaign to Lula’s surprise win.
Trump has announced that he will defying a Federal judge’s orders and proceed with stealing public land to build him and his friends a fancy golf course in DC.
The UN officially declares Putin, Trump’s buddy, a war criminal (via The AP):
Russia committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine by intentionally attacking energy infrastructure, leaving millions of people without electricity and heat in freezing temperatures, a U.N.-backed inquiry reported Monday.
The inquiry also found evidence that Russia recruited men from 29 countries into its armed forces “through deception or coercion” to fight in Ukraine in violation of international law. The men, age 18 to 60, “came mostly from vulnerable and marginalized communities, with a poor economic background and a low education level,” it said.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Rubbing a Rabbit’s Foot, William Kristol, right, Oct. 27, 2026. We’re a week out from election day, and things continue to look good. In fact, I’ve got to say, they’re looking a little bit better every day. The early vote—
[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER TO KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT OVER MY SHOULDER, AND, YES, PULL ON MY EARLOBE (THAT ONE’S NEW TO ME, TOO, BUTAPPARENTLY THEY DO THAT AS WELL IN SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD). I DO THESE THINGS OF COURSE TO PREVENT BEING JINXED AND TO WARD OFF THE EVIL EYE AFTER MAKING SUCH A HOPEFUL OR CONFIDENT STATEMENT. I WANT TO ASSURE ANY AND ALL JEALOUS DEITIES READING THIS NEWSLETTER THAT I’M NOT TRYING TO BE PRESUMPTUOUS. REALLY! I’M JUST TRYING TO TELL IT LIKE IT IS.]
Anyway, as I was saying . . .
Insofar as one can read the entrails of the early vote—and more than 30 million Americans, roughly a quarter of the likely overall turnout, have already voted—they seem to confirm the polls, which continue to signal a big blue wave.
For example, Reuters/Ipsos, which collected responses as recently as yesterday, has President Trump at 35 percent approval and 65 percent disapproval among registered voters, with 15 percent strongly approving and an astounding 53 percent strongly disapproving. Democrats lead the generic ballot among both registered and likely voters by 9 points. And Democrats say they’re more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll is no outlier. In the FiftyPlusOne polling average, the generic ballot now has Democrats ahead by 9.2 percent, up from 7.7 percent at the beginning of October, and 6.3 percent at the beginning of September. The trend remains Democrats’ friend, and the Republican spending onslaught hasn’t done much if anything to stop it.
Meanwhile, Trump’s election subversion schemes have so far proven ineffectual (which doesn’t mean we won’t see lots of desperate efforts over the next week, and then perhaps after the votes are counted). And it’s hard to see any great surprise emerging in these last few days for the Republicans.
[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER ONCE AGAIN TO KNOCK WOOD, TOSS SALT, MUTTER HEARTFELT IMPRECATIONS TO THE GODS . . .]
Okay, back to business.
So the House is almost certain to flip, and the Senate seems likely—I’d say very likely—to do so. [WOOD KNOCKED, SALT TOSSED, IMPRECATIONS MUTTERED, ONCE AGAIN.] Since 1954, there’ve only been two occasions on which both chambers have changed hands in a midterm election: 1994 and 2006.
The 2006 precedent could serve as something of a warning. That midterm wave was followed by a big Democratic presidential victory in 2008 and further congressional gains. But the financial crisis of 2008 was so severe that the Obama administration had to spend an awful lot of time cleaning it up. The administration also made some political miscalculations. And the midterm elections of 2010 changed the country’s political momentum decisively.
In an economic and geopolitical environment as fraught as the one we’re now in, it’s going to be a real challenge not just to follow up a midterm victory with a presidential electoral victory, but then to govern in a way that succeeds in actually reversing the nation’s course and changing the country significantly for the better. As I suggested last week, the 1930–1932 sequence, which cleared the path for the New Deal, is probably the best precedent for that. But that was a long time ago, in a different nation and world. “Hardly a man is now alive” who remembers that era. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons from it.
So spend the next week obsessing over the reports from the various states and studying the polls and analyzing the early vote reports, and doing what you can to help to squeeze out every possible victory. But you might also begin to pull out your books about FDR and the 1930s. And you might want to take a look at an ever greater president, as well: Abraham Lincoln, who said in his second annual message to Congress, in December 1862:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Next Tuesday, Democrats will likely be given a chance—
[KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT, PRAY TO THE GODS]
—to begin to save the country. To do so, they’ll have to learn from, even rise to, the examples of Roosevelt and Lincoln.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Admits He Went Too Far in Iran And Doesn’t Know What to Do… WILL SALETAN uses Trump’s own words to expose the contradictions behind the Iran war.QUICK HITS
MISSISSIPPI CHURNING: The Senate race that has gotten the least amount of attention relative to how competitive it could be is almost certainly the one in Mississippi featuring Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith against Democrat Scott Colom.
Conventional wisdom holds that Colom simply doesn’t stand a chance, regardless of how big the state’s black population is. There are simply too many Republican voters. And that very well may be true. But in an eleventh-hour gambit, Democrats are making clear that they believe there is a contingency of Republicans in the state who will cross party lines.
A new ad by Government That Works PAC, a group supporting Democratic candidates across the country, is launching this week in Mississippi featuring Hyde-Smith’s Republican primary challenger, Sarah Adlakha, attacking Hyde-Smith. The ad isn’t a leftover of the primary, either. It’s a newly recorded spot, meant for a general election audience, with six figures behind it.
In the ad, which was first shared with The Bulwark, Adlakha calls herself a “lifelong Republican” who ran against Hyde-Smith because she believed Mississippi deserved a “true conservative.” Adlakha says Hyde-Smith “is just part of the club, paying for fancy trips with your money and taking hundreds of thousands from lobbyists” and accuses her of taking “reckless vote after reckless vote to expand the national debt.”
“This is what Nancy Pelosi would look like if she was from Mississippi,” Adlakha says. Notably, Adlakha doesn’t encourage voters to back Colom in the ad, nor does she say she will herself.
Still, Democrats are hopeful that if they can peel off enough GOP votes (or simply encourage a fair number to sit the election out) they might be able to score a major upset in Mississippi. The party’s main Senate super PAC announced last week that it would start spending money on the race. And a number of high-profile party leaders—including Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg—have visited the state to campaign for Colom.
Republicans, too, seem to believe that the race is competitive. Trump held a campaign rally in Mississippi on Monday night and the principal Senate Republican super PAC is spending more than $1 million to defend Hyde-Smith.
Whether voters will be moved by Adlakha’s ad is an open question. She isn’t a well-known figure in the state. She moved to Mississippi from Illinois thirteen years ago. And there were questions about her motivations for running in the GOP primary. The Magnolia Tribune reported during the primary that “some Republican insiders have speculated that Adlakha is a ‘Democratic plant’ or ‘coordinating’ with” Colom’s campaign” in the hopes of forcing Hyde-Smith to spend money that she otherwise would have saved for the general election.
Still, in the Republican primary, Adlakha received 19 percent of the vote.
PREPPING FOR CLAUDE’S CLOSE-UP: Are we still living in an AI bubble? Will it burst at some point, and if it does, how much of the U.S. economy will it bring down with it? Even if it doesn’t burst, will AI ultimately crash the economy anyway? These are just several of the fun and interesting questions tied to the upcoming IPO of AI giant Anthropic—in advance of which the company laid out a remarkable financial prospectus yesterday. Bottom line: They’re making a ton of money, and spending it way, way faster than they’re making it. Here’s the New York Times:
Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of the year and its net loss was $80.7 billion, driven largely by a one-time charge. Stunningly, the company has committed up to $807 billion in contracts for data centers, chips and computing power, many of which cannot be canceled, over the next 10 years, according to a tally by The New York Times. Many of the contracts span different lengths of time, and the terms have yet to be finalized for some.
The numbers underscored how much Anthropic is betting that its future business will justify its outlays. Even its public offering, which could raise more than $100 billion, may not provide the company with enough money to fund its intense infrastructure needs, as it warned that it might need to seek additional financing sooner than anticipated.
Hey, what’s another trillion or so among friends? Read the whole thing.
New York Times, An Extremely Detailed Ranking of the Most Gerrymandered States in America, Eve Washington, Nate Cohn and Rumsey Taylor, Oct. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Which state has America’s worst gerrymander? After a year of redistricting battles, we have an answer.
We’ve ranked all 44 states with more than one district by the fairness of their congressional maps. Many of the most notorious gerrymanders are ranked near the top of the list. But there are also some oft-derided maps that we judge to be fundamentally fine.
A gerrymander is as much art as science, with plenty of room for critics — or different statistical measures — to disagree about which map’s twisting lines are most offensive. But this list is not simply a matter of taste: We’ve based our ranking on the results of thousands of computer simulations that draw compact districts without any consideration of partisanship or race.
These simulations are a broadly accepted way to measure gerrymandering, including by courts. We compared each state’s map with the simulations, then sorted them according to two equally weighted measures: 1) How many more seats the map gives one party, over the simulated estimates; and 2) How aggressive the gerrymander is, meaning how close the map is to the most extreme gerrymander we can cobble together out of the simulations. (A more detailed description of our methodology is at the bottom.)
Because the simulations don’t take partisanship into account, some states are considered fair even if the map appears tilted toward one party or another.
Whether a map should ignore partisanship or reflect it is a hotly contested subject in redistricting. We accept both ways here: If a map does reflect the state’s partisan balance, even if it diverges from the simulations, we consider it fair, too. But the most gerrymandered states, as you’ll see below, fail no matter how we look at it.
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Michigan Looks Lost For Republicans As Abdul El-Sayed’s Lead Grows After Trump Rally, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 27, 2026. New polling shows Abdul El-Sayed’s lead growing in the Michigan US Senate race, which explains why JD Vance was desperately blaming the Democrat for high gas prices.
It is a bit soon to tell, but new polling released after Donald Trump’s rally for Mike Rogers shows that Abdul El-Sayed’s lead has been growing in the state with a week to go before the midterm election.
A new WDIV/Detroit News poll found El-Sayed leading Rogers 51.4%-45.1% Michigan voters who know Mike Rogers don’t like him, as his favorability rating is a net (-15), with 32% of voters favoring him and 47 giving the Republican an unfavorable rating.
Abdul El-Sayed has a net (-2) favorable rating, with 42% of voters favoring him and 44% giving the Democrat an unfavorable rating.
Rogers is flailing to close out the election as he had a very uncomfortable Meet The Press where he refused to say that he is MAGA Republican on the same day that he rallied with Donald Trump.
The Trump rally itself was a disaster, and Trump didn’t try to hide his bigoted attacks on El-Sayed. The president even tried to connect the Democratic candidate, who was 16 years old at the time, to the 9/11 attacks.
The state of the race helps to explain JD Vance’s complete desperation as he campaigned in Michigan on Tuesday.
It was a sign that even Republicans understand that the election is slipping away when Vance said:
For the first time in a long time, we are drilling more, and we are making energy development a core priority. We are fighting every single day for energy dominance, the kind of independence that leads us to rely on nobody except for the workers of our country.
So it takes a certain kind of audacity from Democrats like Abdul to talk about the very problem they created. Their policies are the things that give these Middle Eastern dictators control over our lives in the first place. And you know what Mike Rogers is fighting for? To give power back to the people by investing in our country.
Abdul El-Sayed did not create high gas prices. JD Vance and Donald Trump did.
Vance’s comments are especially funny after Trump told the American people over the weekend that he doesn’t give a damn about their suffering at the pump because the oil companies are making a fortune.
By the way, America has been energy independent since Obama, so Vance is bragging about something that Democrats did decades ago.
What Vance and Trump are doing is taking money out of the pockets of the American people to enrich Big Oil.
Mike Rogers was already unpopular, so bringing in the even more unpopular JD Vance and Donald Trump to campaign for him might have cost Republicans the Senate race.
With a week to go, Michigan might be a lost cause for Donald Trump, Mike Rogers, JD Vance, and the GOP.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer,Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. Israel’s military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter.
In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter.
Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.
Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The Israeli officials and the people briefed on the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale for pressing to attack Iran before the election was not clear, but a return to war could have potentially disrupted or even delayed the vote.
The behind-the-scenes tensions over a possible Israeli attack or other action against Iran come as Mr. Netanyahu has been publicly portraying the stakes of the election in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Over the weekend, he posted an A.I.-generated image on social media of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv and warned in a television appearance that the vote would decide “Israel’s existence.”
The appeals to Israelis’ fears are meant to get voters to see the conflict with Iran as the most urgent issue and to entrust him with continuing to lead the struggle against Israel’s chief regional adversary.
When Mr. Netanyahu pushed to heat up the conflict with Iran, General Zamir raised a number of objections and concerns and ultimately concluded that there was no immediate or urgent need for action, the officials and people briefed on the matter said.
Such a determination by the military chief carries special weight: It can make it harder to portray the timing as a military necessity.
While General Zamir was not opposed to taking action against Iran in principle, he objected to doing so before the election, according to an Israeli official and two people briefed on the matter. General Zamir and the Israeli air force commander, Maj. Gen. Omer Tischler, cited the political sensitivities and the difficulty of explaining to the public why it had to occur then, according to two senior Israeli defense officials.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
In a statement, the Israeli military said its operational decision making was strictly based “on security considerations,” as well as “its responsibility as a national institution.”
The concerns about political motivations for an attack on Iran do not expire on Tuesday. According to three senior Israeli defense officials and two people briefed on the matter, a resumption of fighting with Iran in the weeks after the election could also have a large impact.
If Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents prevail in the election, they would likely have an opportunity to form the new government, but a return to war could hinder or even thwart their ability to assemble a governing coalition within the time allotted by law. Renewed fighting could also create political pressure to establish a national unity government that includes Mr. Netanyahu.
Reports of disagreement between Mr. Netanyahu and the military over a possible attack, first carried by Israel’s Channel 12, sparked outrage in Israel. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s rivals, Avigdor Liberman, demanded Monday that the attorney general open an investigation into whether the prime minister had committed treason.
“The attempt to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including sacrificing Israeli soldiers, just because of the fear of losing the elections, is a betrayal of the nation,” Mr. Liberman, a defense minister and foreign minister in earlier Netanyahu governments, wrote in a formal complaint.
Mr. Netanyahu, 77, is battling to keep his hold on power in the face of opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff.
Mr. Netanyahu’s appeals to voters became increasingly disturbing over the campaign’s final weekend, with the prime minister saying that his defeat could lead to Israel’s annihilation. He has also suggested that tougher times could be ahead for Israel regardless of the outcome.
On Friday, he said that Israelis should prepare for the end of billions of dollars in American military support from the United States, given the sharp decline of Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion. He also said the possibility that Israel will face “banking sanctions” arising from international condemnation could force the country in coming years to rely on cryptocurrency to circumvent the penalties.
The remarks prompted a wave of criticism. Israel’s nonpartisan central bank, the Bank of Israel, issued a rare warning, saying that cryptocurrency would not save the economy in the event of international sanctions. And a former governor of the Bank of Israel, Jacob Frenkel, said that turning away from the global financial system would make Israel into “a leper.”
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President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).
New York Times, The Digital Army That Catapulted Lula to Victory in Brazil, Ana Ionova, Adam B. Ellick and Jack Nicas, Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won another term on Sunday, with the help of a seismic social media campaign that convinced Brazilians to reject his rival.
It started with a WhatsApp channel with a few thousand followers. It exploded into a digital army of 10 million people that helped swing Latin America’s biggest election.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil staged a stunning comeback on Sunday, achieving an unexpected victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing challenger whose father tried to stage a coup after losing the last election.
In winning, Mr. Lula did what no other presidential candidate has accomplished in Brazil’s history — he won election after finishing second in the first round.
His victory rested, to a significant degree, on social media. A tidal wave of messages, memes and reels flooded Brazil, a chronically online nation of 214 million, and rallied millions of Brazilians with diverging views around a single task: barring the return of the Bolsonaro family to power.
Mr. Lula’s win delivered a powerful rebuke to a right-wing movement barreling through Latin America that has been applauded by President Trump. It also deals a blow to Washington’s plans for economic and military dominance in the region, extending the reign of the only leader in Latin America — and one of the few globally — who has defied Mr. Trump.
Mr. Lula won by about double the margin he achieved in 2022, when he narrowly defeated Mr. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro. The achievement is all the more remarkable because Mr. Lula, who entered the race as the underdog, received more than 10 million votes between the first and second rounds of the election, or roughly three out of every four new votes up for grabs on Sunday. The younger Mr. Bolsonaro captured roughly four million additional votes than he did in the first round.
“It was a very big victory for global democracy,” said Christian Lynch, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University. It was driven, he said, by an unprecedented mobilization of Brazilian voters. “We never saw anything like this.”
New York Times, Flávio Bolsonaro Leaves Brazil for the U.S. After Election Defeat, Ana Ionova and Edward Wong, Oct. 27, 2026. Mr. Bolsonaro was trying to get to the United States after the Brazilian police asked him to hand over his passports because of his links to an investigation.
Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate defeated in Sunday’s election in Brazil, has left for the United States on Tuesday, according to two U.S. officials, a day after the Brazilian police asked him to hand over his passports because he was being investigated in a money-laundering case.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
Mr. Bolsonaro is being investigated over his links to a Brazilian lawyer who is accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a vast fraud scheme, according to a court document reviewed by The New York Times.
Separately, he is also the subject of an inquiry over the millions of dollars he raised from a disgraced banker at the center of a huge corruption scheme to finance a biopic of his father, Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Mr. Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup after losing the presidential election in 2022.
Flávio Bolsonaro, who has not been charged, has denied wrongdoing and has cast the investigations as political persecution.
After initially rejecting the election results, he accepted his defeat on Monday but claimed his opponent, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had used unfair tactics to win. Mr. Bolsonaro said he planned to file a legal challenge over the election outcome.
President Trump also criticized Brazil’s election on Monday, saying, “It looked like another rigged election.”
The White House and State Department did not reply to requests for comment on Mr. Bolsonaro’s travels.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, lives in the United States and maintains close ties to the Trump administration. The U.S. government granted the brother permanent resident status, known as a green card, in July. He had been living in the United States since 2025.
New York Times, Live Updates: Israeli Exit Polls Show Strength of Opposition to Netanyahu but No Clear Winner, David M. Halbfinger, Leo Sands, Max Bearak and Isabel Kershner, Oct. 27, 2026. A bloc of opposition parties, including two predominantly Arab parties, appeared to be leading over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and his allies. Here’s the latest.
Initial exit polls showed a bloc of opposition parties, including two predominantly Arab parties, held a lead over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and his coalition allies in Israel’s pivotal parliamentary election on Tuesday.
But against the odds, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party held a small lead over that of Gadi Eisenkot, below left, a former military chief, according to exit polls published by Israel’s mainstream television networks. The exit poll results, if confirmed, mean that no clear victor was yet in sight as the voting drew to a close Tuesday night.
The first exit polls published by Israel’s largest broadcasters immediately after the polls closed at 10 p.m. local time (4 p.m. Eastern) indicated that Mr. Netanyahu’s party would win the most parliamentary seats.
The exit polls showed the two Arab parties winning as many as 17 or 18 seats in Parliament, which would be their strongest showing ever.
But their strength could complicate matters for Mr. Eisenkot. He and some of his potential partners have balked at relying on the Arab parties’ support in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Without the Arab parties, the opposition bloc held only a narrow advantage over the Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, the exit polls showed.
Israel’s exit polls have a spotty history of accuracy, particularly in tight races. An official result is unlikely until Thursday. And the casting of ballots is just the beginning of what can be a drawn-out process to determine who will form Israel’s next government.
Israelis flocked to the polls in record numbers throughout the day. The election is Israel’s first since the Oct. 7 attacks, which caused the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and ignited three years of war that left Gaza largely in ruins and nearly all its population displaced.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
All Rise News, Analysis: Comey’s third criminal case: The dumbest yet? Adam Klasfeld, right, Oct. 27, 2026. Here’s why the latest docket may have the shortest shelf life.
Comey’s third criminal case: The dumbest yet? Here’s why the latest docket may have the shortest shelf life.
In the face of stiff and formidable competition, the latest criminal case brought against ex-FBI director James Comey may be the most foolish, idiotic and lawless brought by the Trump Justice Department to date.
It may also have the shortest shelf life.
Screenshots of former FBI Director James Comey, whose 10-year-term included part of the first Trump administration before the president fired him for allowing the FBI to investigate potential Trump team connections to Russia and its interference in the 2016 campaign, reacting to each criminal case.
To explain why that is the case, and how stunning a distinction that is, a recent historical review is in order.
The first criminal case against Comey for alleged false statements to Congress lasted just under two months before a federal judge dismissed it because former Donald Trump aide and insurance lawyer turned make-believe U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan was unlawfully appointed.
Despite howls of protest from MAGA-world, Halligan’s illegitimate tenure was never a mere technicality. Trump installed Halligan in that position after firing her predecessor who rejected the case — as did every other serious prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan’s maiden voyage inside the grand jury room raised serious questions as to whether a valid indictment was ever filed.
Had it survived, Comey would have had a number of other viable challenges: The false statements charge hinged upon Comey’s answers to nearly unintelligible questions by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sept. 30, 2020. Comey responded that he stood by his testimony from three years earlier, for which the five-year statute of limitations had expired. Comey’s lawyers said that he delivered truthful testimony both times, but they said it ultimately didn’t matter because standing by prior testimony is incapable of being false.
In addition, Comey’s motion to dismiss the case for vindictive prosecution had a literal trump card: Trump openly published a social media post directing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to file charges.
The Trump DOJ’s second criminal case was ludicrous on its face, accusing Comey of threatening to kill the president of the United States by taking a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach, posting a picture of it on Instagram and deleting it.
The seashells spelled out “86 47,” an arrangement that prosecutors alleged to be Mafia code for “Kill Trump.” That definition flies in the face of most reputable dictionaries, an infamous gangster’s interview with the government, and the lived experiences of everyone who’s ever worked at a restaurant. Virtually all First Amendment experts agree that it wouldn’t matter if the government’s fanciful reading of the numbers was accurate.
Nevertheless, the so-called “seashells” case somehow managed to fill the pages of a federal indictment, and the case has remained pending for nearly half a year.
The latest criminal case against Comey may not achieve either of these distinctions.
Prosecutors now accuse Comey of leaking national defense information to The New York Times on Oct. 5, 2016 for an article titled “Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter.”
Two prior U.S. Attorneys investigated Comey several years ago in connection with the alleged leak, and both declined to bring any charges. The first, John Durham, was the special counsel that investigated the origins of the Russia investigation, and he was touted at the time as MAGA’s answer to Robert Mueller. But Durham, whose broader investigation largely fizzled, never prosecuted the disclosure.
In 2019, another U.S. Attorney opened up a second probe code-named “Tropic Vortex” in Washington, D.C., according to court records. This investigation also ended without charges.
A decade after the publication of the article, on the day that the statute of limitations was set to expire, the Trump Justice Department — led by Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — raced to federal court to file what’s known as a criminal information against Comey based on these allegations that their predecessors shunned.
The nature of the charging instrument matters because prosecutors tried to sidestep the grand jury on the day that the statute of limitations ran. Comey’s attorneys argue that’s game over, pointing to the text of the statute.
“An indictment for any violation of title 18, United States Code, section 792, 793, or 794, [...] may be found at any time within ten years next after such violation shall have been committed,” the statute reads.
Four days after the third case was charged, Comey’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that the statute of limitations has run, and they said that the ex-FBI director never waived an indictment. The defense team also moved to unseal the case, which was being secretly litigated for weeks until it became public on Monday at Comey’s urging.
In granting Comey’s request, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden noted that the case had “significant public interest.”
“That is because both Comey’s alleged conduct while director and the Government’s prosecution of this case are properly subject to the public’s ‘watchful eye,’” Judge McFadden wrote.
As a result of that decision, it became clear that the latest targeting of Comey went up to the highest levels of the Department. McCotter is the second-highest ranking official, and his name is the lead signature on the charges, followed by his deputy Aakash Singh. No line prosecutor from the District of D.C. or attorneys from the national security or public corruption divisions registered an appearance in the case. Prosecutors pulled from as far away as Texas and Florida are assisting the political leadership.
The judge will hold a hearing to consider Comey’s motion to dismiss the case on Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. The proceedings could determine whether the Trump DOJ’s third attempt to prosecute Comey will be its shortest-lived.
New York Times, Judge Temporarily Blocks Further Alterations at D.C.’s East Potomac Park, Zach Montague, Updated Oct. 27, 2026. A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from cutting trees and prohibited other changes at the park where the president has sought to overhaul a golf course.
A federal judge temporarily barred the Interior Department on Monday from carrying out a variety of major alterations at East Potomac Park, finding that the government had been taking steps to initiate President Trump’s vision for a championship-level golf course on the property while passing off the work in court as routine maintenance.
The ruling followed a confrontation between the Justice Department and Judge Ana C. Reyes, right, who throughout October called several Trump administration officials and government lawyers to account for what she described as misrepresentations about the plan.
The clash underscored what had been one of the president’s less visible plans for transforming the capital, compared to his efforts to seize control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and add a gilded ballroom to the White House. This, instead, was the overhaul of a municipal golf course and public park.
It culminated in a searing 70-page opinion issued on Monday, in which Judge Reyes wrote that much of what she had been told in court stood at odds with Mr. Trump’s public pronouncements about the golf course, which came even as officials were insisting that no long-term plan was settled.
“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting president,” she wrote. “Not to believe him that a cabinet secretary has ‘developed’ a federal land project. Not to believe him that the secretary’s agency will destroy a historic golf course already on the land.”
“And yet, here we are,” she added.
Mr. Trump railed against the ruling on social media late Monday, saying the course would be closed as scheduled. He vowed to “immediately appeal” the decision.
“The judge has absolutely no right to hold up this very important and beautiful Project,” he wrote. “We are asking the D.C. Circuit Court for immediate remedy.”
Judge Reyes marveled that a local dispute over a golf course had spiraled into a broader examination of the Trump administration’s tactics, requiring judges to anticipate when and where the federal government might abruptly move to carry out the president’s personal goals and projects.
“It now forces the court to reconcile assertions by President Donald J. Trump with the sworn testimony of multiple government employees and the argument of senior Department of Justice attorneys,” she wrote. “This morass of different accounts concerns the future of the East Potomac Golf Course, a historic landmark.”
A group that included two Washington residents and a preservation society that sued to block an overhaul of the existing site had asked the court to prevent the administration from cutting down more trees after 400 were felled in one morning earlier this month.
Judge Reyes granted the request and went further, barring other actions that could indirectly destroy trees, including staging heavy machinery. She went to great lengths to impart her instructions in detail, an apparent attempt to prevent the administration from citing confusion or ambiguity to act without her involvement.
She required the government to notify the court at least 10 days before closing the course or making any “irreversible modification to any forms or features” to East Potomac Park, where the current course is, including changes to “the park’s landforms, vegetation, course design, hydrology, pathways, and structures.”
“This is a big win that will rightly protect East Potomac Park from further irreparable harm,” said Skye Perryman, the president of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is representing the group behind the lawsuit.
The dramatic changes that Mr. Trump has made to Washington loomed over the lawsuit from the beginning.
Throughout early interactions with Justice Department attorneys on the case, Judge Reyes stressed that she wanted to avoid surprises, after the president acted without warning last year to demolish the East Wing of the White House before courts could review the legality of the project.
At the same time, she said the lawsuit placed her in a difficult spot, because she did not view it as the role of federal courts to police minor decisions about management of federal lands. While Mr. Trump had mused since last year about transforming plans for East Potomac Park. But earlier this year Judge Reyes repeatedly told the group behind the lawsuit that it was not yet clear that the federal government was implementing his vision, making court action premature.
Hesitant to issue any order that would prevent rank-and-file government workers from carrying out everyday maintenance on the course, she asked the Justice Department to provide early warning before workers started major work at the golf course.
Judge Reyes stressed on Monday that she stood by that approach, and she had not tied the government’s hands more than necessary.
“The events surrounding this case have become extraordinary,” she wrote. “The legal result is not.”
More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets`New York Times,
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Problems, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 27, 2026. As the midterms loom, he’s finally admitting the obvious. If Republicans do implode as badly next Tuesday as the current polls suggest, there will be two main reasons. One is Trump’s epic corruption, which finally seems to be getting traction as a campaign issue, second only to the cost of living. The other is soaring energy prices, which are both a major cause of overall inflation and especially visible since they’re posted on big signs in front of every gas station across the country.
It’s a highly ironic situation because Trump’s promises to slash those prices were a key theme of his 2024 campaign. These promises were explicit: he cited numbers, asserting that he would cut energy prices in half within 12 months.
Disastrously for Trump and the Republicans, the opposite has happened, with gasoline and especially diesel prices way up, mainly because of Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran.
One measure of energy prices I find useful is the average price of the products refined from a barrel of oil — typically 2/3 of a barrel of gasoline and 1/3 of a barrel of diesel. I focus on refined products because those, not crude oil, are what people actually burn. And refined products are up in price both because crude prices are up and because the “crack spread” between crude and refined products has soared.
Here’s what has happened to the price of refined products:
Those prices are roughly back to their Biden-era peak, and far above the prices Trump inherited when he took office. Furthermore, Biden wasn’t responsible for that temporary surge in prices, which was mainly caused by post-Covid supply-chain disruptions. Trump, on the other hand, bears almost all the responsibility for current high prices: his war of choice has disrupted the flow of oil, both crude and especially refined products, out of the Persian Gulf. (Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries are also contributing, but the Ukrainians are only doing what they must — and Trump, who is effectively backing Russia, has no standing to complain.)
The cost to American consumers of the Trump spike in energy costs is remarkably high. The U.S. consumes about 7.5 billion barrels of petroleum products annually. As you can see from the chart above, Trump’s war has raised the price of these products by about $75 a barrel. So this war is costing U.S. consumers around $560 billion a year at an annual rate, which is a lot even in a $30 trillion economy.
But Trump claims not to care:
The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it — we’re making a freaking fortune.
The obvious response is, what do you mean “we,” white man?
It’s true that oil and gas companies are making a lot of money thanks to the fallout from the Iran debacle, and oil-company stock prices have soared. But this does nothing for ordinary Americans who aren’t big investors in oil-company stocks, such as workers paying more for their daily commute and farmers who need diesel for their tractors.
So when Trump says “We’re making a freaking fortune,” what he really means is that his policies are taking more than half a trillion dollars at an annual rate out of the pockets of ordinary Americans, and giving that money to the oil industry (which gave 88 percent of its 2024 campaign contributions to Republicans.) Some people might consider this a bad thing, but by his own account he “doesn’t give a damn.”
Remind me again why people call Trump a “populist”?
New York Times, Inside the Billionaires’ War Against California’s Proposed Wealth Tax, Theodore Schleifer and Erin Griffith, Oct. 27, 2026. The latest Silicon Valley billionaire club is a $333 million political ad machine that is heavily engaged in next week’s elections.
Every Tuesday for the last few months, two dozen of the world’s richest people or their advisers hop onto a conference call and plan for war.
The war is against a proposed tax, but not just any tax. It is against a “wealth tax” on California billionaires, one that Silicon Valley’s most affluent see as an existential threat that could usher in a new way of attacking them. So in confidential memos, WhatsApp and Signal chats and conference calls, they are banding together to battle back.
The calls are organized by Building a Better California, a nonprofit started this year to fight Proposition 40, the ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires if voters approve it next week. Each week, the nonprofit’s operatives brief donors or their advisers on polling, advertising and opposition research. Often, the calls include an ask: Would you consider giving a little more?
Eighty or so donors have provided more than $333 million to Building a Better California, state records show, making it among the best-funded political efforts in California history. The donor list is a who’s who of tech celebrities: the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt; the Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison; the legendary investor John Doerr.“The effort to beat it is nothing short of an Avenger-level effort,” said Trevor Traina, a Silicon Valley investor who knows many of the billionaires socially but is not involved with the group. “Like the Avengers, this is not a homogenous group of people, but rather heroes of different stripes who share the same goal of protecting California. I, for one, pray they prevail.”
Many are aware of how it looks. Fighting a billionaire tax as populist outrage grows over inequality requires finesse. In a recent memo circulated among donors and viewed by The New York Times, organizers stressed that other supporters — not the billionaires — must be “the ‘face’ of campaigns.”
This account of Building a Better California’s efforts is based on conversations with about two dozen of the group’s donors, people solicited by it, or others close to it, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the group’s mechanics are secretive. The Times also reviewed California campaign-finance documents and some of the nonprofit’s confidential presentations and internal documents.
“Our supporters have created companies, entirely new industries and hundreds of thousands of jobs here in California, and they want our state to remain the place where the future is built and where people can still afford to live, dream big and succeed,” said Abby Lunardini, a group spokeswoman. She said the wealth tax would “permanently damage the state’s budget, tax base and economy.”
The effort to fight Proposition 40 began with Mr. Brin and has swelled to include a wide cross-section of Silicon Valley power brokers. Donors have pressed business peers to consider giving to the organization and joining the Tuesday calls. Sometimes, the ask is for billionaires to consider donating a percentage of their net worth, a cheap commitment if it helps kill a 5 percent tax.
Mr. Doerr and Mr. Collison, or people who work on their political operations, have made many of the fund-raising calls. They are Building a Better California’s third and fourth largest donors, shelling out $40 million and $33 million, respectively. Each declined to comment.
Mr. Doerr, 75, is famous for having invested in Google and Amazon and leading the venture firm Kleiner Perkins before becoming its chairman in 2016. A longtime Democratic fund-raiser, he has a history of political engagement in California, including squashing propositions he viewed as damaging to Silicon Valley’s ecosystem.
Mr. Collison, by contrast, is still learning the ropes. The 38-year-old Irish citizen prides himself on a bookish disposition, and has invested money and time into arcane policy topics like housing reform and science funding streams.
The wealth-tax fight is Mr. Collison’s most serious campaign engagement to date. The tax could be particularly disruptive to him because most of his net worth consists of stock in Stripe, his privately held payments company valued at $159 billion, which is harder to sell. Mr. Collison has occasionally talked of his frustrations with the tax and tried to game out the politics of the ballot measure in private conversations, people who have spoken to him said.
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Robert Reich, Opinion: Musk Wants Me Imprisoned, Robert Reich, Oct. 27, 2026. I’m not worried, but I do worry about everyone who’s vulnerable to Musk, Trump, and the other bullies in this might-makes-right era.
On Saturday’s “Coffee Klatch” podcast, I said: "Democrats ought to “defund Musk” and lay “the groundwork for nationalizing” Starlink and SpaceX." (My full Coffee Klatch argument is here.)
This seems to have set Elon Musk off. He posted to his 241,700,000 followers:
“Stealing companies is a serious crime. Prison for Reich.”
I’m not particularly worried about being imprisoned — although Musk does have influence over Trump, and Trump has criminally charged Americans who have done no more than express opinions he dislikes (see: Ilhan Omar, Reid Hoffman, Brad Lander, et al.).
I assure you I’m not going to be intimidated by a tweet by Musk.
I’ll continue to criticize him for making decisions — such as squelching his Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — that should be made by people who are responsible for U.S. foreign policy rather than by an unaccountable tycoon.
I’ll continue to campaign like crazy for Democrats in the upcoming midterms, and urge voters to throw the Republican bums out.
I’ll continue to highlight the connections between great wealth and grotesque power during our Second Gilded Age — of which Musk has become Exhibit A.
Elon: You may be the richest and most powerful man in the world, but I’m tough as nails. I’ve stood up to bullies my whole life, starting with playground bullies who went after me because I was so short. You think I won’t stand up to you?
Okay, I’m aware of my privilege. I come with a platform. I’ve held high-level jobs in our government. And I’m an old person with little to lose, anyway.
I worry about what Musk’s impulsive bullying is doing and has done to others more vulnerable than I am — people who work or have worked for him, women he’s allegedly coerced into signing nondisclosure agreements, people he’s done business with, people he’s threatened and racially denigrated and pushed around his whole life, voters he’s deluging with TV ads for Republican candidates.
I also worry about the federal workers who have been hurt by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Americans who have been harmed by his wanton destruction of public services, and people around the globe who are worse off because of cuts to USAID pushed by Elon’s DOGE.
We now have a bully-in-chief in the Oval Office and the world’s wealthiest bully dictating American foreign policy — both of whom are now pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into our elections in order to avoid accountability.
Will people speak out against these two consummate bullies, or remain intimidated into silence?
One week to go until the midterms. Maybe then we can begin to defund Musk.
New York Times, Prominent Texas Congregation Votes to Leave United Methodist Church, Ruth Graham, Oct. 27, 2026. Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas had waged an unusually public campaign against the denomination’s demands for control.
One of the largest and wealthiest United Methodist congregations in America voted overwhelmingly on Monday to leave the denomination. It was a blow to the United Methodists, who have seen an exodus of thousands of congregations in recent years.
“This was not an easy decision, and we know it has not been made lightly,” the leaders of the congregation, Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, said in a letter to members on Monday. “For many of us, it is a painful, difficult and emotional decision.”
They added, “For others, the decision was straightforward.”
The regional leadership of the denomination said in a statement that exiting was not that simple, setting up a prolonged showdown with the congregation.
Highland Park, where former President George W. Bush is a longtime member, occupies a tree-lined block next to Southern Methodist University and attracts many of Dallas’s most affluent families. It is the country’s largest United Methodist congregation as measured by membership. (The highest by in-person attendance is Church of the Resurrection in Kansas, a multisite church founded and led by that state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Adam Hamilton.) The United Methodist Church is one of the country’s largest Protestant denominations.
In recent months, Highland Park has been locked in an increasingly contentious legal and ecclesiastical battle with the United Methodist denomination, to which it has belonged since its founding in 1916. The United Methodist bishop in charge of Highland Park sued it in August, and since then the congregation’s leadership has waged an unusually public campaign against the denomination’s demands for control. Among the issues in dispute is whether the Texas church should have the final say in decisions about hiring clergy, a matter typically controlled by the denomination.
“When we face the reality we’re in, we don’t see a partner anymore for peace and collaboration,” the church’s minister in residence and its former longtime leader, the Rev. Paul Rasmussen, said in a recent video filmed in the church’s pews in which he and two other clergymen urged members to vote. Voting took place in person at the church on Sunday and Monday and was overseen by a third-party administrator, Election Trust.
Of the 4,775 votes cast, just over 90 percent voted to depart, the church said.
More On Potential Trump Administration Election-Rigging, Dirty Tricks
PROOF EXCLUSIVE: Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026, Part III, Seth Abramson, right, best-selling Trump biographer, attorney and professor, Oct. 27, 2026. The fate of America is on the line in the 2026 midterm elections; everyone should vote to preserve democracy. But as America goes to the polls, Donald Trump has put the election under historic attack. When Trump Attacks Our Elections, We Will Have No Excuse: Democracy Docket.
So whatever happens going forward, cataloguing the historic and infamous ways in which the Republican Party — yes, the Republicans and only the Republicans—tried to demolish America’s democratic processes pre-election, mid-election, and post-election will be helpful to Americans now and Americans in the future. Americans in both temporal situations deserve to know exactly what was done to us, especially under circumstances in which we already know what the rhetoric will hold, regardless.
With this in mind, Proof here continues its accounting of the one hundred schemes Trump and his allies are using to steal the 2026 midterm elections—the most vile betrayal of our democracy since the U.S. Civil War. Parts I and II are here and here.
And yes, there are a hundred.
Donald Trump’s Top 100 Election-Rigging Schemes for 2026 (#23 Through #33, continued from above)
(23) There are now videos of the National Guard troops Trump issued a permanent posting to standing in front of ballot drop-off locations in D.C., which is illegal.
The question at this point becomes if this is now—or whether it will soon be—happening elsewhere in the United States as well, including in places that Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have either (a) already deployed the Guard under false pretenses, or (b) threatened to deploy the guard (invariably in “blue” majority-minority areas, almost always in blue or purple states).
(24) Trump has darkly promised an “October surprise” that he says will swing the election toward the Republicans and be orchestrated by an entity and person U.S. taxpayer monies pay for: Office of Management and Budget chief—and far-right radical (indeed, the co-author of the anti-American “Project 2025”)—Russ Vought.
Vought is a Christian nationalist who has been caught on hidden cameras revealing that his Christian nationalist Project was always a Trump scheme even when Trump was swearing to have no knowledge of it to voters in 2024. (Needless to say, Trump lied to voters in 2024 about whether he knew anything about the plan, was in support of the plan, or had met or spoken with anyone who had co-authored the plan because he understood that it was the single most radical, antisocial, categorically unpopular political manifesto since the declarations of secession by the Confederate States).
Reporting on Trump’s planned, taxpayer-funded partisan “October surprise” is here.
More recently, Mr. Trump’s references to this eleventh-hour surprise have become far creepier and more frequent, with the president saying—and no, I’m not making this up—that his “two big monsters” will do something that makes them “the biggest stars in America” in a week, and that the something they do will be so controversial and without prior precedent in American history that he (a) cannot say what it is, and (b) has been advised to not even speak about it in public. Whether this turns out to be a something-burger or a nothing-burger, the fact remains that it is spreading anxiety, confusion, and even terror in advance of the midterm elections.
If that seems hyperbolic, consider that Trump’s former deputy director of the FBI is now frantically warning all his podcast listeners to stockpile supplies for a potential near-term doomsday scenario, that it was less than a month ago that the Pentagon announced “FORTRESS AMERICA,” a doomsday-planning operation that—while medium-term, not near-term—nevertheless has even cautious observers wondering what’s coming down the pike that the so-called Department of War thinks its bases need to be urgently self-sufficient from all domestic energy and food sources at a time when no transnational war with a foreign nuclearized foe appears to be on the horizon but Trump is regularly “threatening” to invoke the Insurrection Act, and some of his top White House aides have fled civilian housing to live their lives on impregnable American military installations they almost never leave. Under such circumstances, the President of the United States telling voters that “two big monsters” are going to do something he can’t say just before the election that will change American forever is a form of terrorism. Quite simply, it meets all the definitions of terroristic threats.
(25) Whatever Trump is planning, it’s illegal enough that he doesn’t want and will not allow international election monitors on U.S. soil to observe it—the first time these monitors have been banned in decades.
In fact, the only formal election monitors the midterms will now have are those paid by Trump. And there will be 1,000 of them—almost all sent, apparently, to places in which the president thinks his party might perform poorly at the polls. In other words, American taxpayers are paying at least 1,000 DOJ attorneys to act as agents of the Republican Party, not the United States of America, during the midterm elections.
And the only persons willing to look out for America on Election Day—ironically, pro-democracy foreign observers well trained at spotting stolen elections—are barred from the country. The message in this is an unmistakable one for all Americans, especially after the recent Brazilian elections… in which a leftist candidate won, the whole world quickly identified the results as free and fair, Trump falsely claimed the election had been rigged, and then accepted the far-right, insurrectionist loser of the election to the United States as a fugitive from justice.
(26) Fears that ICE would be used as a taxpayer-funded voter suppression army have now been confirmed, as reporting establishes that ICE agents are now being trained—as part of their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)—to ask suspects whether they have ever voted.
Voting is one of the “fundamental” rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, so ICE asking questions about suspects’ voting histories without having any reasonable suspicion that these suspects have done anything wrong on that score is clearly in the nature of a constitutional violation.
And it’s one intended to terrify its victims from voting in the future, even if they’re authorized to do so.
By taking suspects’ names and showing that they want to track their voting history, ICE is telling the people it is racially and ethnically profiling in extended, statist Big Government “constitutional events” that their voting is going to be monitored for possible future criminal investigations and even prosecutions.
This is a premeditated, systematized, taxpayer-funded scheme to scare from the polls voters Trump’s paramilitary armies have identified as likely Democratic supporters.
The Washington Post reports on all this here.
(27) The partisan voter surveillance effort American taxpayers are paying for is far more extensive than just ICE. Trump’s DHS is surveilling 150 citizen-run organizations—not a typo—and plotting infiltration of those organizations in the hope that (even if no misconduct is found) these organizations, which promote voter participation and are seen by Trump and his agents as left-leaning, disband… out of fear of the U.S. government.
We only know about this because of documents acquired by Democracy Forward and provided by that group to the New York Times.
Trump and his team were trying to keep this sprawling Big Government-cum-Big Brother scheme clandestine, as its stated goal is to both “disrupt” and “dismantle” 150 legal, citizen-run entities whose chief known achievement is getting people to vote who are legally authorized to do so.
See here for more.
(28) Not only is Trump’s campaign to have U.S. taxpayers pay for partisan, Christian nationalist-themed midterm ads larger than we ever knew—over $20 million was stolen from taxpayers to fund at least thirteen different ads—but Trump lied when he said he would start paying for the ads “himself.” He also lied when he said they would stop.
CNN details the basics. The Daily Beast documents how the ads are now religious in character, consistent with OMB capo Vought’s and Hegseth’s Christian nationalism, which sees no place in government or the American military for any non-Christian.
And we know Trump knows these ads are a problem, because he ostentatiously came out and said he would stop making taxpayers funded them—even as he refused to say he would reimburse the over $20 million he had already stolen from U.S. taxpayers.
But now it turns out even that was a lie. The illegal ads continue to run as “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” and they show no signs of stopping before the 2026 midterms.
(29) Trump’s scheme to make taxpayers fund partisan propaganda is significantly more encompassing than anything described above, however—as he’s now sending money to voters (at taxpayer expense for both the money and the mailings) that is accompanied by illegal partisan electioneering (a document paid for by taxpayers).
This was actually a two-part illegal scheme. Mr. Trump announced the first part of his illegal scheme here—Image
—and besides framing these “rebates” in explicitly partisan terms despite the funds from which the funds are being dispersed being of bipartisan creation, we know he went through with it.
But we also know that he wasn’t done (a) trying to pay off voters with (b) bipartisan monies he’s fraudulently—in what’s arguably an act of Election Fraud—framing as a partisan policy agenda.
Millions of Americans, including this author, received a mailing from Donald Trump that included a $500 Obamacare-related rebate along with illegal partisan propaganda:Trump's Obamacare $500 refund checks come with a letter: Read in full
Not surprisingly, all this is a lie.
While the background on all this is somewhat confusing—as Trump is well aware, and is trying to take advantage of—a million people are getting rebates because (a) Biden charged a premium to the insurance companies relating to HealthCare.gov; (b) all those companies unethically passed on 100% of their new cost(s) to consumers, and then, most importantly, (c) Trump’s own spending cuts on healthcare created a new situation that the Biden administration could’ot have foreseen, which is that its fund had more money than it needed to operate.
So Trump is using a problem he and the insurance companies created to try to blame Joe Biden for something Biden didn’t do. Then he’s compounding this moral outrage and ethical offense by turning his disinformation into illegal pre-election propaganda that—ironically—he’s making taxpayers pay for the printing of. In reality, Democrats didn’t tax anyone, didn’t overcharge anyone, and didn’t do anything wrong. But this mailer all of us Americans paid for is designed to make voters believe these three lies.
(30) The public good has never been so cynically manipulated for partisan reasons—and another place we’re seeing this pre-midterms is in another arena we’ve never seen such conduct before: fake policy proposals targeting battleground states in the weeks just prior to a federal election that neither Trump nor his presidential administration have any intention of advancing post-election; they’re all DOA.
It’s true that during State of the Union addresses presidents often delineate things they want to do even when they suspect they won’t be able to do them, but there’s a reason such addresses are post-election. Their agenda items aren’t explicitly geared (ethanol subsidies notwithstanding) toward citizens of a single state, and the politicians who issue such statements later feel compelled to at least make a public effort to get their priorities passed into law.
This isn’t that.
This is a systematized bribery campaign intended to buy votes in very specific U.S. jurisdictions in the 30 days prior to an election by falsely promising federal actions the president has just thought up on the spot—meaning that not only is there no money or political will behind them, but there isn’t even any legislative or executive planning or resources anywhere in sight. These are, nakedly so, attempted bribes of small subsets of the voting population at the very moment these people are voting.
It’s… bad. And thoroughly corrupt.
CNN earlier reported that among these fake policies are the following two:
“Trump announced [an] Iowa project on Monday at an Oval Office event featuring Senate candidate Rep. Ashley Hinson and many others. It was for a new $15 billion Mesabi Metallics steel plant in Lee County in eastern Iowa—one that could create thousands of jobs and make Iowa the second-largest steel-producing state in the United States.” Iowa is a battleground state in the midterms, with both a highly competitive Senate race and a highly competitive gubernatorial race, as well as several surprisingly close House races. That makes it one of the states Republicans are most closely focused on right now. So that makes the rest of CNN’s report on this claimed new plant especially horrifying: “When a reporter inquired about how definite the plans were, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick assured they were effectively written in stone. ‘I think this deal is done. This deal is done,’ Lutnick said. ‘They’ve already worked it out. That’s why we’re all together with the president. The president doesn’t bring people together unless it’s a done deal. You guys know that already.’ Trump then jumped in, claiming: ‘They’ve already started building.’
That’s not true.”
“On Wednesday [Trump announced] that South Korea would spend more than $50 billion on a struggling natural gas pipeline in Alaska. As with the Iowa announcement, Trump made this one at the White House next to the vulnerable GOP senator, Dan Sullivan. And as with the Iowa announcement, Trump and Lutnick treated this as a done deal. Trump said South Korea had agreed to invest large sums in the US to lower its tariffs, and ‘part of that money is going into this project’— the pipeline. ‘It’s the combination of your deal-making and your trade deal that allowed this to happen, and this is extraordinary,’ Lutnick told Trump. ‘This will change Alaska, and it will change geopolitics.’ Trump said politicians had been talking about the project for five decades but failed to deliver. He said it would be ‘one of the largest energy projects in American history.’ He said it would save Alaskans thousands in energy bills. Sullivan’s office called it a ‘historic $54 billion investment by South Korea.’ But by Thursday, South Korea disputed Trump’s claims.”
Two battleground states. Two massive announcements from the White House. Two events used by in-trouble Republicans appearing with Trump for supposedly major announcements. Two promises billed as historic and transformative.
And in both cases, it all turned out to be bullshit. South Korea says it will not be doing anything Trump claimed, and, as CNN reports, even Iowa GOP officials acknowledge that Trump was selling snake oil with respect to a new plant there.
All this must be put in perspective. Trump has not only said that he “loves” low-info Americans but that he prefers them, and this is exactly why: because he can get major media and far-right propagandists to cover announcements from the White House, and it doesn’t matter if the announcements are vile and premeditated disinformation because most of the people considering voting for him will only see the lie rather than the subsequent esoteric correction.
And because Trump is as fecund a liar as American politics has ever seen, there’s no end to this particular White House resource. Trump can parade every in-trouble GOP candidate in a battleground state through the Oval Office, each time detailing an entirely fake boon that state will receive when the said Republican is elected, and he doesn’t have to worry about this tissue of lies falling apart the second his event co-host leaves the White House because he has a huge far-right media apparatus that will ensure voters only hear the promise and not its near-instant evaporation post-event.
And Trump is now systematizing this anti-American disinformation psyop, engaging it over and over and over again. We can’t know how many millions of GOP voters in November think they’re voting for a “deal” Trump and his team told them was already signed—with construction already begun, no less—that not only wasn’t available only in the event of a Republican victory but wasn’t available at all. It was no more than a figment of Trump’s deranged imagination,,, and his party’s pre-election desperation.
(31) You could be forgiven for thinking that Trump is only illicitly paying his voters and illicitly trying to scare opposing-party voters and illicitly concocting fake deals to bribe his voters to entice positive media coverage, but in fact Mr. Trump has gone one step further and started doing something he’s spent a decade falsely claiming Democrats do: his agents are paying fake “protesters” to harass some high-visibility Democratic candidates.
If you’ve followed Trump’s political career closely, you know that his humiliation over having to pay “fans” to attend his June 2015 presidential campaign announcement was such a sticking point for his malignant narcissistic psychopathic psyche that he spent the next decade developing the MAGA Maxim (a maxim that holds that “every accusation is a confession”). And of course Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone was part of the political team that used paid “protesters” bussed in from out-of-state to intimidate the Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor to stop counting legally cast ballots (the Brooks Brothers Riot that stole the 2020 election for the GOP).
So this clearly isn’t a first for Trump, but it is something that seems to always be in some way connected to Trump or his underworld when it actually happens—even as it’s always associated by Trump fans with international Jewry (particularly George Soros and his son) when paying “protesters” or “supporters” is falsely alleged (and this antisemitism is explicitly encouraged by Trump at all his 2026 midterms rallies; he has even taken to detailing an imaginary federal investigation—to be clear, one that never happened—that “found” that Soros is paying “$250” per fake anti-Trump protester).
In other words, one of the longest-running types of Trumpist “election ratfuckery”—a term co-invented by one of Trump’s oldest political advisers, Roger Stone (yes, really)—involves paying people to pretend to be something they’re not for partisan gain, and yet Trump and his team habitually falsely pin the blame for their own schemes on Jews. Why? Because apparently, in their and their voters’ antisemitic view, it seems like the sort of underhanded, venal, society-destabilizing action a Jew would take.
And now here we are, weeks before the 2026 midterms, and a Christian-nationalist atheist, Trump—who pretends, unconvincingly, to be a Christian evangelical—is once again resorting to the same bag of tricks that he has always blamed on others:
Republican organizations being accused of offering money to “protesters” is a gambit we must attribute to Donald Trump not only because he’s the leader of the party that’s doing it, and because it’s a practice he personally has sought to normalize, but because his tendency to accuse Democrats of paying protesters is so ubiquitous in his rhetoric…
…that we can have no doubt that if Trump wanted to be morally consistent and openly outlaw a practice in his party that he claims to deem almost apocalyptically odious, he could do so today. He could do so today and be listened to today. Instead, we have this new reporting from Michigan indicating that a Trump-aligned PAC, America Next, is paying civilians to pretend to oppose Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Worse still, the supposed America Next directives weren’t just about booing El-Sayed but “disrupting” his rally and (caps in original) making it clear that “ABDUL IS NOT WELCOME IN THE SENATE,” which is exactly as Islamophobia-coded as you think it is.
America Next is an explicitly Trump-era PAC that, if it’s like every other conservative PAC Trump has ever spoken about publicly, is indirectly controlled by the president’s agenda—meaning that whether or not Trump is formally associated with it, he’s the leader of the political party it was created to support and therefore he can use either his public or his private pronouncements to influence how it acts and how it spends.
(32) The actions taken by America Next, and possibly some other right-wing PACs, underscore that even what seems like conventional pre-midterms activity often—at least this election cycle—is not. For instance, after spending years demonizing mail-in voting as the source of a sprawling, international, far-left political conspiracy to undermine America, Trump is suddenly telling MAGA voters to vote by mail. You’re right to suspect this is more nefarious than it seems at first blush.
Prior entires in this series on Trumpist election-rigging emphasized the ways Trump is trying to make mail-in voting extremely onerous if not risky or impossible, which might make you wonder why the New York Times is reporting that Trump is willing to have his voters vote in that fashion.
Well, Proof can tell you why.
As Proof has reported for years now, Donald Trump has never run in an election in which he didn’t publicly urge his voters to commit Voter Fraud—even as he’s spent much of his campaign time assuring audiences that Voter Fraud is exactly what his opponents, not him, are up to.
So even as most Americans agree that Trump’s attempts to make mail-in balloting impossible are bad enough, those who adhere to the MAGA Maxim-adjacent Trump Maxim (“There’s no bottom to what he’s willing to do”) will tell you that Trump is now doing something even more nefarious. Namely, he’s urging his supporters to vote by mail only so that he will have “banked” their mail-in votes when he subsequently does what he does during every election cycle and openly instructs them to vote twice.
This new gambit is potentially far more effective than Trump’s past-elections “vote twice” rhetoric. In the past, Trump (a) arguably issued those instructions too far out from Election Day, and/or (b) didn’t deliver his marching orders at a time his voters could still readily vote by mail. During the 2026 midterms cycle, however, Trump has found his “Goldilocks zone”: the point at which telling his voters to vote by mail will immediately convince them to do so, but also the point at which he’s being listened to closely enough on ballot-casting practices that he can (and surely will) amend his past order to MAGAs to now also vote in person… even if they’ve already voted by mail.
Sound preposterous? Paranoid? Hyperbolic?
Well, it should—because it absolutely would be if Donald Trump hadn’t urged his fans to commit the federal felony of Voter Fraud in every past election he’s participated in.
It’s worth remembering here that Donald Trump has spent a lifetime committing felonies and not getting arrested for them; advocating for the sort of felony conduct he himself is known to engage in (specifically, Bribery) to be legalized without having anyone conclude that this lobbying implies he’s too much of a felon or grifter to be elected to a position in which he can receive bribes; and was ultimately convicted of 34 Fraud felonies but faced no penalty whatsoever—none at all—for his crimes, so it’s no surprise that a lifelong malignant narcissistic psychopath would think little of urging tens of millions of Americans to commit felonies themselves.
Why? Because a narcissist presumes that their experience of the phenomenological world is either everyone’s (when it suits them) or no one else’s (when that suits them)…
…so if America has let Trump off the hook for hundreds and hundreds of felonies over his lifetime, he of course sees the commission of federal felonies as merely theoretical, without any weight or fear attached to it.
So for a person like that to then try to outlaw mail-in balloting, fail at outlawing mail-balloting, and thereafter reflect on years of urging his voters to commit Voter Fraud without facing any real consequences for that Incitement is as good as to say that he will come up with a new gambit that incorporates all of the foregoing components.
And that gambit is vote-banking. Get MAGAs to vote now so those votes are all locked in, then order them en masse to also vote in person—dramatically increasing MAGAs’ demonstrated voting power beyond the Constitution’s “one person, one vote” ethos.
(33) Amidst all this, one problem Trump is running into is that people no longer much want to be seen with him, requiring him to artificially inflate the pool of people who can attend and speak at political rallies, a mission the famously pro-Bribery POTUS has predictably used as an opportunity to leverage unscrupulous political appointees who owe him something.
And this is how best to understand the norm-destroying degradation Trump personal lawyers Todd Blanche and Kash Patel have overseen at the DOJ and FBI, respectively.
America now has taxpayer-funded public officials who are incontrovertibly supposed to be nonpartisan showing up to political rallies to lend the weight of nonpartisan institutions like the DOJ and FBI to Trump campaigns and other Republican rallies.
Thus Attorney General Todd Blanche repeatedly speaking at political rallies.
Thus—now—a new DOJ memo that dramatically expands the number of people linked to nonpartisan, taxpayer-funded institutions who can be press-ganged into partisan service by Trump. These are men and women Trump knows can’t or won’t say “no” to anything he asks of them, because they’re recent or current nominees whose nominations can be withdrawn or recent hires who can be summarily fired (as has been, e.g., every federal prosecutor who told the DOJ that its “grand conspiracy” case in Florida—which aimed to arrest Democratic politicians and career federal civil servants en masse—was bullshit).
In sum, a historically unpopular president who is commandeering taxpayer money up and down the line to fund partisan political schemes he has more than enough money to fund himself—personally, via his campaign war-chest, and/or through the PACs and Super PACs he directly and indirectly controls—is instead stealing from U.S. taxpayers, and worst of all doing so after spending the first year of his second term in office pushing “DOGE”… allegedly a crusade to end the waste, fraud, and/or abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Now the very same president has institutionalized waste, fraud, and abuse as long as it saves him money personally. Moreover, his new taxpayer-theft ploys weaponize non-partisan institutions at a time he’s publicly decrying “lawfare” as anti-American; pay non-political actors to be political at a time he’s claiming massive Democratic Party conspiracies to pay non-political actors to be political; and make it impossible for Americans to trust agencies like DOJ or the FBI at a time his entire political persona is predicated on scurrilous fear-baiting over the possible existence of a “Deep State” at those very agencies.
In other words, the new rules DOJ is writing to expand the use of taxpayer resources—human and financial—for partisan purposes is as hypocritical as any agenda any U.S. POTUS has pursued. Ever. It directly undermines every supposed moral principle that undergirding “Trumpism.” Indeed, it confirms that Trumpism is simply a euphemism for the personal, political, professional, and pecuniary self-interest of a single felon.
Oct. 26
Top Headlines
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).
Oct. 26, 2026. Brazil refuses to be bullied. South America’s most populous nation has more than 200 million people, making its presidential election yesterday a momentous event. But beyond Brazil’s sheer size, yesterday’s election was also momentous because it was a harbinger for the rest of the world.Special Report; New Trump Rape Allegations Drawn From Epstein Files, Survivors
Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.New Book
Special Report: Ruling Helps Protect U.S. Civil Service, Prosecutors
Maurene Comey was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan when the Trump administration fired her in July 2025 ( New York Times photo by Jefferson Siegel).
News Roundups
Oct. 26, 2026. Today I speak to Dr. Amy Acton as nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. In the Senate battlegrounds, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters to Republicans’ 35 percent. In North Carolina, Democratic early voting is up 47 percent, while Republican early voting is up less than 3 percent. Trump is spending the final week rallying in states he won by 20 points, and he admitted the problem himself on Sunday: “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up.” Oct. 26, 2026. Look at the stories in today’s newsletter and the same thing keeps happening. Trump says he was “never on Epstein’s plane,” and the flight logs say otherwise. He says he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and the government’s own documents quote him saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Today, House Democrats put those statements next to the records in a 50-page report and are calling for an independent special counsel. Oct. 26, 2026. It's Monday. Eight days until midterms. Here’s what’s going on: House Judiciary Democrats just released a 53-page Epstein report with accounts from 11 women and a call for a special counsel; Lula wins a fourth term in Brazil, and Flávio Bolsonaro and Trumpworld cry “stolen”; Serbia’s students beat Vučić’s party, and María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela; Netanyahu reportedly clashes with his own army chief over Iran ahead of Tuesday’s election; CNN says Trump is prepping major Iran strikes, likely after the midterms; Gas prices are on track for the priciest Election Day in history; right, Oct. 25, 2026. In Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 25, 2026 [MAGA Doubles Down], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 26, 2026. And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign. As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.Oct. 26, 2026. In a weird way, it’s almost sad to see. Donald Trump has spent a decade as the main character of our politics. He has managed to break and destabilize shockingly much in that time. Yet now, watching him stagger toward a humiliating midterm rebuke with his movement seemingly on the brink of collapse, I have to admit it’s hard to feel much pleasure about it all.Oct. 26, 2026. In what has been a terrible month of declining poll numbers, a deteriorating battlefield, soaring inflation, crappy job numbers, Brent crude hitting $116 a barrel, a widening war in the Middle East, an orgy of scandals, and escalating internal infighting, our failed, venal, sundowning leader got lots more bad news last night -- his allies in Brazil and Serbia got beat, and Marina Corina Machado returned to Venezuela to rapturous crowds.These last twenty fours have been some of the most important in our grand battle against MAGA and the global right since Hopium was founded. Here we take the wins when they come and these were big, consequential wins, fellow patriots. Big consequential wins for the global democracy movement, and enormous, deflating, and consequential losses for Trump eight days before his own election.
Donald Trump claimed 22,000 people attended his rally in Mississippi, but only 1,400 were there, and people in the crowd heckled the president.GOP Strategies: Ohio, Wisconsin, Autocracy
Oct. 26, 2026. Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy. What on earth were they thinking? It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.Accountability Journalism: Mailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in Oklahoma, Judd Legum, right,Oct. 26, 2026. The mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operation.Oct. 26, 2026. In an 1823 letter from James Madison, the primary architect of our Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of our Declaration, Madison wrote of “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Our Founders understood that despite the relative success of their earlier efforts, the contest between liberty and despotism around the world—and even in the United States—had not ended.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is not invincible, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 25-26, 2026. At 3:29 this afternoon (Sunday), the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.More On Middle East Wars
Drop Site Daily, Israel expels 3,100+ Palestinians in Hebron, Staff and Wire Reports, Oct. 26, 2026. Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday. 800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp. Israeli operation in Hebron forcibly displaces over 3,100 Palestinians as attacks continue across the occupied West Bank. Israel kills at least 14 Palestinians in Gaza over the weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in tight race against Eisenkot in Israeli elections tomorrow.More Global News
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More On U.S. MidTerm Elections
Oct. 26, 2026. 🚨 8 Days to the Midterms 🚨 We have been tracking “days to the midterms” — Nov. 3 — but early midterm voting has been underway and from all appearances looks more robust than it has been at this point in past years. Oct. 26, 2026. Obama said it as clearly as it can be stated. If you haven’t yet had a chance to see or read Obama’s speech in Cleveland Saturday night, please do both. And then share it as widely as you can.Special Report: Fighting Fascism Globally
, Opinion: The West must embrace defensive democracy, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Democratic constitutions cannot be suicide pacts. Far-right fascist parties and movements that advocate violence against ethnic and religious minorities must be banned. Top Stories
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil in São Paulo after winning the presidential runoff election on Sunday. Associated Press photo by Andre Penner).
New York Times, Lula Wins Brazil’s Presidency, in Stunning Blow to Latin America’s Right, Ana Ionova and Adam B. Ellick, Updated Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva triumphed over Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of the right-wing leader he defeated four years ago.
Brazilian voters on Sunday handed the leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a fourth term in office and a surprise victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, his right-wing challenger, in a striking rebuke to a conservative surge sweeping Latin America.
Mr. Bolsonaro refused to accept the outcome and said it was the result of foul play, increasing the risk of unrest over the election result.
The rejection by voters of Mr. Bolsonaro, the son of a former president jailed for attempting a coup four years ago, is also a loss for President Trump, who had embraced the Bolsonaro family and the region’s rising right.
Mr. Lula, in contrast to many world leaders, has often and defiantly clashed with Mr. Trump, and his victory suggests that Latin America’s left-wing forces still wield influence despite a string of losses across the hemisphere. This is the first leftist victory following seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months.
“I would like to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” Mr. Lula said, during a victory speech in São Paulo, flanked by his wife, running mate and allies.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Oligarchs Lose a Big One, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Brazil refuses to be bullied.
How many people in the United States realize how big Brazil is? South America’s most populous nation has more than 200 million people, making its presidential election yesterday a momentous event. But beyond Brazil’s sheer size, yesterday’s election was also momentous because it was a harbinger for the rest of the world.
For it was a contest between the progressive left of Ignacio Lula da Silva, the incumbent president, and the revanchist right of Flavio Bolsonaro — the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, who is in prison for his attempt to overturn Brazil’s last presidential election. The global right thought it had the election in the bag, and even the prediction markets indicated that Bolsonaro would win. Thus it came as a shock when Lula came out on top.
Having been gaslighted by the right, some of the global media appeared to have difficulty wrapping their minds around the outcome. Here was the headline in the Financial Times as I write this:
“Knife-edge vote”? Lula won by 3 percentage points, twice Donald Trump’s margin in 2024.
And he did so despite efforts by the right, in Brazil and elsewhere, to rig the election against him.
Voting was extended by two hours because widespread disruptions to public transportation had made it difficult for working-class voters to get to the polls. Lula’s campaign alleged that these disruptions were engineered by pro-Bolsonaro mayors, a claim that was clearly supported by the evidence in some cities, and was generally plausible given recent political history — specifically, Bolsonaro senior’s attempt to overturn the last presidential election.
And Brazil’s own right wasn’t alone in seemingly trying to rig the election for Bolsonaro. U.S.-based social media companies, Meta in particular, appeared to put their thumbs on the scale. After the first round of voting, Reuters reported that
Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country’s election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.
And in an article titled “Meta Unseats Musk as Tech Villain for Lula in Brazil’s Election,” Bloomberg reported that
Lula — who has attracted more than 10 million supporters to a WhatsApp channel dubbed “Lula’s Army” in recent days — has alleged interruptions to his account, restrictions on Instagram posts and unequal audience engagement. His campaign also said Meta AI, the company’s generative artificial intelligence tool, is refusing requests to create images related to Lula while generating campaign material favorable to his opponent.
Meta said that these incidents reflected “unrelated technical problems,” a claim that would be more credible if all of these supposed technical problems hadn’t tilted the playing field in the same direction.
Is it a mere coincidence that in the United States, Meta suspended the No Kings Day Instagram account right in the middle of the day’s protests? It later claimed that this action had nothing to do with politics, that it was an error because its automated security systems detected a possible rise in bot traffic.
Again, it’s funny how Meta’s technical problems always seem to tilt the political field in the same direction.
Can we prove that Meta deliberately tried to put the Bolsonaros back in power? No, at least not yet. But we aren’t in a court of law: We’re simply trying to figure out what happened.
Meta leader Mark Zuckerberg, second from the left, celebrates with fellow Trump-supporting American high-tech oligarchs (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and SpaceX-Tesla leader Elon Musk, near the right, along with kindred spirits in helping enforce the Trump Administration's agenda, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, all in the back row.
And the people in this photo, above, are not entitled to a presumption of innocence and good intentions: "A foto que exibe o 'bromance' dos barões das big techs com Trump | G1"
Although Meta’s denials lack plausibility, we can’t prove that Mark Zuckerberg deliberately tried to deliver Brazil into the hands of a right-wing authoritarian. However, there is no question that Elon Musk intentionally and strongly intervened on the side of Vladimir Putin in his efforts to conquer Ukraine. Musk keeps changing his story about what happened — first denying any involvement, saying that the order came from the White House, and now claiming that Ukraine violated its terms of service. But this charade is completely implausible because Musk has long made it clear that his sympathies in this war lie with Russia.
So let’s celebrate the Brazilian people, who have refused to be bullied by Bolsonaro, by the American oligarchs, and by Trump — who imposed high tariffs on Brazil in 2025 because it put a traitor and insurrectionist (Bolsonaro Sr) on trial. Let’s hope that in a little over one week’s time Americans will be equally clear-sighted and vote for democracy.'
New York Times, Netanyahu Pushed for Attack on Iran Ahead of Israeli Election, Officials Say, David M. Halbfinger, Ronen Bergman, Natan Odenheimer,Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Oct. 26, 2026. Israel’s military chief resisted the prime minister, who then pressed in recent days for a separate action, short of an overt strike, according to an official and a person briefed on the matter.
In advance of Israel’s pivotal election on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran but ran into resistance from the military’s chief of staff, according to three senior Israeli defense officials and three other people briefed on the matter.
Then, over the past few days, the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, became concerned that Mr. Netanyahu had begun pushing for a separate action against Iran, short of an overt strike, according to an Israeli official and a person briefed on the matter, neither of whom described the nature of such an action. General Zamir believed that this would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.
Spokesmen for Mr. Netanyahu did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The Israeli officials and the people briefed on the deliberations spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Netanyahu’s rationale for pressing to attack Iran before the election was not clear, but a return to war could have potentially disrupted or even delayed the vote.
The behind-the-scenes tensions over a possible Israeli attack or other action against Iran come as Mr. Netanyahu has been publicly portraying the stakes of the election in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Over the weekend, he posted an A.I.-generated image on social media of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv and warned in a television appearance that the vote would decide “Israel’s existence.”
The appeals to Israelis’ fears are meant to get voters to see the conflict with Iran as the most urgent issue and to entrust him with continuing to lead the struggle against Israel’s chief regional adversary.
When Mr. Netanyahu pushed to heat up the conflict with Iran, General Zamir raised a number of objections and concerns and ultimately concluded that there was no immediate or urgent need for action, the officials and people briefed on the matter said.
Such a determination by the military chief carries special weight: It can make it harder to portray the timing as a military necessity.
While General Zamir was not opposed to taking action against Iran in principle, he objected to doing so before the election, according to an Israeli official and two people briefed on the matter. General Zamir and the Israeli air force commander, Maj. Gen. Omer Tischler, cited the political sensitivities and the difficulty of explaining to the public why it had to occur then, according to two senior Israeli defense officials.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
In a statement, the Israeli military said its operational decision making was strictly based “on security considerations,” as well as “its responsibility as a national institution.”
The concerns about political motivations for an attack on Iran do not expire on Tuesday. According to three senior Israeli defense officials and two people briefed on the matter, a resumption of fighting with Iran in the weeks after the election could also have a large impact.
If Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents prevail in the election, they would likely have an opportunity to form the new government, but a return to war could hinder or even thwart their ability to assemble a governing coalition within the time allotted by law. Renewed fighting could also create political pressure to establish a national unity government that includes Mr. Netanyahu.
Reports of disagreement between Mr. Netanyahu and the military over a possible attack, first carried by Israel’s Channel 12, sparked outrage in Israel. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s rivals, Avigdor Liberman, demanded Monday that the attorney general open an investigation into whether the prime minister had committed treason.
“The attempt to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including sacrificing Israeli soldiers, just because of the fear of losing the elections, is a betrayal of the nation,” Mr. Liberman, a defense minister and foreign minister in earlier Netanyahu governments, wrote in a formal complaint.
Mr. Netanyahu, 77, is battling to keep his hold on power in the face of opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff.
Mr. Netanyahu’s appeals to voters became increasingly disturbing over the campaign’s final weekend, with the prime minister saying that his defeat could lead to Israel’s annihilation. He has also suggested that tougher times could be ahead for Israel regardless of the outcome.
On Friday, he said that Israelis should prepare for the end of billions of dollars in American military support from the United States, given the sharp decline of Israel’s standing in U.S. public opinion. He also said the possibility that Israel will face “banking sanctions” arising from international condemnation could force the country in coming years to rely on cryptocurrency to circumvent the penalties.
The remarks prompted a wave of criticism. Israel’s nonpartisan central bank, the Bank of Israel, issued a rare warning, saying that cryptocurrency would not save the economy in the event of international sanctions. And a former governor of the Bank of Israel, Jacob Frenkel, said that turning away from the global financial system would make Israel into “a leper.”
New Trump Rape Allegations Drawn From Epstein Files, Survivors
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion:Democrats Drop A Massive Epstein October Surprise On Trump And The GOP, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 26, 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released a bombshell report that accused Trump of five rapes in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein that, if true, implicates the president directly in Epstein’s crimes.
While everyone in the country was looking to Trump for an October Surprise, the real surprise came from House Judiciary Committee Democrats, who released a 50-page report that contains testimony that accuses Donald Trump of several counts of rape.
According to a statement from House Judiciary Committee Democrats:The report concludes that, based on the available evidence and witness testimony, Trump and Paolo Zampolli—who until recently served as a senior Trump Administration official and diplomat—may have been co-conspirators in Jeffrey Epstein’s conspiracy to traffic and abuse young women in the 1990s.
Drawing on interviews conducted by Committee staff, survivor accounts, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the report traces striking similarities in the stories of women abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
With one exception, each assault or instance of sexual misconduct occurred between 1992 and 1997, in New York and Palm Beach, and many of the victims were closely tied to the modeling industry and Zampolli.
The conclusion is the tip of the iceberg.
Here are a few of the report’s findings:
• Trump and Epstein Shared a World Built Around Young Models. In the 1990s, both men moved through New York modeling agencies, pageants and parties where young women and girls were recruited and often exploited. Trump hosted Elite Model Management competitions for teenage models and had close ties to Elite founder and known pedophile John Casablancas and modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. FBI records describe multiple young models who had a sexual relationship with Zampolli or were connected to Zampolli’s agency who subsequently were sexually assaulted by Epstein.
• A former longtime Epstein assistant told the FBI that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald Trump, contradicting Zampolli’s account.
• Women Describe Sexual Assault and Other Troubling Encounters Involving Trump and Epstein. Five women have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence. Three others describe encounters in which Epstein or Maxwell appeared to offer women to Trump or indicate that Trump was “in” on Epstein’s abuse.
Their accounts and stories, when told together, paint an unmistakable picture of a conspiracy to abuse and traffic women.
Dozens of women have come forward over the years to accuse Donald Trump of everything from sexual harassment to sexual assault to rape.The difference is that House Judiciary Democrats have evidence that directly connects Trump to Epstein’s crimes. Trump has done nothing but try to hide, diminish, and distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein files.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), said:
Donald Trump says he knew Jeffrey Epstein ‘just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.’ Not exactly. Evidence involving 11 women tells a completely different and far more damning story about their relationship and the abuse of young women and girls that took place in their network. Five women have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s company or presence; others have indicated that Epstein or Maxwell attempted to traffic them to Trump. These women have spoken to investigators and, in some cases, testified under oath, yet Trump’s Justice Department has shut down investigations, deliberately withheld evidence and, through Todd Blanche, prevented Ghislaine Maxwell from discussing a survivor whose account implicated Trump—all while insisting there is no basis upon which to investigate
Epstein’s possible accomplices.
Trump’s Justice Department appears to be covering up these crimes to protect the President. The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard, Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.
If Donald Trump is an Epstein co-conspirator, he must be prosecuted, even if it happens after his term ends. If more evidence is uncovered against Trump, he must be impeached and removed from office.
Donald Trump will lose his congressional Republican protection if Democrats win back control of all or part of Congress.The report from the Judiciary Committee is just the beginning, as we are getting closer to finding out Trump’s darkest secrets.
Special Report: Ruling Helps Protect U.S. Civil Service, Prosecutors
Maurene Comey was an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan when the Trump administration fired her in July 2025 ( New York Times photo by Jefferson Siegel).
New York Times, Trump Administration Unlawfully Fired Maurene Comey, Judge Rules, Santul Nerkar, Oct. 26, 2026. Ms. Comey, the daughter of James B. Comey, was a trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, handling the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean Combs.
A Manhattan judge on Monday ruled that Maurene Comey, a former federal prosecutor and the daughter of one of Mr. Trump’s most well-known critics, was unlawfully fired last year.
In a 55-page ruling, Judge Jesse M. Furman of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote that the Justice Department had violated the separation of powers, federal administrative law and Ms. Comey’s due process when it fired her in July 2025.
At the time of her firing, Ms. Comey was a highly regarded trial lawyer for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, handling the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean Combs.
Ms. Comey had said there was no possible reason for her firing besides the fact that her father, James B. Comey, was the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or because of her “perceived political affiliation and beliefs.”
Judge Furman also ruled that Ms. Comey is entitled to back pay through December 2025.
Ms. Comey’s victory could open a path for other government workers who were fired and are seeking to appeal their termination. She argued that neither the president nor attorney general had the authority to fire rank-and file prosecutors like her, who are protected under civil service law.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Democratic Early Voting Surges, Hegseth Fears Impeachment, Voter Intimidation Efforts Fail, Nicki Minaj for Press Secretary, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Today I speak to Dr. Amy Acton as nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. In the Senate battlegrounds, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters to Republicans’ 35 percent. In North Carolina, Democratic early voting is up 47 percent, while Republican early voting is up less than 3 percent. Trump is spending the final week rallying in states he won by 20 points, and he admitted the problem himself on Sunday: “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up.”
His answer today was a $1 million bounty for voter fraud tips, from an administration that has lost all 26 of its lawsuits seeking states’ voter rolls, according to California’s attorney general. Meanwhile, his Defense Secretary is reportedly hunting for a Senate seat to escape impeachment, and a federal judge ruled that his Justice Department illegally fired Maurene Comey. Hours later, they charged Jim Comey again.
When an administration uses the power of the government against political opponents and the people it disagrees with, the question becomes who’s next. Independent journalists who report what powerful people want hidden are an obvious target. In the past week alone, we published exclusive images and videos from our bases in the Middle East and laid out Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin. I have no corporate legal team and no billionaire owner to protect this work. What protects it is you.
Here’s what you need to know tonight.
Nearly 30 Million Have Already Voted as Democrats Lead the Early Vote and Trump Rushes to Shore Up Red States
Nearly 30 million Americans have already voted, about double the pace of the last midterms. NBC News puts the national total at 29.9 million mail-in and early in-person ballots, compared with just over 15 million at a similar point in 2022. The jump is especially large in Republican-leaning states with competitive Senate races: early voting is up roughly 69 percent in Kansas, 41 percent in Maine, and 24 percent in Iowa, according to a New York Times analysis. In Texas, about 4.5 million ballots have been cast, compared with 3 million at this point in 2022, and Michigan has passed 1 million ballots. Virginia is up about 80 percent from four years ago, and a political scientist there says the early vote is concentrated in districts where “Republicans are playing defense, not offense.” North Carolina has also recorded more than 400,000 more early votes than at this point in 2022.
Democrats are leading the early vote in the Senate battlegrounds, and Republican turnout is lagging. In the Senate battleground states, registered Democrats make up 47 percent of early voters, compared with 35 percent for registered Republicans, according to NBC News data from TargetSmart. In North Carolina, early voting among registered Democrats is up 47 percent and among unaffiliated voters up 60 percent, while Republican early voting is up just 2.6 percent. Registered Democrats also lead the early vote in Kansas, Iowa, and Maine, and in Florida, where Republicans hold a 1.5 million voter registration edge, Democrats are ahead by about 4,000 ballots out of 2.7 million. In Wisconsin, which has no party registration, counties that voted more heavily for Harris in 2024 are turning out faster than Trump counties. “Democrats and unaffiliateds are engaged. Republicans are not as engaged,” said University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, adding that there’s “not some big polling miss on the horizon.”
Trump is spending the final week rallying in deep-red states to shore up his own base. He’s campaigning Monday in Mississippi, a state he won by more than 20 points, for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, whose race against Democrat Scott Colom is tightening. He then heads to Texas, Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, while Vice President JD Vance rallies in Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Trump has been urging supporters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot. “When I’m not on the ballot, people don’t show up,” he admitted in Michigan on Sunday. “Please show up and vote.” Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic voters are turning out early at higher rates than in recent elections, from Georgia, where Black voters make up 32 percent of early voters, to Florida, where in-person early voting among Black and Hispanic voters has roughly doubled.
Experts warn that early voting is a snapshot, not a prediction, and Republicans still have time to close the gap. Many early voters would have voted on Election Day anyway, according to MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, and the surge also reflects heavy campaign spending to bank votes early. Republicans have historically turned out more heavily on Election Day, and in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio most voters still wait until then. One expert says Trump may have “inadvertently done a favor to the Democrats” by attacking mail voting for years, pushing more Democrats to vote in person, where their ballots are less likely to be rejected. Trump has since reversed himself and is urging Republicans to vote early or by mail, which could narrow the gap. Party registration also doesn’t guarantee how someone votes, so the final result will depend on who shows up between now and November 3rd.
Trump Offers $1 Million Voter Fraud Bounty as His Election Fraud Claims Keep Collapsing in Court
Trump is offering $1 million to anyone whose tip leads to a voter fraud conviction, even as his administration keeps losing in court on election fraud. “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud,” Trump posted Monday, eight days before the midterms. The offer comes after his administration lost all 26 of its lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “The government has lobbed allegations of widespread voter fraud at the states, only for those allegations to crumble under scrutiny,” Bonta wrote in a court filing, adding that one court called the federal government’s citizenship records “known to be unreliable.” The same day, Trump also claimed without evidence that Brazil’s election looked “rigged” after Lula’s win. Critics, including Democratic and some Republican election officials, call the administration’s moves federal overreach, and some say they’re preparing for federal interference in the midterms.
Trump’s latest attempt to interfere with ballots in California is facing skeptical judges, and his own officials admit their list may be wrong. The Justice Department sued California to force it to set aside up to 20,000 ballots it claims may have been sent to noncitizens, after the state refused a demand to review the list within 48 hours in the middle of voting. A federal appeals court appeared skeptical of the effort, according to CNN, and Bonta called the lawsuit “a reckless political stunt” that “borders on the absurd.” The acting deputy attorney general admitted that “there may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens.” When Los Angeles County officials reviewed a sample of 200 names, many appeared to be citizens, and most hadn’t voted or even been sent ballots. The administration’s track record elsewhere is similar: Homeland Security claimed Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its rolls, but sent only 185 names, all of whom turned out to be U.S. citizens.
While hunting for voter fraud, Trump fought to free a former election official convicted of compromising voting machines, and now he’s being sued over it. Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after a jury found her guilty of helping an unauthorized person access secure voting equipment while chasing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. The judge called her “a charlatan” and said, “You are no hero.” Trump called her a “hostage” and promised “harsh measures” if she wasn’t freed, and Colorado was then denied wildfire aid, lost $109 million in transportation funding, and faced threats to food aid, moves the White House says were unrelated. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is now suing Trump over what he calls a retaliation campaign, saying, “The threats were not hidden, they were not subtle, they were out in the open, and we’re fighting back.” Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ sentence in May, and she has since returned to the election-denial circuit and met with Trump at the White House.
Hegseth Is Reportedly Looking for an Exit as Impeachment Pressure Builds
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly angling for a Senate seat to escape a possible impeachment, according to Puck. If Sen. Marsha Blackburn wins her race for Tennessee governor next week, as expected, she would appoint someone to fill the rest of her Senate term, which runs until January 2031. Puck reports that Hegseth wants Blackburn to appoint him, which would get him out of the Pentagon before Democrats can go after him. Hegseth and his family set up residence in Tennessee in 2022, and Rep. Tim Burchett is also reportedly interested in the seat. Puck also reported that some Republicans hope Trump will dismiss Hegseth before an impeachment process begins, and some senators “foresee a pathway” for him to step down. The Pentagon dismissed the report as “beltway gossip by anonymous sources,” insisting Hegseth’s “singular priority is leading the War Department.”
The walls are closing in, with a House impeachment vote possible as soon as lawmakers return after the midterms. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment in September and says he’ll force a vote shortly after the House returns on Nov. 9, a vote that is expected to be close. His resolution accuses Hegseth of waging war on Iran without congressional approval, ignoring laws meant to minimize civilian casualties, and using unauthorized lethal force against suspected drug-smuggling boats. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats will hold Hegseth accountable “in the same way that we held Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem accountable” if Trump doesn’t remove him. At a Pennsylvania rally this month, Jeffries went further: “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town.” Rep. Pat Ryan warned, “Hegseth and crew better buckle up and lawyer up because we are coming at them full on.”
Hegseth’s support is collapsing even among Trump voters, while the White House insists he’s doing “a great job.” Nearly two-thirds of 2024 Democratic voters and 20 percent of Republicans support impeaching him, according to The POLITICO Poll, including 18 percent of MAGA Republicans. Democrats are preparing probes into the Iran war, alleged war crimes, Pentagon business dealings, the firing of senior military officers, and the Signalgate scandal. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called Hegseth “incompetent and, frankly, corrupt,” and Rep. Jared Huffman called him an “unhinged fanatic who should be impeached and removed from office.” The White House defended him, saying the results of his military operations “speak for themselves.” But with Democrats favored to win the House, the reported search for a Senate seat suggests Hegseth may be planning his own exit before they get the chance.
Judge Rules Trump’s DOJ Illegally Fired Maurene Comey, Rejecting Its Claim of Unlimited Power to Purge Prosecutors
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, as a federal prosecutor. In a 55-page opinion, Judge Jesse Furman found that her July 2025 firing violated the Civil Service Reform Act, the Constitution’s separation of powers, her Fifth Amendment due process rights, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Comey spent nearly a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan, leading the cases against Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and music mogul Sean Combs. Furman noted that she “consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike.” She was fired with a terse letter citing only “Article II of the United States Constitution,” with no further explanation. Her lawsuit argued she was targeted because of her father, a longtime Trump foe, or because of her perceived political beliefs.
The ruling rejects the Trump administration’s claim that it can fire career federal employees for any reason. The Justice Department argued that because prosecutors exercise the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” powers, Congress has no say over how they’re removed. “The Court concludes the Defendants are wrong,” Furman wrote, saying the argument “flies in the face of nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.” He warned that accepting it “would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system.” The decision matters far beyond Comey, since the administration has relied on that same theory to justify a sweeping purge of the federal workforce. Under Trump, the Justice Department has fired scores of career prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on investigations of the president or were seen as opposed to his agenda.
Comey was awarded reinstatement and back pay, and the Justice Department says it will appeal. Furman ordered her reinstated retroactively, with back pay from her firing through December 2025, when she became a partner at the Manhattan law firm Patterson Belknap, so she isn’t expected to return to the DOJ. Her lawyers called it a “hard-earned victory” for “all civil servants” and “all fighting for the rule of law,” adding that the decision confirms “the President is not above the law.” A DOJ spokesperson said the department “disagrees with this decision and will appeal in due course.” The ruling lands as Trump’s Justice Department keeps pursuing her father: an earlier case against James Comey was dismissed after a judge found the prosecutor had been illegally appointed. A separate indictment accusing him of threatening Trump with an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647” is still pending, and that case has been delayed until early next year.
Trump’s Justice Department has charged former FBI Director James Comey for a third time, the same day a judge ruled the department illegally fired his daughter. Federal prosecutors charged Comey with transmitting national defense information and conspiring to transmit national defense information, according to NBC News. The case has been under seal since Oct. 5, and Comey has not been indicted. His lawyers filed a motion last week to dismiss the charges. Comey has been a target of Trump’s since he opened the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump fired him in 2017. The first case against him, accusing him of lying to Congress, was thrown out after a judge found the prosecutor had been illegally appointed, and a second, accusing him of threatening Trump with an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647,” is delayed until early next year.
Trump Calls Brazil’s Election “Rigged” Without Evidence as Even His Own Allies Congratulate Lula
Trump claimed without evidence that Brazil’s election “looked like another rigged election” after Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro. “It looked terrible. I thought it was terrible,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I mean, I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election, frankly.” He took issue with the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision to extend voting by two hours, which Lula’s campaign had requested after buses were taken out of service in cities where he had strong support. Bolsonaro called the extension a “dirty trick,” even though his own campaign had also asked for more time because of heavy rain in the conservative south. Lula won 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent, a margin of about 4.4 million votes. Asked whether anything should be done about the result, Trump said, “I’m not running Brazil,” and added, “I like Lula. I get along with him very well.”
Trump’s administration reportedly held back its congratulations, even as world leaders and Trump’s own allies in the region welcomed Lula’s win. The State Department had drafted the customary congratulatory statement, but guidance was issued to postpone it and “evaluate” the situation after Bolsonaro called the result “inexplicable,” according to the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Meanwhile, Trump allies Chile’s José Antonio Kast and Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella both congratulated Lula, along with Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Mark Carney, and Zelensky. The Kremlin also welcomed the result, praising Lula’s work within BRICS. Lula’s victory snapped a streak of seven straight conservative presidential wins across Latin America in 18 months, according to the AP. It also denies Trump a powerful ally and keeps the region’s largest economy as a counterweight to Washington.
Bolsonaro is now under travel restrictions, after his brother suggested he should leave the country if he lost. Flávio Bolsonaro said federal police asked him to hand over his passports after he visited his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in prison for attempting a coup. “I was ordered right on the street to hand over my passports, and I’m also prohibited from leaving the country,” he said in a video. He claimed, without evidence, that the order came from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and said it was based on his brother Eduardo’s podcast remarks that Flávio should leave Brazil if he lost. He says he’ll comply and denies planning to flee. After first refusing to concede and seeking to annul the election, he now says he’ll “organize the opposition” to Lula’s government.
Other news:
Trump insiders say there’s “a very genuine possibility” that Nicki Minaj becomes the next White House press secretary. Reporter Jake Lahut surveyed his Trumpworld sources after White House staffers publicly floated the rapper for the job, following Katie Zacharia’s firing after just five days. One Trump adviser pointed to Trump’s history of unconventional picks, noting that his communications director, Steven Cheung, came from the world of professional wrestling: “Maybe after Kate it’s even time for a little chin music. Maybe that’s Nicki.” The same adviser predicted that almost anyone would look like a brilliant speaker compared with Zacharia, but probably wouldn’t be as good at the job as Karoline Leavitt. Another source involved in the situation wouldn’t give odds, answering with what Lahut called a classic Trumpworld “you tell me.” Lahut’s conclusion is that the pick is a real possibility, though it’s unclear whether it would happen before the midterms, and conservative commentator Scott Jennings is also reportedly in the mix.
Two Catholic bishops say the White House exploited a private prayer meeting with Trump for political purposes days before the midterms. Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob, one of 12 bishops at the Oct. 22 Oval Office meeting, issued “A Public Apology,” saying they were told it would be a private discussion with a chance to pray privately with the president. Instead, the White House quickly posted photos and video of the bishops praying over Trump, which Grob says was done without the participants’ consent. “I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred... would be manipulated in that way,” Grob said, adding that he heard from people “harmed by the president’s policies.” Des Moines Bishop William Joensen wrote, “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purpose.” Asked whether it had the bishops’ consent to release the images, the White House didn’t answer, saying only, “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump.”
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI model, warned in its IPO filing that its own technology could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company released the documents ahead of a stock market listing that could be record-breaking, pitching investors on AI’s ability to transform the world while warning it could also destroy it. The filing says its models have already been shown to be able to help people “develop chemical, biological, or other dangerous weapons.” It also warns that the models could cause harm by “behaving in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways,” including actions “no user or third party directed,” and that those risks may grow as the systems become more capable. Anthropic devoted 94 pages, nearly a quarter of the document, to risks, including that the long-term effects of AI on mental health and child development “are not yet fully understood.” The same filing claims AI could help cure diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, and says some of the money raised will go to new data centers and computing power.
A fighter jet intercepted a civilian plane that flew into restricted airspace over Mar-a-Lago while Trump was in Florida. Around 12:20 p.m. Saturday, a NORAD F-16 used a “headbutt maneuver,” flying close in front of the plane to get the pilot’s attention. The pilot then made contact and safely left the restricted area, according to NORAD, and the pilot’s identity has not been released. Trump and Melania Trump were in Florida that day to vote early in West Palm Beach. NORAD has intercepted more than 60 aircraft violating flight restrictions around Palm Beach since January, which a NORAD spokesperson called “a lot.” Pilots who violate the restricted airspace can face enforcement action from federal authorities when they land.
A United Airlines flight returned to Las Vegas after a flight attendant reportedly saw a passenger texting about hijacking the plane. Flight 1681 was carrying 150 passengers and six crew members to Newark on Saturday night when the flight attendant noticed the messages, according to CBS News. “The flight attendant saw him texting that he was going to hijack the aircraft,” the pilot told air traffic control. “They called me, we went into lockdown, and we returned to Vegas.” The plane landed safely about an hour after takeoff, and all passengers were removed and inspected, with no injuries reported. Passengers were rebooked on a flight the next morning, and the FAA is investigating. Authorities have not identified the passenger or said whether he was detained.
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its global workforce, to help pay for its massive AI spending. Staff across divisions including Copilot, Xbox, Windows, finance, and human resources are eligible, while marketing, commercial business, and security are excluded, according to a Reuters source. The company is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers and chips, and expects $175 billion in capital spending this year alone. Investors are increasingly questioning whether those investments will pay off. The offer covers eligible employees in the U.S., Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. It follows earlier buyouts offered to about 9,000 U.S. employees this year and 4,800 job cuts announced in July.
Walter Koenig, who played Chekov on the original “Star Trek,” has died at 90. He died at his home in North Hollywood, his agent confirmed, leaving William Shatner and George Takei as the last surviving primary cast members of the original series. Koenig joined the show in its second season as Pavel Chekov, the Enterprise’s navigator, and went on to reprise the role in seven “Star Trek” movies. Takei, whose wedding Koenig attended as best man, called him “a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend.” “Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course,” Takei wrote. Koenig kept working almost to the end, winning best actor at this year’s Independent Shorts Awards.
The NBA has signed deals making Kalshi and Polymarket its preferred prediction markets, alongside an agreement with federal regulators. The league says the deals include “significant integrity protections,” such as limits on which markets can be offered, information-sharing on suspicious trading, and a ban on league and team personnel trading on NBA events. The NBA will have the right to approve which types of markets are available on its games. “If you’re going to be betting on our games or trading on our games or playing fantasy around our games, it’s better for it to be regulated than unregulated,” said the NBA’s Scott Kaufman-Ross. The deals come as more than a dozen states fight prediction markets in court, and the NFL recently asked the Supreme Court to settle who regulates them. Giannis Antetokounmpo has promoted Kalshi and LeBron James recently signed with Polymarket, while Victor Wembanyama has said he will never endorse such sites.
The father of a 6-year-old boy killed when a driver plowed through a youth soccer game in Wichita paid tribute to his son at his funeral. Cole Adrian and soccer coach Nicholas Schafer, 35, were killed on Oct. 17 when a pickup truck reportedly sped from a parking lot across a field where a game was underway, injuring 10 others, including several young children. “Cole often told us this was the ‘best day ever,’ even on days when nothing really special happened,” his father, Chris Adrian, said through tears. The family has drawn comfort from local youth soccer players who wore shirts reading “LLCA,” which the family took to mean “live like Cole,” “love like Cole,” and “long live Cole.” The 34-year-old driver, who reportedly had two of her own children in the truck, was arrested at the scene but released a day later without charges pending toxicology results and an inspection of the truck. Wichita’s police chief defended the release, saying the law and Constitution required it.
Apple says a “small number” of its new $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo devices have cracked inner screens. Reports of cracks began spreading on Reddit and social media soon after the phone went on sale Friday, including one Australian user who said the screen broke along the hinge within six hours. “As I continued opening it, I heard an audible crack, and the screen broke right along the hinge,” the user wrote. Apple confirmed the issue and said affected customers should contact AppleCare for a replacement. Analysts say it’s too early to tell whether the problem is widespread, noting that Samsung’s first foldable had similar issues in 2019. The Duo is the biggest launch yet under new CEO John Ternus, and it has reportedly sold out until January.
When Trump has to go to Mississippi to save a Senate seat and can’t draw a crowd while he is there, it really is over for Trump and the Republican Party.
Democrats might not win the Senate seat in Mississippi, but Trump’s appearance in the state only helped them.
become a campaign prop, especially the immigrant families in his diocese who live a few miles from Mar-a-Lago.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Caught in Major Epstein Lies, White House ‘Panicked’ as Right Wing Governments Fall, Big Iran Strikes Planned, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Look at the stories in today’s newsletter and the same thing keeps happening. Trump says he was “never on Epstein’s plane,” and the flight logs say otherwise. He says he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, and the government’s own documents quote him saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Today, House Democrats put those statements next to the records in a 50-page report and are calling for an independent special counsel.
The same thing is happening around the world. Bolsonaro called his loss “foul play,” but the votes say otherwise. Serbia’s government put Vucic on state TV more than 500 times, and voters threw him out anyway. Here at home, Trump’s party keeps calling its seats safe while its own redrawn districts slip away. And CNN reports the White House has plans for major new strikes on Iran, ready to go after you’ve voted.
Powerful people keep putting out their story. The records keep telling a different one. My job is to put the two side by side so you can see the difference for yourself.
Billionaires bought the newspapers and the social media platforms, and they’re spending hundreds of millions to shape this election. You can’t outspend them, but together we can fund a newsroom they don’t control.
Here’s what you need to know today.
House Democrats Accuse Trump of Lying About Epstein and Call for a Special Counsel to Investigate the DOJ’s Alleged Cover-Up
House Judiciary Democrats released a 50-page report accusing Trump of lying “dozens of times” about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and they’re calling for an independent special counsel to investigate. The report, titled “The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up,” comes eight days before the midterms. It argues that the evidence clearly meets the FBI’s standard for opening a full investigation into whether Trump took part in Epstein’s crimes. Democrats say Trump’s own Justice Department can’t be trusted to run that investigation, so they’re demanding a special counsel under federal rules that require one when the department has a “conflict of interest.” That counsel, they write, should investigate the president, as past special counsels from Archibald Cox to Robert Hur did, along with all of Epstein’s potential accomplices. “An independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat.
The report walks through the claims Trump has made about Epstein and lays out the records that contradict them. In 2019, Trump said he knew Epstein “just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” but the report says the two were “inseparable” for much of the 1990s, and that Epstein’s address books listed 14 phone numbers for Trump. In 2024, Trump said he “was never on Epstein’s plane,” yet the Epstein files show he flew on the jet at least eight times. Trump has long claimed he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, but an unredacted DOJ document quotes Trump himself saying Epstein “was never asked to leave.” Democrats also point to the 2003 birthday note to Epstein that Trump denies writing, comparing its signature with his signatures on other documents from the same period. The report argues that repeated false statements like these can be treated in court as evidence of “consciousness of guilt.”
Democrats accuse Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, of possible obstruction of justice to protect the president. The report says Blanche shut down ongoing Epstein investigations and, as deputy attorney general, flew to Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison right after she was called to testify before Congress. According to the transcript, Blanche steered Maxwell away from a subject that implicated Trump on at least three occasions. Democrats say that “could easily run afoul” of federal witness tampering law. They also raise Maxwell’s transfer afterward to a minimum-security camp, the DOJ’s continued withholding of records despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and its refusal to share evidence with New Mexico and British investigators, which the report says left the U.K.’s investigation “at risk of collapse.” The White House said “none of these allegations are true,” calling the report “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans,” and Trump has long denied any wrongdoing connected to Epstein.
Trump’s White House Is Terrified the Global Uprising Against Strongmen Is Coming Here, and He’s Next
Trump’s White House is in full panic mode as the worldwide revolt against right-wing strongmen reaches America’s doorstep. In just one weekend, voters in Brazil rejected the Bolsonaro family Trump embraced, and students in Serbia toppled one of Putin’s closest allies in Europe, following the ouster of Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year. Trump’s response says it all: total silence on Brazil, a desperate Islamophobic rant in Michigan, and a party pouring millions into districts that were supposed to be safe. His own aides are already bracing for a midterm wipeout, and conservative groups are pushing him to issue mass pardons to protect his staff from investigations if Democrats take Congress. With just 34 percent of likely voters approving of him in Michigan, a state he won in 2024, the warning signs are everywhere. The question now is whether the wave sweeping the globe crashes over Trump’s party in eight days. Instead of staying on message, Trump is posting lengthy diatribes on Truth Social:
Screenshot of a very long Truth Social post by Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), shrunk into a thin strip in the center of a gray card. The text reads: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Let’s talk about this COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER, Bill Maher. He’s got a Low Rated Show on equally Low Rated HBO, which was once, long ago, a Network of Quality and Excitement — But that’s all gone. It’s not “HOT” anymore! Maher’s friend and business associate, Chuck LaBella, was also a friend of mine, worked on The Top Hit Show, The Apprentice, as a “gofer” and, because of the success of that show, Number One and Top Rated on many weeks, with the Finale’ being among the Top Shows of the Year, he was automatically and quickly brought up through the Ranks of NBC, along with everyone else associated with that Historic “Happening.” The Success of the Apprentice was so great that everyone partook — It built many careers, and that is a wonderful thing. (continues)
Lula’s stunning comeback in Brazil was a direct defeat for Trump, who tried to rescue the Bolsonaro family with tariffs and sanctions. Lula won 51.8 percent to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent, becoming the first candidate in Brazil’s history to lose the first round and come back to win, with a margin roughly double his 2022 victory. It was the first leftist win after seven straight right-wing victories across Latin America, and a rebuke of Trump, who imposed tariffs and sanctions on Brazil trying to keep Jair Bolsonaro out of prison. “This country refuses to be anyone’s backyard,” Lula declared, thanking the young people “who took to the streets to defend democracy.” Turnout actually rose from the first round to more than 128 million voters, driven by youth mobilization and a massive WhatsApp campaign. Trump has said nothing, while Flávio Bolsonaro, following his father’s playbook, called the result “foul play” and demanded it be annulled.
Putin just lost one of his closest allies in Europe as Serbia’s students crushed Aleksandar Vucic in a landslide. Vucic was one of the few European leaders who kept visiting Moscow even during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, standing alongside Orbán as Putin’s friendliest voices on the continent. Now both are gone. The student movement won 52.6 percent to Vucic’s 39.2 percent, a projected 140 seats, well past the 126 needed for a majority, despite Vucic dominating state media with more than 500 live addresses, a level one monitor compared to North Korea. The Kremlin was left hoping Serbia’s new leaders will still “understand the value of cooperation with Moscow,” while Zelensky, Germany’s Merz, and leaders across Europe celebrated. Hungary’s new prime minister, who ousted Orbán, said he felt “nostalgic” watching the celebrations, as Putin’s allies fall one by one.
Facing the same wave at home, Trump is resorting to Islamophobic fearmongering as even his gerrymanders collapse. At a Michigan rally Sunday, Trump claimed Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed would “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” falsely calling the U.S.-born Muslim a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member.” El-Sayed, who holds a narrow lead in a race that could decide the Senate, fired back: “My name and my faith are not the reason you can’t afford your gas.” Meanwhile, the congressional maps Trump pressured states to redraw as a “firewall” are failing: North Carolina’s 1st District, drawn so Trump would have won it by 11 points, is now a toss-up with more than $42 million in ad spending, and Texas seats drawn with a 10-point Trump advantage are shifting toward Democrats. Trump even admitted Speaker Mike Johnson begged him to rescue struggling candidates because their races are “tough.” As one strategist put it, this “will go down as a dummymander rather than a gerrymander.”
Trump Has Plans Ready for Major New Iran Strikes, Likely After the Midterms
U.S. forces are ready to launch major new strikes on Iran within 96 hours of a Trump order, and officials say it’s a question of when, not if. According to CNN, enough forces are now deployed in the Middle East to carry out attacks that would go far beyond the limited strikes on radars and launchers the U.S. has conducted since Trump halted full combat operations earlier this year. The Pentagon has developed a wide-ranging target list including Iranian energy infrastructure, military sites, and nuclear facilities. “It will be a big effort,” one official said. Officials say Trump appears to be leaning toward ordering major action, most likely after the Nov. 3 midterms, though he has backed off at the last moment before. Trump himself told Fox News on Sunday: “Do I make a deal with them, or do I finish them off?”
Israel pushed Trump for a joint attack before the midterms, but Trump told Netanyahu to wait. An Israeli security source told CNN that Netanyahu “really wanted and tried to convince Trump for a joint attack in Iran before the elections, and Trump did not give a green light,” a claim Netanyahu’s office called “fake news.” Israel has since delayed new strikes but is building up for joint operations with the U.S., likely after the American midterms, with one source saying, “The plans are ready, waiting for Trump’s approval.” Israeli media reported an “unprecedented” confrontation between Netanyahu and his army chief, who reportedly demanded legal authorization before carrying out an unspecified Iran directive, amid fears the war could be exploited for political gain ahead of Tuesday’s Israeli election. Netanyahu called the report “rubbish,” and his defense minister insisted there is “complete” coordination. U.S. intelligence assessments found Netanyahu still lacks a clear strategic objective beyond showing “progress,” even as he has publicly ordered Israel’s security services to topple Iran’s regime.
The U.S. is quietly preparing for Iranian retaliation, pulling diplomats out of the region and halting troop deployments. Intelligence assessments warn that if the U.S. and Israel strike again, Iran and the Houthis would likely retaliate immediately against American personnel and facilities in the region and beyond. The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia is already under ordered departure, other embassies are expected to follow or face staffing caps, and nonessential troops scheduled to rotate into the Middle East have been told they’re no longer going. A U.S. official called the current standoff in the Strait of Hormuz “untenable,” as oil prices stay high near $115 a barrel despite more tankers getting through. Meanwhile, the Houthis claimed another attack on Riyadh’s airport just hours after it reopened, and a tanker was struck and disabled in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday.
Iran says new U.S. strikes won’t change its position, even as the war and blockade squeeze its economy. “Whether there is war or not, our policies remain the same,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, adding that the U.S. and Israel “know they will achieve no different outcome” if they attack again. Tehran says indirect talks with Washington continue through intermediaries, and senior officials from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are meeting Iranian leaders in Tehran Monday to push for de-escalation. But the U.S. naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue, and the shadow fleet of tankers Iran used to sell oil to China reportedly ran dry in mid-October. Iran’s parliament speaker is now calling on citizens to cut gas use by 10 percent ahead of expected winter shortages.
Netanyahu Accused of Trying to Provoke Iran War to Delay Israel’s Election as Army Chief Pushes Back
Israel’s army chief reportedly pushed back on a Netanyahu directive that could have triggered a war with Iran just days before Tuesday’s election. According to Israel’s N12 News, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir received an order from the political leadership to carry out an action that security officials said would “trigger a rapid escalation into a confrontation with Iran.” Zamir demanded an in-depth discussion and formal legal authorization before moving forward, as he and other military leaders grew concerned the government was trying to exploit the Iran front for political gain. The report described the relationship between Netanyahu and Zamir as hitting “new lows.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu would have welcomed a return to war with Iran in August, earlier in October, and again recently, with both Trump and Zamir at times acting as brakes on him. Zamir has reportedly only been willing to strike Iran before the election if Iran was preparing to attack Israel or if Trump launched a new round of fighting with full U.S. backing.
Opposition leaders are accusing Netanyahu of treason, saying he tried to drag Israel into war to stop the election. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman called on the attorney general to open a criminal treason investigation, accusing Netanyahu of trying to provoke a confrontation with Iran to delay or prevent the vote. “The man has gone off the rails,” Liberman said, adding that relations between the military and political leadership have “never been as strained.” Former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot warned Netanyahu, “Do not dare to place your own political interests above the security of the State,” vowing not to let the IDF become “a tool for Netanyahu’s political survival campaign.” Democrats party leader Yair Golan went further, saying Netanyahu “does not hesitate to sacrifice the lives of our children for his survival on the eve of elections.”
Netanyahu and his defense minister deny any rift or any plan to strike Iran before the vote. Netanyahu called the report “rubbish” and said “there is no confrontation,” claiming critics were trying to obscure warnings that Iran was attempting to interfere in the election. Defense Minister Israel Katz said coordination with the IDF on Iran has been “complete,” and stated “unequivocally” that Israel had no intention of attacking Iran before the election, unless Iran struck first. He called the opposition’s attacks “shameful and irresponsible.” The controversy comes as Netanyahu faces a tight race in Tuesday’s election, with polls suggesting his governing coalition could lose its majority. It also comes as CNN reports Israel lobbied Trump for a joint strike on Iran before the vote, which Trump declined.
Ukraine Gets Starlink and Intelligence Back, but Patriot Shortage and Russian Strikes Continue
Zelensky says the U.S. has fully restored Ukraine’s Starlink access and its warnings about incoming Russian ballistic missiles, but the Patriot missile shortage remains unresolved. After meeting with U.S. officials in Oslo, Zelensky said the intelligence and Starlink issues “have been resolved as of today,” following a restriction that came amid his public feud with Trump over the diesel deal with Russia and Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. Drone attack reports across Ukraine shot up while Starlink access was restricted, as Russia ramped up strikes ahead of winter. But Zelensky said U.S. Patriot interceptors still aren’t arriving, warning that “things are moving very slowly, more slowly than Russian missiles fly.” “You cannot say, ‘yes, we will give the missiles to you,’ and then not deliver them for a month or two,” he said. Overnight, Russia launched about 140 drones and three ballistic missiles at Ukraine, injuring at least eight people and hitting a shopping center in Zaporizhzhia.
A Ukrainian government source says the Oleshky ceasefire came about after Zelensky spoke with Pope Leo, who had spoken to Putin, even as the White House credits Melania Trump. The source told Sky News the humanitarian corridor took shape following those conversations, adding weight to questions about who really brokered the deal. The two sides also disagree on timing, with Ukraine’s human rights chief saying the ceasefire starts Tuesday while the U.S. says Oct. 29. The Kremlin said the Oleshky arrangement could serve as a model for similar deals elsewhere, but stressed that upcoming peace talks place no restrictions on its military operations. Meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers have been using drones to drop food and medicine into the occupied city, where about 50 children are trapped, and even airlifted pets to safety in cages. Russia, without evidence, accused Ukraine of mining roads to block evacuations, while Russia itself has been accused of using Oleshky’s civilians as human shields.
Ukraine is making slow but significant gains on the battlefield as peace talks are set to resume next month without the leaders. The Institute for the Study of War says Ukrainian forces have liberated three villages in the Oleksandrivka direction, forcing Russia to redeploy some of its more combat-capable troops away from offensive operations, which could threaten Russian logistics over time. Ukraine also launched more than 100 drones at Russia’s Voronezh region overnight, killing two people and injuring 17, and drone maker Fire Point said it struck a major synthetic rubber plant there. Russia’s security service claimed it foiled a Ukrainian-directed drone plot targeting Moscow’s missile defenses, which Ukraine hasn’t commented on. U.S.-mediated talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. are expected in November at a technical level, possibly in Abu Dhabi or Switzerland. Zelensky said territory is a “red line” that can only be discussed between leaders, and that he doesn’t want to approach any such meeting “having lifted all sanctions.”
Other news:
Anthropic has confirmed that its Claude AI model bypassed a paywall to access voter data from the state of Georgia. The AI found a loophole in an old version of a state agency website, requesting a digital “access token” that let it reach aggregate vote counts normally available only for a fee, as part of an internal statistics project. Anthropic said Claude “did not access the state’s voter registration system, change any voting records, or pull any individual voter records,” and that it has added safeguards to prevent similar behavior. The company had disclosed earlier this month that Claude had worked around restrictions to reach gated data, including on U.S. government websites, and had also submitted a fake tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police and filed 19 visa applications. It’s the latest in a growing string of incidents involving AI agents acting on their own, including an OpenAI agent that hacked Australia’s healthcare system. The White House’s new Super Intelligence Force now requires AI companies to report security incidents involving their technology.
RFK Jr.’s overhaul of U.S. vaccine policy has left new vaccines in limbo, with patients now paying out of pocket for shots that used to be free. After a judge blocked Kennedy’s attempt to replace the government’s vaccine advisory committee with his handpicked allies, Kennedy hasn’t appointed any new members, meaning no new vaccine recommendations are being issued. Without a recommendation, insurers aren’t required to cover newly approved vaccines, like Moderna’s new mRNA flu shot for adults 50 and up, potentially until January 2029. One retired public health worker was charged a $40 co-pay for the shot, saying, “I’ve never had to pay for a flu shot in my life.” Even Kennedy’s own former lawyer accused the White House and Justice Department of “doing everything they can to make sure that there is no functioning vaccine committee.” Experts warn the committee may never return to how it was without new legal protections from Congress.
U.S. forces are accused of “weaponizing” Somalia’s floods by driving civilians toward a rising river with relentless airstrikes. Residents of Jilib, the de facto capital of the militant group al-Shabaab, describe constant drone strikes that have killed civilians and pinned the population along the flooding Juba River, just as a strengthening El Niño threatens catastrophic floods. A source monitoring the region told the Guardian the offensive appears to be “exploiting El Niño as a weapon of war,” raising fears of mass drownings among women and children in the coming months. The U.S. military’s Africa Command denied the allegation, saying it “does not target civilians” or “use weather or flooding as a method of warfare.” But witnesses describe far more strikes than the 11 the U.S. has publicly acknowledged since August, raising questions about covert strikes. The crisis is compounded by aid cuts, with Somalia’s aid budget collapsing from $2.2 billion in 2023, and one refugee camp leader estimating 6,000 may have died in Kismayo’s displacement camps since USAID was shut down.
R&B singer Chris Brown received a suspended sentence for hitting a man in the head with a tequila bottle at a London club. Brown, 37, was sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended for 12 months, after pleading guilty earlier this year to affray over the February 2023 attack at a private members’ club in Mayfair. Security footage showed Brown striking Abraham Diaw four times with a heavy square tequila bottle, twice in the head, before throwing punches as Diaw fell. Brown’s vocal coach, Omololu Akinlolu, who grabbed Diaw in a “bear hug” during the attack, received a four-month suspended sentence. The judge called the attack “plainly dangerous” and warned that “commercial success does not attract preferential treatment.” Both men were ordered to pay about $2,000 in court costs.
Newly released footage shows baby monkeys taken from their mothers and subjected to neurological experiments at the University of Washington. The videos, obtained by PETA through a public records request, show infant macaques, some just two days old, with electrodes attached to their heads, screeching and clutching blankets as researchers tested their reflexes and memory. The monkeys were part of a $4.2 million, NIH-funded project from 2014 to 2020 studying whether exposure to a marine algae toxin in the womb damaged their brains, and PETA says they were killed afterward. “Instead of clinging to their mothers, they grasp blankets on metal tables,” said PETA’s chief primate science adviser, a former University of Washington scientist. The university said its staff have specialized expertise in primate care and that the research remains relevant to public health, though there’s no clear evidence it changed health recommendations. PETA is calling for the closure of all seven U.S. National Primate Research Centers.
Police have arrested a 15-year-old in the shooting near Florida A&M’s stadium that injured 12 people during homecoming weekend. The teen faces 11 counts of attempted second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a delinquent, according to Tallahassee police. The shooting broke out Saturday night near Bragg Memorial Stadium after the historically Black university’s homecoming football game, injuring several minors, including an 11-year-old. Police said a physical altercation between people who knew each other came before the gunfire, and that none of the victims appear to have been the intended targets. “What should have been a weekend of celebration in our community instead became a night of fear and violence,” said Police Chief Lawrence Revell. More arrests are possible as the investigation continues.
Japan has indicted a U.S. Marine on robbery and murder charges in the killing of a Japanese woman in Okinawa. Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, is accused of strangling 39-year-old Anna Yagi with a telephone cord in a hotel in Naha earlier this month and stealing her backpack and wallet, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK. Ballard has denied the allegations. The case sparked protests in Okinawa and Tokyo, drew condemnation from Japanese political leaders, and led to a curfew and alcohol ban for U.S. troops on the island. It’s the latest in a long string of incidents fueling unease over the large U.S. military presence in Okinawa, near Taiwan and China. The Marine Corps said it recognizes “the seriousness of the charges” and will continue cooperating with Japanese authorities.
Meidas Touch Network, Monday Update: Lula Wins, Trump’s Allies Fall, and an Epstein Report Drops 8 Days Out, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 26, 2026. It's Monday. Eight days until midterms. Here’s what’s going on: House Judiciary 
Democrats just released a 53-page Epstein report with accounts from 11 women and a call for a special counsel; Lula wins a fourth term in Brazil, and Flávio Bolsonaro and Trumpworld cry “stolen”; Serbia’s students beat Vučić’s party, and María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela; Netanyahu reportedly clashes with his own army chief over Iran ahead of Tuesday’s election; CNN says Trump is prepping major Iran strikes, likely after the midterms; Gas prices are on track for the priciest Election Day in history;
The Epstein Report
This morning, House Judiciary Democrats under Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin released a report titled “‘We Have Certain Things in Common, Jeffrey’: The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover it Up.”
It draws on accounts from 11 women, FBI records, and documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The central claim is that Trump was an active participant in Epstein’s abuse of young women in the 1990s.
You can read the full report in its entirety here:'
Five of the 11 women directly accuse Trump of rape or sexual assault in Epstein’s presence, and others say Epstein or Maxwell tried to traffic them to him. Two allegations involve 13-year-old girls. There’s also a new allegation from a Swiss model who previously accused Trump of sexual assault and now alleges he raped her at a 1993 pageant at the Plaza Hotel. The report also names longtime Trump friend Paolo Zampolli as a possible co-conspirator.
The report argues that AG Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is compromised and that an independent special counsel is needed. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called the allegations untrue and the report a “desperate attempt” to distract. Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove reports the Epstein case is haunting Republicans on the campaign trail. Rep. Robert Garcia says Oversight will open its own probe if Democrats win the House.
Brazil Says No
Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro 51.76% to 48.24%, a margin of roughly 4.36 million votes, after trailing in round one. Lula not only had to fight Bolsonaro and the international network of autocrats, but also Big Tech. Meta appeared to suppress Lula’s ads and content while Flávio’s got amplified, on top of Musk’s thumb on the scale at X. So Lula’s people built their own channel, ironically on another Meta platform not based on algorithms, but based on the people. Congressman André Janones launched a WhatsApp channel he called “Lula’s Army.” Per Colombian journalist Félix de Bedout, it grew from 50,000 people in the first round to 10 MILLION in the runoff. That’s how they broke through the blockade.
Lula’s victory speech took aim at Washington and Silicon Valley. He said Brazil won’t be in anybody’s backyard, called out foreign interference through digital platforms, and promised to regulate the tech giants that earn billions, pay no taxes in Brazil, and try to steer its elections.
Flávio refused to concede and says he’ll seek to annul the election over a court order extending voting by 2 hours. And guess who posted his statement first? Trump adviser Jason Miller. Shocker.
Elon Musk posted that the “math doesn’t add up,” which ignores how runoffs work. Lula picked up about 10 million votes between rounds while Flávio added around 3.6 million. Trump influencer Joey Mannarino called for Trump to “send in a team for Lula” like he did for Maduro. The Trump propagandist class on X in unison all pushed their stolen election claims.
Pathetic.Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL) arrives to speak after losing the presidential runoff election, in Brasilia, Brazil October 25, 2026. REUTERS/Adriano Machado
Some on Brazil’s own right didn’t play along. João Amoêdo, founder of the center-right Novo party, said Flávio’s refusal proves the family’s coup-plotting DNA. Celebrations filled the streets all across Brazil, and even in Buenos Aires, the capital of Trump pal Javier Milei.
It Was a Rough Weekend for Trump’s Friends
In Serbia: The student-led movement born out of the 2024 Novi Sad canopy collapse beat Aleksandar Vučić’s party roughly 52% to 32%. Vučić is still president, but his party’s decade-plus grip on parliament is over. He cultivated close ties with Putin, Don Jr.—and Jared Kushner pursued a major real estate deal with his government.
In Venezuela: María Corina Machado returned home via Colombia and drew huge crowds on her way to Caracas. I have real problems with how much she has flattered Trump, but she is a far better alternative than Delcy Rodríguez.
In Cuba: Marco Rubio literally posted a recruitment pitch on X inviting Cubans into a “discrete partnership with the CIA.”
In Hungary: The Trump regime is reportedly encouraging another loser, Viktor Orbán, to run for UN Secretary-General, with Russia and China apparently supportive, per WSJ.Netanyahu vs. His Own Army
Israel votes Tuesday, and Channel 12 describes an unprecedented confrontation between Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir over military action related to Iran right before the election. Zamir has reportedly demanded signed documentation on its legal authorization. Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief now leading the opposition, publicly backed Zamir and warned Netanyahu not to turn the IDF into a tool for his political survival.
Reports circulated that Netanyahu was pressing Trump for more support heading into the vote, and shortly after, Trump posted a second endorsement to Truth Social, attaching the one he’d already given a week earlier “to those who haven’t seen it.” He encouraged Israel to vote for Netanyahu so that they can continue the war against Iran. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is running an ad bragging that electricity prices haven’t spiked in Israel, while Americans pay record prices for the war he and Trump started.
More Reporting on New Attacks
CNN, citing 2 U.S. officials, reports U.S. forces could launch major new operations against Iran within 96 hours of an order, with a target list covering energy, military, and nuclear sites. Trump apparently wants to wait until after the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, Iran hosted a security summit in Tehran with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Pakistan’s army chief, and Türkiye’s intelligence chief. Everything continues to spiral out of control for MBS as Ansar Allah (Houthis) gain territory and hit Saudi Arabia.
CENTCOM’s Admiral Brad Cooper claimed over 95% of ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz safely. But UKMTO data shows 27 attacks in October, the most of any month throughout this war. And UKMTO has admitted they are undercounting the attacks. But let’s humor Brad Cooper’s 95% number. That means tankers have a 5% chance of getting hit by his rosiest of scenarios. If you knew you had a 5% chance of your plane crashing, would you board your flight? This isn’t exactly encouraging.Gas Prices Keep Surging
GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan says gas is 42 cents above the 2022 Election Day average, making this the priciest Election Day ever. Diesel is nearly a dollar higher. Trump’s second-term average gas prices have already passed Biden’s.
So of course Kevin Hassett went on Fox and called this “about the best economy we’ve ever seen.”
The Early Vote
In Texas, Democratic primary voters are turning out like it’s a presidential year while Republicans are turning out like it’s a midterm. Democrats across the board are way ahead of their 2024 pace.
Then there’s DataRepublican, one of the most-followed data accounts on the MAGA right (and a former secret Trump regime employee). When her followers asked for her early vote analysis, she said her platform is big enough that being too honest with the numbers could hurt morale, so she would instead quietly post information to her website without announcing it on X. That says a whole lot. When she posted the data on her site, it showed a likely 15 to 21 point shift to the left from 2024 when you extrapolate the info.
Trump and Vance are spending the final week in states Trump won by an average of 14 points, including Mississippi today.
And one more reminder from me: don’t let any of this positive data make you complacent. Remember to vote. Keep spreading the word. Take nothing for granted.
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.
Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.
The next nine days will decide the direction of this country, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way. I have some big interviews coming this week that you won’t want to miss, daily coverage as the final stretch unfolds, and a major election night livestream on November 3rd with guests I can’t wait to share with you.
None of it is possible without you. I don’t have a corporate owner or a billionaire backer. This work runs on readers who believe in independent journalism.
Here’s what you need to know tonight.
Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat to a student-led protest movement, ending his more than decade-long grip on power in a historic election. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” Vucic said Sunday, projecting the students would take between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament to his party’s 105. A representative sample by pollsters showed the student list winning 138 seats to 104 for Vucic’s party. Turnout hit nearly 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, with long lines snaking from polling stations across the country. The vote followed almost two years of student-led protests against corruption and creeping authoritarianism, sparked when a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024, killing 16 people. Belgrade’s streets erupted in celebration, with cars honking and students chanting “victory” and “he’s done,” as one celebrating woman said, “We have finally got rid of this mafia.”
The Bottom Is Falling Out for Republicans as Trump’s Own Words Drag Down His Party
Trump told a Georgia rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans paying more at the pump, bragging that the U.S. is “making a freaking fortune” off high oil prices. “We’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, but my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher,” Trump said Saturday. He predicted the headlines would say he was bragging about money while people suffer at the pump, then added, “I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.” The remarks came as inflation rose to 3.7 percent in September, hotter than expected, and consumer sentiment sits near the lowest point on record. “Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded, while former Obama adviser David Axelrod quipped it was “not a great closing message.” New Yorker writer Susan Glasser called it “the epigraph for the entire Trump 2.0 presidency.”
Republicans’ own internal polling shows the bottom falling out in seats that were once considered safe. GOP leaders received polling in late September showing that districts Trump won by 10 points or more in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere are now competitive, and all three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa look likely to fall, according to Politico. Even longtime incumbents who haven’t faced serious races in years, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, are now at risk. “I think the scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is,” one senior House Republican said. Their worst fear is that white working-class voters, angry over fuel prices and the Iran war, won’t just stay home but will vote for Democrats. Arkansas Rep. French Hill, whose deep-red seat is now a Democratic target, blamed “President Trump’s lack of favorability at the top.” Democrats say they’re confident of winning the House and could reach as many as 240 seats.
Election analysts say Trump himself is the reason, warning of a “red undertow” that could sink Republicans in both chambers. Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said rising prices, tariffs, and the Iran war all hit at once just as voters started paying attention: “It was almost like the bottom fell out suddenly.” He said the coming wave “isn’t pro-Democrat. It’s anti-Trump,” predicting Democrats will flip 20 or more House seats and likely four Senate seats, enough to take both chambers. A New York Times poll this week showed Democrats leading by 11 points, with Trump’s approval at a new low. Early voting data also shows Democrats and independents far more energized than Republicans. And Trump’s own past attacks appear to be backfiring: after spending months calling mail-in voting fraudulent, he’s now frantically urging Republicans to vote early by mail.
Obama Hammers Trump Over the Iran War as Trump Fumes Over Obama’s Crowds
Obama blasted Trump for starting an unnecessary war with Iran, arguing he had already kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons without firing a shot. “Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, because I put a deal in place that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes,” Obama said in Cleveland. “And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it; I just had to engage in diplomacy.” Trump withdrew from that 2015 deal in his first term, then launched strikes on Iran alongside Israel in late February, promising a quick operation that has now dragged on for nearly eight months. “So seven months later, how’s that war going?” Obama asked, noting that 21 Americans have been killed, 865 wounded, missile stockpiles depleted, and Iran now holds “veto power” over the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the price of oil, diesel, and “just about everything.” The war has become a liability for Republicans, with a new AP-NORC poll finding 56 percent of Republican voters and 47 percent of Democratic voters say ending it should be a top priority for the next Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton now leads Vivek Ramaswamy 50 percent to 43 percent in a Marist poll taken before his controversial ad aired, and Sherrod Brown leads Sen. Jon Husted 48 percent to 44 percent.
Trump lashed out over the size of Obama’s Detroit rally, complaining that the media “never” talks about his crowds. Obama rallied Saturday in Detroit with Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson on the first day of in-person early voting in the state. Speaking at a rally in Georgia that night, Trump mocked the turnout: “A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd.” He referred to El-Sayed as “Mohamed,” a name drawn from the candidate’s middle name that Trump has repeatedly used against him. Trump then revived an old grievance about Sen. Bernie Sanders, claiming Sanders drew “like 900 to 1,000 people” while he drew tens of thousands. In reality, Sanders’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew an estimated 36,000 people in Los Angeles and more than 34,000 in Denver last year. He attacked Obama on Truth Social too:
Musk Doubles Down on Ukraine Starlink Cuts as Kyiv Fires Back and Pentagon Hands SpaceX Sensitive Military Data
Elon Musk is defending his decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starlink, lashing out at critics as “bloodthirsty warmongers” and agreeing that Zelensky “needs to go.” In a string of posts Saturday night into Sunday, Musk said Ukraine violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes, writing, “We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed.” He warned that if Starlink were switched off, “the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately,” adding, “This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.” Musk accused his critics of wanting the war to continue “until every last man in Ukraine has died in a ditch,” and when one user wrote that Zelensky needs to go, Musk replied, “Yes.” Until this weekend, neither Musk nor the U.S. government had taken responsibility for the cuts, with Musk previously insisting that limits were “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Earlier this month, Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev hailed Musk’s attacks on Zelensky as a “tipping point” in the war. Today, he celebrated Musk again:
Ukraine flatly denies Musk’s claim, saying it would have been physically impossible to use commercial Starlink the way he described. “It’s very strange that Elon Musk doesn’t know about the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov, noting that Starlink doesn’t work over Russian territory, so Ukraine “PHYSICALLY CANNOT USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK” for deep or mid-range strikes. A former drone adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry said any drone mission requiring satellite links had to run through Starshield, the U.S. government-controlled military version, and that Ukraine “did not violate the terms of use.” Ukrainian officials say the cuts capped Starshield at about 100 miles per hour, hampering their ability to shoot down Russian drones and forcing them to cancel operations. The restrictions came as Trump struck a diesel deal with Russia, waived sanctions, and called for Ukraine to get a new president, and coincided with an interruption in U.S. intelligence warnings of incoming Russian attacks. Zelensky has said he believes both Trump and Musk were involved.
Russia pounded Ukraine as the satellite fight played out, and Kyiv is now racing to build its own system so it never depends on Musk again. Zelensky said Russia launched about 1,600 guided bombs, 48 missiles, and nearly 2,300 attack drones at Ukraine in the past week alone, killing and injuring people almost every day. Ukraine’s defense ministry has partnered with Nokia and Finnish satellite firm ICEYE to develop a “sovereign” Starlink-style network built on European technology. “We must all rely on capabilities that we can control,” Zelensky said. A security analyst told NBC News that Musk’s control over Starlink gives him “enormous leverage,” which is exactly why Europe is pushing to build independent space infrastructure. This isn’t the first time: Reuters reported last year that Musk ordered a 2022 Starlink disruption during a pivotal Ukrainian counteroffensive, which SpaceX called inaccurate.
At the same time, the Pentagon has handed SpaceX access to sensitive military space-tracking data, raising new national security and conflict-of-interest concerns. The Space Force gave SpaceX “enhanced” access to U.S. Space Command’s most detailed catalog of objects in orbit, a first for any commercial company, including radar tracking data on objects as small as about 4 inches. The data has been closely held because it could expose the limits of U.S. defense capabilities used to monitor other countries’ satellites. Critics say it gives Musk an edge over competitors and moves toward privatizing space traffic control, after Musk’s DOGE fired much of the staff at the federal program meant to handle it and the administration twice tried to defund it. “It’s like giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights,” said a former employee of that program. Public Citizen said Musk “has bought his way into the favor of President Trump,” and his “political investment is paying off very, very handsomely.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 25, 2026 [MAGA Doubles Down], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 26, 2026. And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.
As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.
Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.
He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”
Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”
On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.
At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”
But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”
Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.
Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.
Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.
Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.
After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”
“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.
After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.
Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against incumbent Republican senator Mike Rogers in Michigan.
That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.
El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.
Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.
And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.
Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.
American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.
Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.
Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”
After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”
The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.
“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.
Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for [Donald Trump].”
It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.
In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”
An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”
In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ass Clown, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In a weird way, it’s almost sad to see. Donald Trump has spent a decade as the main character of our politics. He has managed to break and destabilize shockingly much in that time. Yet now, watching him stagger toward a humiliating midterm rebuke with his movement seemingly on the brink of collapse, I have to admit it’s hard to feel much pleasure about it all.
Instead, I still mostly feel disgust and shame: This is the would-be Napoleon who managed to haul the United States of America to this ridiculous place?
Trump, who still apparently believes in the mystical election-saving power of his rallies, has spent weeks dragging himself from stage to stage across the country. He is plainly exhausted; he is noticeably hoarser, looser, and less energetic than he was even a couple weeks ago. Most of what he dishes out is reheated sludge—microwaved leftovers from 2016 and 2024. Two things are new, though.
One is this ass thing. Can we talk about this ass thing? Trump can’t stop talking about the derrieres that surround him. Mostly it’s Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, but it’s started to spread. “I’ve been living with this whole thing about the ass,” he said last night in Michigan. Then he turned to Mike Rogers: “I’d say that about your ass, too, Mike, if it gets you a guaranteed victory.” Not in a gay way, though, he hastened to clarify. “By the way, I’ve looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before,” he added. “Nicki Minaj. That’s hard to miss.” He then invited Minaj, who was in the audience, to stand up so people could get a better view.
But the main new thing is the conditional promise.
You’ve heard the big one, of course: Trump’s no-foolin’ pledge that, if Republicans win the midterms, he’ll reward the public’s good behavior with $5,000 checks for every adult. What you may not realize, if you don’t watch the rallies, is how basically every Trump promise is now framed like this.
He goes to Westchester, Kentucky, and promises a new $100 million Defense Department investment in a pharmaceutical plant there—but only “if Republicans win.” “You have to win, Andy,” he tells Senate candidate Andy Barr. “Otherwise, forget it.”
He goes to Park City, Kansas, and promises a farmer-pleasing change to allow the sale of ethanol-blended gas year round—but only if Sen. Roger Marshall wins re-election. “If Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it,” Trump says. “I’m only doing it for him.”
He goes to Greenville, North Carolina, and promises to settle longstanding claims from veterans exposed to contaminated drinking water while serving at nearby Camp Lejeune decades ago. But only “if we win the House and Senate.” “If we don’t win, there’s no money,” Trump says. “If we do win, you’re getting it, and it’s going to be finally over with that nightmare that’s been going on for so many years.”
As is typical with Trump, none of these quid pro quo promises are actually true. Some of these things—the $5,000 checks, say—are never happening, whether Republicans win or not. Others—the Westchester plant, the Camp Lejeune settlements¹—are moving forward either way. The president either doesn’t know this, or does know it but thinks his voters won’t. And what if they were true? What if the president was actually planning to try to withhold settlements from veterans genuinely harmed by government carelessness out of pique that American voters rejected him and gave Congress back to the Democrats? Which possibility would be more embarrassing? Which would be more shameful?
Once upon a time, this stuff actually seemed to work for Trump. He built a whole lurid Technicolor artificial world for his supporters to live in: a world where pedophile satanist Democrat elites and murderous asylum-escapee migrants had conspired to kill America, a world where he had arrived as Messiah to resurrect it and lead it to the promised land. He lied and lied, and then from time to time he won.
But now it’s over. He’s cooked, he’s done, the jig is up. The American people, who somehow momentarily and disastrously forgot just who this guy is two years ago, have managed to remember, and they don’t like what they see. Nobody is listening. Nobody believes. The wheedling doesn’t help. The lies don’t help.
And yet there he is, out there night after night, this 80-year-old man crisscrossing the country, lying himself hoarse, smashing the same button again and again. The lies don’t help, but he can’t stop lying. It worked before. He knows it worked before. Why isn’t it working now? What the hell is wrong with you people? What the hell is wrong with the country?
It’s an undignified way for an undignified politician and his once-formidable movement to go down. Not with a bang, but a whimper. And it’s a hard thing for those of us on the outside to look at with any pride. It’s good that this thing is collapsing under the weight of its own ludicrousness. How did we ever let it beat us in the first place?
The voters are walking away from Trump. Fortunately for him, at least he likes the view.
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Loses Big In Brazil And Serbia, More Encouraging Early Vote Data, Adam Hamilton Joins Us Live Today At 1:30 pm ET, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In what has been a terrible month of declining poll numbers, a deteriorating battlefield, soaring inflation, crappy job numbers, Brent crude hitting $116 a barrel, a widening war in the Middle East, an orgy of scandals, and escalating internal infighting, our failed, venal, sundowning leader got lots more bad news last night -- his allies in Brazil and Serbia got beat, and Marina Corina Machado returned to Venezuela to rapturous crowds.
These last twenty fours have been some of the most important in our grand battle against MAGA and the global right since Hopium was founded. Here we take the wins when they come and these were big, consequential wins, fellow patriots. Big consequential wins for the global democracy movement, and enormous, deflating, and consequential losses for Trump eight days before his own election.
The people of Hungary, Serbia, and Brazil have done their jobs this year. Now it is our turn brothers and sisters. Let’s use this energy to drive the early vote this week, run up the score, and win these midterms for as Anderson Clayton told us:
Elections may be decided in November, but they are won in October!
My Monday morning early vote update is that the strong performance we’ve seen with young, Black, and Hispanic/Latino voters continues today. It appears that these important members of our coalition understand the assignment:
For more on what we are seeing in the early vote be sure to read my new deep dive here:
Some Additional Notes On The Early Vote, Simon Rosenberg·Oct 25, Read full story
A few days ago the right wing site Real Clear Politics released polls in 8 House races in deep red places. Democrats lead in 7 of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PA 8: Cognetti 52, Bresnahan 48 (Cognetti +4)
TX 35: Garcia 51, De La Cruz 49 (Garcia +2)
MT 1: Forstag 50, Flint 46 (Forstag +4)
FL 14: Castor 48, Beltran 43 (Castor +5)
MO 2: Wellman 51, Wagner 46 (Wellman +5)
NC 11: Ager 56, Balkcom 43 (Ager +13)
AR 2: Hill 52 (GOP), Jones 48 (Hill +4)
AZ 2: Nez 50, Crane 48 (Nez +2)
MI 7: Lawrence 53, Barrett 45 (Lawrence +8)
IA 2nd: James 50, Mitchell 47 (James +3)
I cannot even imagine how this played in Republican circles. In keeping with Halloween, we can safely describe this as bloodbath territory for them, and a reminder that in the closing days of the election Trump is campaigning in and Republicans are spending in Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, and South Carolina:
Yes, the desperate, impulsive, Idiot-In-Chief really attacked Lisa Murkowski yesterday over her very public opposition to his ridiculous effort to steal the Alaska Senate seat. Thanks Donald!
The backlash to the Trump-backed vile ad run by Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio continues as the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke its neutrality rules and came out swinging for Amy Acton yesterday:
Let’s end with this video of our great candidate, Bobby Pulido, campaigning this weekend, South Texas style:
Yes, fellow patriots, it is that time……time to….
Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight Their Neverending Fuckery
There are three things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:
Huffington Post, Opinion: ‘Stick A Fork In It’: Ex-Trump Official Says 1 Move Could Mark The End Of Trump Presidency, Ben Blanchet, Oct. 26, 2026. Anthony Scaramucci advised the president to be “very careful,” or else lead to the death of the Republican Party.
Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s communications director in his first term, has warned that the president could create serious trouble for himself — and his party — if he agrees to a proposed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Trump should be very careful with that because he would probably — he’s going to push the envelope where he may be asked to leave the presidency,” said Scaramucci on Sunday’s episode of “The Daily Beast Podcast.”
The proposed meeting — which, per The Wall Street Journal, Putin floated in an Oct. 9 call with Trump — would bring the leaders together in China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month.
The intended focus of the meeting, sources told the Journal, would be to negotiate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine — but without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Asked about the proposed meeting outside the White House last week, Trump said he’s open to whatever he can do to end the war “whether somebody’s there or not” before suggesting that denuclearization would be the focus of the talks.
Scaramucci, joining the likes of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal editorial boards, advised the president against attending such a meeting.
“If that meeting were to happen, then I would tell you that the Republican Party is completely dead; we’d probably have to get a tombstone out,” he began.
“And you tell me the date of that meeting and I will chisel into the tombstone: ‘This party got started in Wisconsin in 1856, it elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and it died on the date of that meeting.’ The party is dead — sticking a fork in it — the Cheney, Bush, Romney, Reagan, Eisenhower party dead, stick a fork in it.”
Addressing those who might doubt his presidency-ending prediction, Scaramucci insisted it’s “not crazy,” as he expects Democrats will take the House in the midterms and could find a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove Trump from office.
“Let’s say they split and they go 50-50, you need 17 Republicans that have had enough of him,” Scaramucci said.
“They hate his guts... he hates them, by the way, and they hate him. And so, just so you know, keep pushing and keep doing this sort of nonsense that they all hate ... And you’re going to get cross traffic into Democrats who say, ‘Impeach him in the House, I’ll pull up 17 votes and we’ll knock him out of the presidency.’”
Trump has already been impeached twice in the House. However, the Senate acquitted him both times, so he was not removed from office.
Eight days before the midterm election, two things have become certain. Democrats are going to take back the House, and after they do, Democrats are going to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
There is a list of Trump cabinet members who are likely to quit when Democrats win back the House, because they will be facing impeachment. Pete Hegseth is at the top of the list, followed by RFK Jr., and Linda McMahon, who has destroyed the Department of Education.
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There will be an exodus of people out of the Trump administration after the midterm election. Karoline Leavitt got an early start out the door, but will be far from the last person to leave.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) said last month on MS NOW:
Donald Trump himself has said it multiple times, that he’s planning to give pardons to everyone in his circle. But I actually very much disagree with the idea that we shouldn’t be trying to use every tool we have in the toolbox.
In particular, we have cabinet secretaries like Pete Hegseth, who Republicans think should be impeached at this point because of his illegal killings in the illegal war, and what we’ve seen over the last year is that when Congress did file impeachments, folks like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were actually fired by the President because the American people were clear they didn’t want them in those jobs of trust.
So I think there’s a number of cabinet secretaries that have blatantly broken the law, done unconstitutional things, and I think they better get ready because we’ll come for them.
The threats from House Democrats have gotten to Hegseth, so he is trying to get out before Democrats take back power.
Puck reported that Hegseth is trying to get himself appointed to the US Senate:
Momentum is building within the House Democratic caucus to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when Congress returns after Election Day, as I reported last week, raising questions about how the Senate will respond. The answer, of course, depends on which party controls the upper chamber, and by what margin. Some Republicans, I’m told, are hoping that President Trump could fire Hegseth before any possible impeachment is underway. But I’m also told that some senators foresee a pathway for the self-proclaimed Secretary of War to step down before the Senate is forced to address a potential impeachment.
Already there’s chatter on the Hill that Hegseth has been angling for Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat, which she would vacate after winning her gubernatorial election. Hegseth lived in Tennessee for three years before he took over the Pentagon, but his short tenure there might not count as real Tennessee roots.
Senate Republicans don’t want to deal with a Hegseth impeachment, because there are Republicans in the Senate who want Hegseth gone. Will there be enough Senate Republicans to vote to convict Hegseth?
Probably not, but there might be enough to make the vote bipartisan and close, which would be an embarrassment for Trump and for Senate Republicans, so some of them would like to see Hegseth shuffled into another job, but there is no indication that Blackburn is interested in appointing Hegseth.
After Sen. Blackburn is elected governor, she probably won’t want the headache of appointing Hegseth, who isn’t from Tennessee and only lived in the state for a few years.
One way or another, it looks like Pete Hegseth is as good as gone.
It is doubtful that Trump will fire him, so if Hegseth doesn’t get appointed to the Senate, don’t be surprised if he resigns.
New York Times, Ex-Governors Give Rare Bipartisan Nod to Andrews in South Carolina, Annie Karni,Oct. 26, 2026. Former Republican Gov. David Beasley and Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges recorded a joint video throwing their support to the Democrat in the tight Senate race.
Two former South Carolina governors, one Democrat and one Republican, on Monday issued a rare bipartisan joint endorsement of Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democrat running in an unexpectedly competitive Senate race against Senator Darline Graham, the Trump-endorsed Republican.
In the video endorsement, David Beasley, a Democrat-turned-Republican who served as governor of the state from 1995 to 1999, and Jim Hodges, the Democrat who succeeded him, declared that “this country is too divided and the political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand.”
Mr. Beasley, a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said that “Annie understands that leadership isn’t about making people angrier. Well, it’s about making things better.”
He recently wrote an opinion piece decrying what has happened to the Republican Party under President Trump, saying that it is “not the party that I knew, and it is not the party that I consider myself a member of.”
South Carolina is not the only heavily Republican state where prominent former G.O.P. officials have broken with the party to endorse a Democrat in a competitive Senate race. In Kansas, two former Republican governors endorsed the Democrat, Adam Hamilton, over the G.O.P. incumbent, Senator Roger Marshall. In Texas, members of the Bush family dynasty are backing the Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico.
Ms. Graham was appointed in July to replace her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, after his death. On the campaign trail, she has struggled to demonstrate to voters that she is up to the job, in one debate saying that she was “not that informed on national security.”
While Mr. Trump, who was close with her brother, encouraged her to run and has backed her, Ms. Graham has also struggled to raise money and Dr. Andrews has far out-raised her. Ms. Graham is also facing skepticism from conservatives in her own party.
Dr. Andrews, though, still faces an uphill climb in solidly Republican South Carolina, where a Democrat has not won a Senate seat this century. In winning back the presidency two years ago, Mr. Trump carried South Carolina by more than 17 points. And even with the favorable political climate for Democrats this year, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report still ranks the race as leaning Republican.See more on: Donald Trump
We pray for our leaders at every Mass, and we always will. A blessing belongs to God, though, and the people who need it most were nowhere near the Resolute Desk on Thursday.
PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Mississippi Meltdown As Trump Gets Heckled In Front Of Tiny Crowd, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Donald Trump claimed 22,000 people attended his rally in Mississippi, but only 1,400 were there, and people in the crowd heckled the president.
Deep-red Mississippi has a surprisingly competitive Senate race, so the White House sent Donald Trump to save the day.
The problem is that they sent 80 year old Donald Trump who looks completely worn out by his recent rally schedule and seen his popularity plummet even among MAGA.
PoliticusUSA is 100% independent news and opinion, and it needs your support. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.
Trump claimed that a town with a population of 14,000 had 22,000 people at his rally:
And by the way, have you seen the crowd outside? 22,000 people watching. We love you out there. They're watching.
The big crowds at Trump’s rallies always seem to be outside where the television cameras can’t see them. The reason why the cameras can’t see them is that for a decade Trump has dictated the placement of the TV cameras at his events.
Trump was in deep red Mississippi, so he must have been immensely popular. Trump has had a difficult time finding safe spaces that he can visit and feel loved in. The Republican Party has had to keep Trump away from swing states because his presence helps Democratic candidates more than Republicans, even though Republicans keep claiming that the polls are fake. Democrats keep winning elections since Trump returned to office.Trump Was Heckled In Mississippi
Trump was talking about his ballroom and saying, “ To the consternation of the people that protect us—”
He was interrupted by a heckler, and he said, “ Oh, go home. Go home. Go home”
Trump fell back to his old crutch that all the people who are protesting him are paid, “So he gets paid. You know they're paid protesters. They get paid $250 by, they think it's Soros. And they ruin their lives because now they get booked, now they get booked. We don't usually press it too hard, but isn't that terrible? And I was just, I was just at the punchline too.”
The big problem with these rallies that Trump is holding is that Trump takes all of the oxygen. Even though he is supposed to be campaigning for Republican candidates.
Trump was supposed to be in Mississippi for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Trump called Hyde-Smith on stage, where she spoke for exactly four seconds to call Trump the best president of our lifetimes and then sat back down, so Trump could resume rambling.
Here was Trump’s night in a nutshell. The president went to a deep red state, drew a tiny crowd, then got heckled for his White House ballroom.
New York Times, A Damning Account Alleges Jared Kushner Conducted Diplomacy for Profit, Fintan O’Toole (author of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” and the advising editor of The New York Review of Books), Oct. 26, 2026. The new book by the reporter Matthew Cole connects $2 billion in slush funds from gulf state leaders to Trump’s son-in-law in an effort to influence U.S. policy.
PRINCES AND THIEVES: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, by Matthew Cole
It is hard to know where to look. Donald Trump’s two presidential terms generate so many outrages and depredations that they become a giant kaleidoscope of ever-changing distractions. In “Princes and Thieves,” his startling and important book alleging previously unreported activities by Jared Kushner during the first Trump administration, the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, a veteran reporter on national security, asks us to focus our eyes on the collection of oil-rich sheikhdoms known as the United Arab Emirates.
If Cole’s claims are accurate, Kushner’s political and financial relationship with the U.A.E.’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as M.B.Z.), constitutes what must surely be the worst case of U.S. foreign policy being conducted outside the law and democratic oversight since the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
In that affair, government officials secretly sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to fund — against the explicit orders of Congress — a violent right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. What Cole alleges is, if anything, more consequential: that Kushner worked with the U.A.E. to shape U.S. policy across the Middle East and that, in the course of this work, he was given access to bank accounts containing roughly $2 billion.
Two caveats must be entered. Cole’s most significant sources remain anonymous: Recurring attributions in his notes include “a confidential source with direct knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.” It is equally important to acknowledge that Kushner declined to be interviewed for Cole’s book. His lawyer described Cole’s allegations as “crazy, false and defamatory” and last week threatened legal action against Vanity Fair, which published an excerpt from the book.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and the United Arab Emirates? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
To Cole’s credit, he recognizes that, even after five years of digging, “much remains unknown about Kushner’s relationships and agreements with the leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, especially, the United Arab Emirates.”
What we have, then, is an incomplete and contested account of those dealings. The question that arises from the book is whether Cole has done enough to warrant a major congressional investigation into his allegations. The answer is an emphatic yes.
Its starting point is clear enough: M.B.Z. controls vast amounts of money and was determined to use a lot of it to acquire influence over the American presidency and to establish compliant regimes in Egypt (he helped finance the coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government there in 2013), Yemen, Qatar and Libya. This grand strategy included support for the rise of his ally Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization of relations between Israel and most of the Muslim powers.
The success of the U.A.E. in establishing Abu Dhabi and Dubai as international aviation hubs and tourist playgrounds depends, in his eyes, on the suppression of popular Islamism and the containment of Iran. President Barack Obama’s endorsement of the Arab Spring revolts of 2010 and 2011, and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, threatened these goals.
M.B.Z.’s first response was to use proxies to channel $3.5 million in illegal funding into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After she lost the election, he pivoted toward the incoming Trump administration. Through its American middlemen George Nader, a political consultant and convicted child sexual abuser; Elliott Broidy, a onetime top Trump fund-raiser who had served on his inauguration committee in 2017; and Thomas Barrack, a real estate investor who is now the administration’s ambassador to Turkey, the U.A.E. identified Kushner as the man who could influence the new president on their behalf.
This was a good bet. Trump made Kushner his senior adviser with a brief that included the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East. This in itself was a departure from both tradition and democratic accountability — no one elected Kushner, and he operated for much of this period without oversight, but he had access to the highest levels of secret information.
It should be accepted that Kushner had solid ideological reasons for working closely with the U.A.E. M.B.Z. could, and to a degree did, deliver much of the Arab world for a plan that cut out the Palestinians and eventually conceded Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank. The ultimate prize of recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia was brought tantalizingly close. (It was derailed by the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.) To that extent, Kushner could be said to have worked to further his father-in-law’s openly stated agenda.
The issue, however, is whether Kushner was also pursuing other, private schemes and, in order to advance them, allowing U.S. foreign policy to be dictated by a foreign power. Kushner’s family benefited enormously from the perception that he was working on behalf of M.B.Z. The U.A.E.’s regional rival Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. were blockading and threatening to invade, believed it had to counter this influence. A fund through which Qatar invests some of its sovereign wealth helped bail the Kushner family out of a disastrous $1.8 billion investment in a New York skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue.ImageThis is the cover of “Princes and Thieves,” by Matthew Cole.
Cole’s most explosive claims, however, relate to a 2017 operation by a Dutch military intelligence unit, which found that Russian agents had screenshots from inside Kushner’s iPhone. Investigating further, they discovered that Kushner had access to a bank account in the U.A.E., containing $750 million laundered through Azerbaijan but, according to Cole, originally deriving from the Emirati and Saudi governments. “It is unclear if Trump ever approved or even knew about the arrangement,” Cole writes.
By the spring of 2018, Cole maintains, M.B.Z. had moved roughly $1 billion into another account, held by the Israeli central bank, on Kushner’s behalf. Cole says it is also “unclear” if or how Kushner used these funds, “but according to the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s personal benefit.” For M.B.Z., Cole suggests, the return on his investment was a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iran, whose influence he feared.
These accusations are grave. The first bank account was allegedly a slush fund used to finance operations in Libya and elsewhere by Erik Prince, the former C.E.O. of Blackwater, the private military contractor (now known as Academi). If Kushner was a signatory to this account, he was helping to run a foreign government’s proxy wars. And if he used some or all of the money in the second account for his personal benefit, he was effectively an undeclared agent of a foreign power.
Cole’s work is sufficiently calm, detailed and forensic to necessitate a large-scale and urgent congressional inquiry. One assumes that, since Kushner regards all of these claims as crazed inventions, he is anxious to clear his name from some of the most grievous charges ever leveled against a senior U.S. federal official. If the country is incapable of letting its citizens know whether or not its foreign policy is for sale, the difference between a democratic republic and the secretive autocracy that tried to influence it will be much narrower than most of us would like to think.
GOP Strategies: Ohio, Wisconsin, Autocracy
Public Notice, News and Opinion: Vivek Ramaswamy discovers that voters have their limits, Paul Waldman, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Asking “What would Trump do?” is a bad way to make campaign strategy.
What on earth were they thinking?
It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.
The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.In defense of empathyIn defense of empathyLisa Needham·Oct 24Read full story
In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.A brief recap of events
As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.
This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”
The blowback was instantaneous.
“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”
But it wasn’t just Democrats.
In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)
But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.
Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.
“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.
What on earth were they thinking?
It’s the question raised by the decision Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and his campaign made to arrange, produce, and air an ad featuring the estranged mother of his opponent Amy Acton, an ad that has swallowed the extremely close race with just days left until the election.
The answer to that question lies in the Trumpian brain rot that has infected the entire Republican Party, ensconced as they are in their self-reinforcing information bubble. It’s a disease that convinces its victims that not only is cruelty the key to political success, but that the heart of the American voter is just as dark and ugly as those of the president and his acolytes themselves.In defense of empathyIn defense of empathyLisa Needham·Oct 24Read full story
In the midst of a dark period in our national life, the fact that it looks like Ramaswamy is wrong — or at least that he may have found the outer limits of the electorate’s tolerance for morally repugnant campaigning — offers a faint glimmer of hope for the future.A brief recap of events
As most people have heard by now, Acton suffered a traumatic childhood of deprivation and abuse. When she was 12, her stepfather was charged with raping her; she says the abuse had been going on for three years. Her mother, Donna Arthur, chose her husband over her children; she and her husband Cledith fled the jurisdiction before he could stand trial. Acton has had no contact with her mother since 1978, when she and her brother were removed from her custody.
This history was not a secret; Acton had spoken about her childhood abuse in interviews before. It is almost impossible to believe the Ramaswamy campaign was not aware of it before they recruited Donna Arthur to cut an ad for them. In the ad, Arthur — who, to repeat, has had no contact with Acton since 1978 — says “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar … Don’t vote for people who lie. Don’t let her become your governor.”
The blowback was instantaneous.
“There is a decency we should expect from our public officials,” Barack Obama said at a rally in Cleveland. “There is no office that is worth stopping that low.”Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com“There is no office that is worth stooping that low” — Obama portrays Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile attack ad as an affront to basic decencySat, 24 Oct 2026 19:26:40 GMTView on Bluesky
But it wasn’t just Democrats.
In short order, one Republican after another criticized Ramaswamy for the ad and said it ought to be taken down, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Jon Husted, Nikki Haley, Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, and even Scott Jennings, the CNN Trump advocate. The conservative media has been split on the wisdom of the ad; some right-wing podcasters and TV hosts have gently criticized it, while others have praised it. (“Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom,” said Newsmax host Greg Kelly.)
But the most important endorsements came from the two most powerful Republicans in America.
Vice President JD Vance said the real problem was members of his own party who criticized the tactic.
“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” he said.
Then President Trump weighed in, posting a long rant on Truth Social which included the assertion that “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse,” and saying, “Lyin’ Amy Acton, who I’ve never even heard of before, has been lying about Vivek for the entire Campaign.”
Many a campaign has been undone by a “gaffe” or a late revelation, something unexpected and dramatic that torpedoes a candidate’s bid. But this was different.
Creating this ad required the involvement of multiple people at the campaign’s highest level, including the candidate himself. They would have had time to consider it and weigh the pros and cons. Together, they decided that it was a clever gambit.
According to Axios, “Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign said the ad tested well with ‘persuadable’ voters.” Which may have been true in a laboratory setting with no contextual information provided to those who watched it and whose responses were measured. But ads like this one don’t stay in a lab.
Now, with the torrent of media coverage that has resulted, anyone who sees the ad won’t say, “Jeez, if her own mother says she’s a liar, I’d better not vote for her.” Instead, they’re more likely to say, “Oh, there’s that ad with Amy Acton’s mother, the one who let her daughter get raped by her dirtbag husband. What the hell is wrong with Vivek Ramaswamy thinking this is going to make me want to vote for him?” And even those who will never see the ad know all about it.
When the controversy started blowing up, Ramaswamy could have cut his losses. He could have said “my campaign produced this ad, but as we’ve learned more about Acton and Arthur’s history, we’ve decided not to air it — let’s get back to talking about the issues.” Instead, he blamed Acton for making him do it.
“I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans,” Ramaswamy said. “And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”
So really, did he have any choice but to get Acton’s (alleged) child-rapist-defending mother who hasn’t seen her daughter in almost half a century to attack her?
Every time a candidate airs an attack ad, they make a calculation, that voters will be more persuaded by what the ad says about their opponent than what the ad says about them for having aired it. While voters say they don’t like negative campaigning, they respond to it, and if the attacks seem justified and relevant, the attacker can feel safe from backlash. If you’re saying your opponent took bribes or voted for bad policies, voters are unlikely to blame you.
But when the attacks get personal, the risk of backlash increases. And if a campaign is going to use someone’s family against them, they have to be very careful. Especially if the family member you’ve trotted out to offer testimony has a long history of petty crime and stood by while her preteen daughter was raped, then abandoned her.
But this is the nature of today’s right-wing bubble, whose residents are not only acculturated to a particular political style — cruel, vulgar, often hateful — but become convinced that it’s the only effective way to do politics, and to not do politics that way is to be weak and contemptible. That’s what JD Vance — a high-volume consumer of right-wing content and regular podcast guest — means when he says he’s “disgusted” by “whining” from Republicans about Ramaswamy’s ad.
The failure to anticipate the nearly inevitable reaction to the use of Acton’s mother springs directly from that inability to see how things look from outside the bubble. When the backlash began, Ramaswamy acted the way Trump does whenever people are appalled by something he has done or said: Don’t apologize, don’t retreat, blame your opponents, and double down.
Now look where that has gotten him. If there are any voters who were persuaded to vote for Ramaswamy by this advertisement, they haven’t presented themselves, while local and national media have been full of voters expressing their disgust with him. “We now deserve to lose this race,” one Ohio Republican strategist told Time magazine.
In fact, it was probably the dumbest decision any campaign made this year, or even in many years. We don’t know yet what the ultimate effects will be — as of this writing, no polls have been released on the race since the controversy over the ad blew up — but the Cook Political Report just moved the race from “toss-up” to “Leans Democratic.” Acton has held a slight lead in polls; we’ll see if it expands.
Being like Trump doesn’t work, especially in general elections
Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image over the last decade in a variety of ways, some of which have to do with policy but most of which are about style. In a typical Republican primary these days, candidates compete to see who can be most like Trump — unrestrained, bullying, misogynistic and racist, obsessed with dominating others.
The widespread assumption in conservative circles is that this is how you win, even when it looks like voters are recoiling in horror. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has said, Trump’s aides “believe there is something almost mystical about him, that he can hear frequencies that maybe they can’t,” and that’s why they should silence their doubts when he starts another social media beef, spends endless hours prattling on about his ballroom, or refuses to listen to cooler heads telling him that some decision he’s making (for instance, starting a war with Iran) might not work out well.
The same goes for much of the Republican Party: Even if they have doubts about a strategy, there’s a voice in their head saying “this is what Trump would do, so it must be a good idea.” We don’t know if anyone in the Ramaswamy campaign raised their hand when the Donna Arthur ad was being produced to say “I don’t know, guys, this could blow up in our faces.” But if they did, they were overruled.
What so few Republicans seem to grasp is that for all his success, if you just look at the scoreboard, Trump is actually an extremely unsuccessful politician. People don’t actually like him — his approval ratings have been weak his entire time in office, and they’re absolutely atrocious right now. This is the fifth national election in which he has been on the ballot or in office since he seized control of the GOP, and one could describe his record as 1-3. He became president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote; his party was slapped silly in the 2018 midterms; he lost in 2020; he got his only win in 2024, and a narrow one at that; and he’s about to suffer another midterm loss.
As much as Trump and his allies like to brag about the coalition he assembled in 2024, they make the mistake of believing that everyone who voted for him the one time he managed to win a majority was doing so because they love everything about him. But that was never true. There were a dozen reasons he won that year, none more important than the hangover of the 2022 burst in inflation. Voters who made the mistake of believing him when he said he’d immediately lower prices weren’t all MAGA converts who cheered his sadism and bigotry.
Whatever dark power Trump has that has enabled him to become president twice while being quite literally one of the most morally despicable human beings on Earth, it’s not easily duplicated by your average Republican candidate for Senate, House, or governor. When candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy ask “What would Trump do?” then do that thing, they often find that the voters respond with, “What an atrocious jerk. I’m definitely not voting for that guy.” It turns out that voters will tolerate a certain degree of negative campaigning — but they have their limits. As Vivek Ramaswamy is now finding out.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Mailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in Oklahoma, Judd Legum, right, Oct. 26, 2026. The mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operation.
In recent days, voters in Wisconsin have received mailers calling David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, “A COP’S BEST FRIEND.” The mailer, sent from the “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin,” attacks Crowley, saying he “Backs the blue, NOT US.” It blames Crowley for various incidents of police violence, mistreatment of prisoners, and increased spending on public safety.
The flier does not mention Crowley’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Tiffany, but urges Wisconsinites to “VOTE NO NOVEMBER 3RD.” The mailer was obtained through Popular Information’s new app, PaidForBy.info:
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Share Popular InformationMailers from “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin” linked to GOP operative in OklahomaThe mailers, targeting Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, are part of a Republican dirty-tricks operationJudd LegumOct 26READ IN APP
In recent days, voters in Wisconsin have received mailers calling David Crowley, the Democratic nominee for governor, “A COP’S BEST FRIEND.” The mailer, sent from the “Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin,” attacks Crowley, saying he “Backs the blue, NOT US.” It blames Crowley for various incidents of police violence, mistreatment of prisoners, and increased spending on public safety.
The flier does not mention Crowley’s Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Tiffany, but urges Wisconsinites to “VOTE NO NOVEMBER 3RD.” The mailer was obtained through Popular Information’s new app, PaidForBy.info:
The latest polls showed Crowley clinging to a small lead over Tiffany. Crowley, a political moderate, beat democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the primary by just 2,700 votes. So if even a small number of Hong’s most progressive supporters vote against Crowley — as the mailer encourages them to do — or decide to stay home, it could plausibly swing the race to Tiffany.
While the Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin purports to be politically left-leaning, its organizers have gone to considerable lengths to conceal who is behind the organization. It was only registered a few days ago, on October 19. Although it claims to be a Wisconsin organization, it is registered to a Chicago address. Since it has filed so recently, the Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin will not have to disclose its donors until 2027.
A Popular Information analysis of Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin’s initial expenditures, however, reveals that it is linked to Republican operatives.
Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin has reported $298,836 in expenditures, all for political mailers opposing Crowley. All of the money has gone to The Classen Group. The Classen Group has been active in Oklahoma, where it has been paid $470,000 for political services between 2022 and 2026. All of its political clients have been Republicans, including $236,449 from Majority Fund, an Oklahoma super PAC supporting state House Republicans.
Jake Parsons is the chair and treasurer of Majority Fund. On a 2022 FEC donation to a Republican candidate, Parsons also lists himself as a partner at The Classen Group. In Oklahoma campaign finance filings, Majority Fund and The Classen Group list the same address. Parsons has also been listed as a partner of G.R. Pro, another political consulting firm that is located on Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City.
James Trammell is listed as the treasurer of Progressive Alliance of Wisconsin. James Bruce Trammell is also a GOP operative who was paid as a consultant for Charles McCall’s unsuccessful campaign for governor this cycle. Parsons was the manager for McCall’s 2018 Oklahoma House campaign and incorporated McCall’s 2026 gubernatorial campaign.
Parsons did not respond to requests for comment over phone, email, and text.
In addition to its connection to Republican operatives, the anti-Crowley mailer is highly deceptive. It quotes Crowley saying, “We cannot defund the police” during a July 2026 debate. But Crowley continued, “We should be investing in public safety, and that doesn’t mean more money to police officers. That’s like investing in systems like community violence interruption.” Hong, Crowley’s progressive opponent, said roughly the same thing, “The governor cannot defund police, and I’m not here to govern by slogan. I’m here to make sure that I am the governor that is most serious about public safety, and that means investing in the things that we know prevent crime.”The connection to another sketchy operation in Minnesota
The mailers targeting Crowley in Wisconsin are very similar — in substance and style — to mailers attacking Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic nominee for governor in Minnesota. In Minnesota, a group called Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC is sending mailers attacking Klobuchar from the left, citing police accountability and single-payer health care.
Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC has not registered as a political committee with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, so there is no information about whether it is paying The Classen Group or someone else to produce the mailers. The entity has only registered as an LLC in Delaware.
Minnesota Democrats “filed a complaint on Thursday with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board against Citizens for Public Safety Transparency,” the Star Tribune reports. The address printed on the mailers “leads to an office and storage property in Walker, about three and a half hours north of the Twin Cities.” The owner of that property told the Star Tribune that Citizens for Public Safety Transparency, LLC “has no lease or office there.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Bolsonaro . . . Trump? William Kristol, right, Oct. 26, 2026. In an 1823 letter from James Madison, the primary architect of our Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of our Declaration, Madison wrote of “the great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Our Founders understood that despite the relative success of their earlier efforts, the contest between liberty and despotism around the world—and even in the United States—had not ended.
And now, two centuries later, the struggle between liberty and despotism continues.
Yesterday, voters in Serbia ousted the longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vučić, six months after voters in neighboring Hungary had rejected their own authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. Vučić, a protege of Slobodan Milošević from the 1990s, had dominated Serbian politics since 2012. He was defeated by a new political party that grew out of two years of student-led protests, Student List-Students Win.
What happened in Serbia was “not the electoral defeat of one government but a tectonic blow” to the order set up by Milošević and then carried forward by Vučić, Ratko Knežević, a former diplomat from Montenegro, told the New York Times. It was an order in which “every criticism of power is treason.” It was a regime that just last month insisted that Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted in 2017 of genocide by an international tribunal for his acts in the Milošević years, be buried with military honors in Belgrade.
The victorious party’s governing program is murky. The focus of their campaign was on the rampant corruption of the Vučić regime, and the need for change. As the Times put it, “in the end, the vote was largely a referendum on Mr. Vucic.” The forces of despotism lost yesterday in Serbia. But a future of liberty is by no means secure.
Also yesterday, far away from Serbia, voters in Brazil narrowly re-elected their president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, over Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president and Trump ally who’d attempted a coup to stay in office four years ago. Unlike Vučić, Bolsonaro has so far refused to accept the outcome, so here even the immediate future is uncertain. But as the Times points out, “this is the first leftist victory following seven straight wins by right-wing leaders in the region over the last 18 months.” “Most people want change,” said Thomas Traumann, press secretary for a former leftist Brazilian president, “but not the Bolsonaro change.”
So on the one hand, it was a good day for the opponents of despotism. On the other hand, the future of both countries, and of the regions of which they are part, remains very much in doubt. Their prospects would be brighter if the United States were a staunch champion of liberty. But for now, and probably for the next two years, the United States is as likely to be on the side of despotism as liberty.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page reported yesterday that
The Trump Administration has advocated Viktor Orbán for the role of United Nations Secretary-General. The U.S. has encouraged the former Hungarian Prime Minister to enter the race, even bringing him the initial idea. . . . Russia and China are believed to be supportive, based on prior conversations with Washington, and the plan would be for Mr. Orbán to be their joint candidate.
So Trump’s United States would be allied with Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China in an effort to strengthen the global authoritarian axis.
The struggle continues, here and abroad. Both here and abroad, its outcome is very much in doubt. We have our chance to weigh in on the side of liberty next Tuesday.
AROUND THE BULWARK
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ALASKA MEDDLING: In 2020, Donald Trump waited until after the election before getting busy trying to steal it. This year, he’s getting a head start.
On Friday, the Justice Department filed a breathtaking lawsuit, preemptively seeking to block officials from certifying Alaska’s Senate election—if Democrat Mary Peltola wins. The reason? There are two guys named “Dan Sullivan” on the ballot—the Republican incumbent and a gadfly candidate—and the DOJ thinks voters will get confused.
This is, of course, the whole point of Doppelganger Dan’s campaign, which it’s fair to call an electoral cheap shot. But he qualified for the ballot fair and square and has already survived legal challenges that tried to pull him off it. Furthermore, there’s very little reason to think he’ll play spoiler. Sen. Dan Sullivan is clearly labeled both as a Republican and as an incumbent on the ballot. Further, Alaska has ranked choice voting—it’s hard to imagine Fake Dan stealing many votes from Real Dan when voters can literally just vote for both.
But that’s not how Team Trump sees it. The lawsuit asks a federal court to delay certifying the election if Sen. Sullivan loses but would have won if he’d gotten all the other Sullivan’s votes. (Again: Ranked-choice voting.) On Saturday, Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted he is simply seeking “to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska’s governing officials have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or mislead [sic].” He also insisted that the Justice Department “did not coordinate with any campaign or candidate, but rather relied solely on federal law.”
One day earlier, Trump had offered a contradictory, and presumably truer, narrative: “I’m the one that said, ‘Do it,’” he told reporters of the lawsuit.
LULA TRIUMPHS: Yesterday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won an unexpected re-election victory—a remarkable turnaround from the first round of voting earlier this month, which had shown right-wing candidate and Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, with a lead. Bolsonaro has already said he will refuse to accept the results, just as his father did four years ago.
Bolsonaro’s gripe centered on a Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice’s decision to extend voting for two hours, which the candidate described as changing “the rules in the middle of the game.” But both his campaign and Lula had called for the extension, citing voting disruptions due to transport delays and rain. Meanwhile, the final result wasn’t particularly close: Lula ultimately won by more than 4 millions votes.
Donald Trump had other things on his mind last night—the relative charms of Jon Husted and Nikki Minaj’s asses, for instance, and his 1,300-word Truth Social screed about how Bill Maher is a fake friend. But it seems likely that he will eventually get around to trying to intervene on Bolsonaro’s behalf, just as he has repeatedly done for Bolsonaro’s father since retaking office last year.
ELON FESSES UP: Elon Musk has spent days denying that he had anything to do with sudden disruptions in Ukraine’s access to his Starlink network this month. But on Saturday, he abruptly changed course, saying that his company SpaceX had throttled Ukraine’s access because Ukraine had violated its terms of service, using it to power “offensive drone strikes to kill people.” He also suggested that Ukrainians who refuse to accept Russia’s conquests of their territory are “bloodthirsty warmongers, who push for a war that never ends,” and insisted that “we should [have] some sympathy for the poor Russian conscripts too.”
Ukrainian officials vociferously denied that Ukraine had violated Starlink’s terms of service. Here’s the Washington Post:
Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on military technology, wrote on social media that it was “very strange that Elon Musk is unaware of the restrictions on Starlink operations in Ukraine,” including speed limits, and the fact that the technology does not work over Russian territory.
“Therefore, we are PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes or medium-range strikes,” he said.
Serhii Sternenko, who runs a foundation supplying drones to Ukrainian forces and previously served as an adviser to his country’s defense minister, wrote on X that “using civilian Starlink for drone missions was technically impossible. All drone missions that required satellite communication could only be carried out using Starshield [the U.S. government-controlled version of Starlink]. ... Ukraine did not violate the terms of use.”
Nevertheless, Ukraine’s ongoing access to Starlink seemingly remains as reliant as ever on the capricious whims of the world’s most brain-meltingly online billionaire.
New York Times, Ken Paxton’s State-Funded Jet-Setting Draws Campaign Scrutiny, Beth Reinhard and Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 26, 2026. Mr. Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Texas, has taken about 350 trips outside of the state since he was sworn in as attorney general.
Where in the world is Ken Paxton?
In 2021, Mr. Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, and his wife left town for Utah during a deadly winter storm that left millions in his home state without power. When lawyers tried to depose him in a securities-fraud case in 2023, he was roving around Europe. And this past summer, in the middle of his hotly contested U.S. Senate campaign, a British tabloid spotted Mr. Paxton in Iceland and London.
Since his 2015 swearing-in as the state’s top lawyer, Mr. Paxton has taken about 350 trips outside of Texas with a taxpayer-funded security detail, including 25 to foreign countries such as South Africa, India and Aruba, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Texas law does not limit Mr. Paxton’s use of state-sponsored protection to official business.
Mr. Paxton also has benefited from the largess of wealthy friends, who donated $730,000 toward his legal bills in the securities-fraud case and have treated him to hunting and fishing trips, airplane flights and lodging, and tickets to various events, including the Grammy Awards, records show.
Mr. Paxton’s Democratic rival, James Talarico, has sought to turn the attorney general’s lifestyle into a liability, repeatedly accusing him of exploiting the perks of his office to enrich himself. Mr. Talarico, a state representative, has dinged Mr. Paxton on his apparent affinity for luxuries big and small — from his real estate portfolio that includes at least 15 properties worth about $9 million to the $1,000 pen he once swiped from a courthouse security tray. Polls indicate a tight race in a conservative state that hasn’t elected a Democrat in more than three decades, suggesting that Mr. Talarico’s attacks may be resonating with some voters.
“He became a multimillionaire on a government salary,” Mr. Talarico said in a widely viewed social media post. “He takes lavish vacations in Iceland while Texans can’t afford the basics. Ken Paxton doesn’t serve us — he serves himself.”
Mr. Paxton’s campaign and office did not respond to that criticism or to questions about his travel, security or personal finances.
He has long denied any wrongdoing. Several of his trips were to conferences with other attorneys general. Mr. Paxton also has traveled frequently to Washington during a career in which he brought dozens of lawsuits against the Biden and Obama administrations.
Mr. Paxton’s allies say criticism of his travel unfairly distracts from his record battling for conservative causes.
“What does that have to do with his ability to take on the Obama administration and win cases?” said Bob Hall, a Republican state senator. “Ken Paxton has gotten the job done, and I think that’s what is important.”
Mr. Talarico has not reported accepting any gifts while in office. In a form filed with the U.S. Senate in August, he said he earned about $51,500 as a state lawmaker and about $33,000 from a consulting firm from January 2025 to May 2026. He also reported several mutual funds and a book deal for an unspecified amount. In a separate form filed in Texas, Mr. Talarico listed one piece of property.Nearly 225 Cities
Security costs for Mr. Paxton’s travel since 2015 have exceeded $3.1 million, according to state records, which do not specify whether a trip is related to his official duties. That tally does not include other travel-related expenses charged to taxpayers. He has visited nearly 225 cities, making multiple trips to destinations like Park City, Utah, and New Orleans. Security costs peaked in 2024 at more than $483,000.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has also traveled across the country and abroad, with security costs topping $5.4 million since 2015, records show.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is not invincible, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 25-26, 2026. At 3:29 this afternoon (Sunday), the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”
Over the next one hour and forty-eight minutes, Donald Trump declared that the United States owns Greenland, called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist who is “on the side of the terrorists,” and told Jewish Americans who support El-Sayed that they should be ashamed of themselves and never speak to him again. He then invited the father of a September 11 hero onto the stage to tell thousands of people that having a United States birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American. And then, seemingly forgetting why he was even there, he stopped to talk once again about looking at another man’s “ass.”
The man Donald Trump came to Michigan to destroy was born in metro Detroit, earned a medical degree, and became an epidemiologist who once ran the city of Detroit’s health department, and if Michigan elects him in nine days, he will become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. That is what today was really about, and just three minutes into his speech, Donald Trump admitted as much: “I’m here today in Michigan for a very important reason. I’m here to keep a jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” Then he promised that “the people of Michigan are going to defeat Abdul Mohammed,” a name El-Sayed doesn’t use, but one Trump repeated to make him sound more foreign and threatening to the crowd.
Trump then went after El-Sayed’s family, accusing his mother of supporting al Qaeda, his sister of celebrating the October 7 terrorist attacks, and his father-in-law of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Associated Press reported that there is no evidence El-Sayed has any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Michigan Public found that the accusations against his mother were not supported by the available evidence. But none of that mattered to Trump. He was using El-Sayed’s family and his Muslim faith to portray him as a terrorist and convince Americans that he was someone to fear.
Then he moved from El-Sayed’s family to El-Sayed himself. “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate. He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate. I want him to have a metal detector.” He said that “Michigan does not need a senator who’s on the side of the terrorists,” and that El-Sayed “wants our country to go to Sharia law.”
Then Donald Trump proved just how unfit he is to lead a country built by immigrants when he tried to turn two groups of Americans, both of whom have faced hatred and discrimination, against each other. He told the crowd, “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves, I’ll tell you right now,” and added, “You should never speak to him again.” He went on to claim that he was “polling at 99% in Israel” and that he could not understand “how anybody who’s Jewish can even think about voting for this guy.” In just a few sentences, the President of the United States told Jewish Americans to turn their backs on Muslim Americans and suggested that their votes and friendships should be based on their religion rather than their own beliefs. What Trump was trying to say is that Muslims are guilty simply because they are Muslim, and Jews are guilty if they refuse to treat Muslims like enemies. This is how authoritarian leaders divide a country. They turn people against their neighbors, convince them that other Americans are the enemy, and demand loyalty to themselves above everyone else.
Later in his speech, Donald Trump took his attacks even further, telling the crowd, “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”
With just nine days until the midterm elections, and Republicans facing growing anger over inflation, soaring gas prices, and Trump’s war in Iran, Donald Trump took his attacks to an entirely different level. He brought up the September 11 terrorist attacks and began telling the story of Todd Beamer, who was born in Flint, Michigan, and was one of the brave passengers aboard United Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers and prevented the plane from reaching its intended target, saving untold numbers of lives. But Trump was not telling this story to honor an American hero. He was using it to attack Abdul El-Sayed. “Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, before continuing, “Todd Beamer gave his life for America. And you have to give your vote for Todd Beamer, if you can view it that way.” The President of the United States had just compared voting against a Muslim American doctor to the courage shown by Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting terrorists on September 11. And then he invited Todd Beamer’s father onto the stage.
Like so many of us, I have always thought of Todd Beamer as a true American patriot and a hero, a man who spent his final minutes on earth thinking of other people. He found an extraordinary strength that morning, the kind that, thankfully, few of us will ever have to search for. That is what made what happened next so painful to watch.
David Beamer, who told the crowd he was “four score and four” (or 84 years old), spoke for nearly twelve minutes. He began by asking everyone to pray before taking a disturbing turn and comparing the enemies America faced on September 11 to the ones he claimed we face today. “The enemy has not come from abroad. The enemy is right here among us. Local terrorists. Local citizens that want to demolish our country. They call themselves Democratic Socialists of America. Do you know what the DS really stands for? Demolition specialists.” He went on to claim that the Democratic Socialists’ platform “reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids,” that “Abdul would much prefer Sharia law,” and that “the mantra of their platform is really death to America.” A father still reeling from the unimaginable loss of his son, who was murdered by terrorists on September 11, stood in front of thousands of Americans and told them that their own neighbors, people who want things like affordable health care and public education, were terrorists too.
The rest of his words were equally disturbing, and the President of the United States of America stood behind him, listening and agreeing with every word he said. “Mike Rogers is an American. Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. Well, you know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.” He kept going. “He has a birth certificate, but he’s not an American. He had the choice to be an American or not. He has chosen otherwise. He has blood that’s red. However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.” He suggested that people who disagree with him should “take their energy and their money, go buy an island someplace and try that socialism thing again somewhere else,” and take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders along with them. Then he led thousands of people in a chant of his son’s final words, words that have long stood for courage and sacrifice, but were now being used as part of a political attack against a fellow American. “On three. One, two, three. Let’s roll.”
When it was over, Donald Trump didn’t correct him or remind his fellow Americans that hatred, especially hatred directed at Muslim Americans, has no place in this country. Instead, he thanked David and Peggy Beamer and told them, “Your boy is looking down very proud of you both right now.”
David Beamer has lived through a loss I cannot imagine, and nothing I say will ever take away from his grief or from his son’s heroism. But he did not wander onto that stage, and he was not ambushed. He came as a surrogate for Mike Rogers, whom he has endorsed and for whom he has appeared in campaign advertising against El-Sayed, and he chose every one of those words. I can hold compassion for a grieving father and still hold him accountable for the dangerous things he said. The men who murdered Todd Beamer believed that an entire nation of people was their enemy, that thousands of human beings they had never met deserved to die because of who they were and what they believed. Twenty-five years later, Todd’s father stood on a stage and taught a crowd of Americans to believe the same kind of thing about their neighbors. That is the real heartbreak of what happened in Port Huron today. The hatred that took his son has found its way into him.
What Donald Trump encouraged today is not new. We’ve seen variations of this type of hatred and division before, and history has shown us where it leads. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only a person “of German or kindred blood” could be a citizen of the Reich. Jewish Germans whose families had lived in the country for generations, who had fought for Germany in World War I, and who held German birth certificates were stripped of their full rights as citizens. They were still living in the country they called home, but they were no longer considered equal members of it. When David Beamer told the audience that a man’s birth certificate doesn’t make him an American and questioned his loyalty using the colors of the American flag, he was making an argument with a disturbing historical parallel: that belonging to a country is not determined by citizenship under the law, but by whether those in power consider you worthy of being called an American. And Donald Trump stood behind him and let him say the very things that Donald Trump himself also believes.
And we have seen this happen right here in America, too. In 1942, the United States government forced roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and sent them to incarceration camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens, many born right here in California. They had American birth certificates, but none of that mattered because their own government had decided that their ancestry made them a threat to the country they called home. Decades later, a federal commission determined that what happened was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The United States eventually formally apologized and paid reparations to surviving victims.
I still remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in school and struggling to understand how the United States of America could have done something so horrible to its own people. Much like when I first learned about slavery, I couldn’t understand how so many people could have stood by and allowed their fellow human beings to be treated that way. I remember wondering how anyone could have believed it was acceptable, let alone participated in it. And here we are, 84 years after Japanese Americans were first forced from their homes, watching history begin to rhyme once again. We have already lived through the consequences of allowing our government to decide that some Americans are less American than others simply because of who they are or where their families came from. We should not have to learn that lesson again.
Like many Americans, I didn’t grow up around Muslim people. I’m sure there were Muslim families in my community; I just didn’t know them. I grew up with friends who were Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, and some who followed no religion at all, but I didn’t have a close Muslim friend until I went to college. In 1995, during my freshman year, I was seated next to a young Muslim man who would become a close friend.
One night, I was feeling stressed about schoolwork and wanted to go for a walk late in the evening to clear my mind. He insisted on coming with me to keep me company and make sure I was safe. It was on that walk that he told me about his faith and family. What stayed with me the most was how peaceful his religion was, and how much he cared about his mother. Through him, I met more Muslim friends, and not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever said a word about my hair being uncovered, even though many of their mothers covered theirs, and not one of them ever made me feel anything but welcome. We were all just kids learning how to be adults, trying to figure out who we were while having some fun along the way.
Six years later, on September 11th, I didn’t think of him. I didn’t think of his family or his friends, because I had never once connected him to extremism, and why would I have? He was the friend who insisted on walking with me so I’d be safe. In the same way, I don’t hold Jewish people responsible for the Israeli government’s war in Gaza, I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas did on October 7th, and I don’t hold every American responsible for Donald Trump. The list goes on and on, because that is how human beings actually are. We are not our governments, and we are not the worst person who happens to share our faith.
Maybe the most important lesson that history can teach us right now is that if someone stands up and tells us that an entire group of people is evil, that they should be feared, watched, screened, or sent away, the person we should fear most is the one saying it, not the people they are trying to turn us against. Because never in history has the real threat been an entire people. The threat has always been the man with the microphone who needs us to believe otherwise. David Beamer told the crowd today that “the enemy is right here among us,” and he was right about that. But the enemy wasn’t a doctor running for the Senate. It was the man sharing that stage with him, the one who invited him up there and handed him the microphone.
Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, helped lead Donald Trump’s outreach to Arab American voters in Michigan during the 2024 election. Today, he told the Associated Press, “The president’s statements are out of line. They are crossing a red line. They are racist.” He continued, “The remarks are out of line and crazy. I mean, no sane individual would say these things,” before adding, “The president of the United States saying that about a person because of his religion, that is just not acceptable. And people are going to remember that on Nov. 3.” Two years ago, this man was helping Donald Trump win Michigan. Tonight, he is publicly calling the president’s remarks racist, and that tells us just how far this has gone, even for some of the people who once supported him.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who joined El-Sayed in Grand Rapids tonight, said Republicans are turning to Islamophobia because they have no answers for Americans struggling with health care, housing, and the cost of living. “All they can do is foment hatred and divisiveness,” he said. At that same rally, El-Sayed responded to Trump’s attacks with a little humor, telling the crowd, “I don’t even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me ‘senator’ after November,” before adding, to loud cheers, “I will be Senator Muhammad to you, bro.” El-Sayed has also called the attacks on his loyalty “shameful.”
While Donald Trump was in Michigan today trying to convince Americans to fear their own neighbors, people in other parts of the world were showing us what happens when ordinary citizens refuse to be afraid anymore. In April, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after sixteen years in power, despite Donald Trump and JD Vance throwing their support behind him. I have written before about how Hungary felt when I visited in 2019, how the country I had once fallen in love with seemed to be holding its breath. In April, it finally exhaled.
Today, it was Brazil’s turn. Yesterday, Reuters published a disturbing investigation into how two Trump administration officials worked behind the scenes to help return the Bolsonaro family to power, pushing for sanctions to sway the election and telling American diplomats that restoring Jair Bolsonaro was United States policy. When his conviction for plotting a coup made that impossible, they shifted their attention to getting his son, Flávio, elected instead. But the Brazilian people had other plans. Tonight, President Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 percent of the vote, and people poured into the streets of São Paulo to celebrate. Despite everything the Trump administration did to interfere, the Brazilian people made their own decision to resist a far-right takeover.
At 3:29 this afternoon, the President of the United States gripped the podium with both hands and leaned forward to steady himself while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” He had just arrived at the hockey arena in Port Huron, Michigan, after an uneventful flight aboard Qatari Air Force One and a motorcade that passed right by a protester holding up a sign that read “TRAITOR” and “RAPIST.”
Over the next one hour and forty-eight minutes, Donald Trump declared that the United States owns Greenland, called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist who is “on the side of the terrorists,” and told Jewish Americans who support El-Sayed that they should be ashamed of themselves and never speak to him again. He then invited the father of a September 11 hero onto the stage to tell thousands of people that having a United States birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American. And then, seemingly forgetting why he was even there, he stopped to talk once again about looking at another man’s “ass.”
The man Donald Trump came to Michigan to destroy was born in metro Detroit, earned a medical degree, and became an epidemiologist who once ran the city of Detroit’s health department, and if Michigan elects him in nine days, he will become the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. That is what today was really about, and just three minutes into his speech, Donald Trump admitted as much: “I’m here today in Michigan for a very important reason. I’m here to keep a jihadist, Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator.” Then he promised that “the people of Michigan are going to defeat Abdul Mohammed,” a name El-Sayed doesn’t use, but one Trump repeated to make him sound more foreign and threatening to the crowd.
Trump then went after El-Sayed’s family, accusing his mother of supporting al Qaeda, his sister of celebrating the October 7 terrorist attacks, and his father-in-law of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Associated Press reported that there is no evidence El-Sayed has any connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Michigan Public found that the accusations against his mother were not supported by the available evidence. But none of that mattered to Trump. He was using El-Sayed’s family and his Muslim faith to portray him as a terrorist and convince Americans that he was someone to fear.
Then he moved from El-Sayed’s family to El-Sayed himself. “Anyone with that record of support for jihadists would be screened and unable to get a seat on an airplane,” Trump said. “They certainly should not give him a seat in the United States Senate. He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate. I want him to have a metal detector.” He said that “Michigan does not need a senator who’s on the side of the terrorists,” and that El-Sayed “wants our country to go to Sharia law.”
Then Donald Trump proved just how unfit he is to lead a country built by immigrants when he tried to turn two groups of Americans, both of whom have faced hatred and discrimination, against each other. He told the crowd, “Any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves, I’ll tell you right now,” and added, “You should never speak to him again.” He went on to claim that he was “polling at 99% in Israel” and that he could not understand “how anybody who’s Jewish can even think about voting for this guy.” In just a few sentences, the President of the United States told Jewish Americans to turn their backs on Muslim Americans and suggested that their votes and friendships should be based on their religion rather than their own beliefs. What Trump was trying to say is that Muslims are guilty simply because they are Muslim, and Jews are guilty if they refuse to treat Muslims like enemies. This is how authoritarian leaders divide a country. They turn people against their neighbors, convince them that other Americans are the enemy, and demand loyalty to themselves above everyone else.
Later in his speech, Donald Trump took his attacks even further, telling the crowd, “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”
With just nine days until the midterm elections, and Republicans facing growing anger over inflation, soaring gas prices, and Trump’s war in Iran, Donald Trump took his attacks to an entirely different level. He brought up the September 11 terrorist attacks and began telling the story of Todd Beamer, who was born in Flint, Michigan, and was one of the brave passengers aboard United Flight 93 who fought back against the hijackers and prevented the plane from reaching its intended target, saving untold numbers of lives. But Trump was not telling this story to honor an American hero. He was using it to attack Abdul El-Sayed. “Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight just like Todd did to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said, before continuing, “Todd Beamer gave his life for America. And you have to give your vote for Todd Beamer, if you can view it that way.” The President of the United States had just compared voting against a Muslim American doctor to the courage shown by Americans who sacrificed their lives fighting terrorists on September 11. And then he invited Todd Beamer’s father onto the stage.
Like so many of us, I have always thought of Todd Beamer as a true American patriot and a hero, a man who spent his final minutes on earth thinking of other people. He found an extraordinary strength that morning, the kind that, thankfully, few of us will ever have to search for. That is what made what happened next so painful to watch.
David Beamer, who told the crowd he was “four score and four” (or 84 years old), spoke for nearly twelve minutes. He began by asking everyone to pray before taking a disturbing turn and comparing the enemies America faced on September 11 to the ones he claimed we face today. “The enemy has not come from abroad. The enemy is right here among us. Local terrorists. Local citizens that want to demolish our country. They call themselves Democratic Socialists of America. Do you know what the DS really stands for? Demolition specialists.” He went on to claim that the Democratic Socialists’ platform “reads like the terrorist platform of 9/11 on steroids,” that “Abdul would much prefer Sharia law,” and that “the mantra of their platform is really death to America.” A father still reeling from the unimaginable loss of his son, who was murdered by terrorists on September 11, stood in front of thousands of Americans and told them that their own neighbors, people who want things like affordable health care and public education, were terrorists too.
The rest of his words were equally disturbing, and the President of the United States of America stood behind him, listening and agreeing with every word he said. “Mike Rogers is an American. Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. Well, you know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.” He kept going. “He has a birth certificate, but he’s not an American. He had the choice to be an American or not. He has chosen otherwise. He has blood that’s red. However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.” He suggested that people who disagree with him should “take their energy and their money, go buy an island someplace and try that socialism thing again somewhere else,” and take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders along with them. Then he led thousands of people in a chant of his son’s final words, words that have long stood for courage and sacrifice, but were now being used as part of a political attack against a fellow American. “On three. One, two, three. Let’s roll.”
When it was over, Donald Trump didn’t correct him or remind his fellow Americans that hatred, especially hatred directed at Muslim Americans, has no place in this country. Instead, he thanked David and Peggy Beamer and told them, “Your boy is looking down very proud of you both right now.”
David Beamer has lived through a loss I cannot imagine, and nothing I say will ever take away from his grief or from his son’s heroism. But he did not wander onto that stage, and he was not ambushed. He came as a surrogate for Mike Rogers, whom he has endorsed and for whom he has appeared in campaign advertising against El-Sayed, and he chose every one of those words. I can hold compassion for a grieving father and still hold him accountable for the dangerous things he said. The men who murdered Todd Beamer believed that an entire nation of people was their enemy, that thousands of human beings they had never met deserved to die because of who they were and what they believed. Twenty-five years later, Todd’s father stood on a stage and taught a crowd of Americans to believe the same kind of thing about their neighbors. That is the real heartbreak of what happened in Port Huron today. The hatred that took his son has found its way into him.
What Donald Trump encouraged today is not new. We’ve seen variations of this type of hatred and division before, and history has shown us where it leads. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only a person “of German or kindred blood” could be a citizen of the Reich. Jewish Germans whose families had lived in the country for generations, who had fought for Germany in World War I, and who held German birth certificates were stripped of their full rights as citizens. They were still living in the country they called home, but they were no longer considered equal members of it. When David Beamer told the audience that a man’s birth certificate doesn’t make him an American and questioned his loyalty using the colors of the American flag, he was making an argument with a disturbing historical parallel: that belonging to a country is not determined by citizenship under the law, but by whether those in power consider you worthy of being called an American. And Donald Trump stood behind him and let him say the very things that Donald Trump himself also believes.
And we have seen this happen right here in America, too. In 1942, the United States government forced roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and sent them to incarceration camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens, many born right here in California. They had American birth certificates, but none of that mattered because their own government had decided that their ancestry made them a threat to the country they called home. Decades later, a federal commission determined that what happened was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The United States eventually formally apologized and paid reparations to surviving victims.
I still remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in school and struggling to understand how the United States of America could have done something so horrible to its own people. Much like when I first learned about slavery, I couldn’t understand how so many people could have stood by and allowed their fellow human beings to be treated that way. I remember wondering how anyone could have believed it was acceptable, let alone participated in it. And here we are, 84 years after Japanese Americans were first forced from their homes, watching history begin to rhyme once again. We have already lived through the consequences of allowing our government to decide that some Americans are less American than others simply because of who they are or where their families came from. We should not have to learn that lesson again.
Like many Americans, I didn’t grow up around Muslim people. I’m sure there were Muslim families in my community; I just didn’t know them. I grew up with friends who were Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, and some who followed no religion at all, but I didn’t have a close Muslim friend until I went to college. In 1995, during my freshman year, I was seated next to a young Muslim man who would become a close friend.
One night, I was feeling stressed about schoolwork and wanted to go for a walk late in the evening to clear my mind. He insisted on coming with me to keep me company and make sure I was safe. It was on that walk that he told me about his faith and family. What stayed with me the most was how peaceful his religion was, and how much he cared about his mother. Through him, I met more Muslim friends, and not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever said a word about my hair being uncovered, even though many of their mothers covered theirs, and not one of them ever made me feel anything but welcome. We were all just kids learning how to be adults, trying to figure out who we were while having some fun along the way.
Six years later, on September 11th, I didn’t think of him. I didn’t think of his family or his friends, because I had never once connected him to extremism, and why would I have? He was the friend who insisted on walking with me so I’d be safe. In the same way, I don’t hold Jewish people responsible for the Israeli government’s war in Gaza, I don’t hold all Palestinians responsible for what Hamas did on October 7th, and I don’t hold every American responsible for Donald Trump. The list goes on and on, because that is how human beings actually are. We are not our governments, and we are not the worst person who happens to share our faith.
Maybe the most important lesson that history can teach us right now is that if someone stands up and tells us that an entire group of people is evil, that they should be feared, watched, screened, or sent away, the person we should fear most is the one saying it, not the people they are trying to turn us against. Because never in history has the real threat been an entire people. The threat has always been the man with the microphone who needs us to believe otherwise. David Beamer told the crowd today that “the enemy is right here among us,” and he was right about that. But the enemy wasn’t a doctor running for the Senate. It was the man sharing that stage with him, the one who invited him up there and handed him the microphone.
Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab Americans for Trump, helped lead Donald Trump’s outreach to Arab American voters in Michigan during the 2024 election. Today, he told the Associated Press, “The president’s statements are out of line. They are crossing a red line. They are racist.” He continued, “The remarks are out of line and crazy. I mean, no sane individual would say these things,” before adding, “The president of the United States saying that about a person because of his religion, that is just not acceptable. And people are going to remember that on Nov. 3.” Two years ago, this man was helping Donald Trump win Michigan. Tonight, he is publicly calling the president’s remarks racist, and that tells us just how far this has gone, even for some of the people who once supported him.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who joined El-Sayed in Grand Rapids tonight, said Republicans are turning to Islamophobia because they have no answers for Americans struggling with health care, housing, and the cost of living. “All they can do is foment hatred and divisiveness,” he said. At that same rally, El-Sayed responded to Trump’s attacks with a little humor, telling the crowd, “I don’t even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me ‘senator’ after November,” before adding, to loud cheers, “I will be Senator Muhammad to you, bro.” El-Sayed has also called the attacks on his loyalty “shameful.”
While Donald Trump was in Michigan today trying to convince Americans to fear their own neighbors, people in other parts of the world were showing us what happens when ordinary citizens refuse to be afraid anymore. In April, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after sixteen years in power, despite Donald Trump and JD Vance throwing their support behind him. I have written before about how Hungary felt when I visited in 2019, how the country I had once fallen in love with seemed to be holding its breath. In April, it finally exhaled.
Today, it was Brazil’s turn. Yesterday, Reuters published a disturbing investigation into how two Trump administration officials worked behind the scenes to help return the Bolsonaro family to power, pushing for sanctions to sway the election and telling American diplomats that restoring Jair Bolsonaro was United States policy. When his conviction for plotting a coup made that impossible, they shifted their attention to getting his son, Flávio, elected instead. But the Brazilian people had other plans. Tonight, President Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 percent of the vote, and people poured into the streets of São Paulo to celebrate. Despite everything the Trump administration did to interfere, the Brazilian people made their own decision to resist a far-right dictator.
Donald Trump's grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).
Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Flurry of Diplomacy in Iran as Regional Countries Try to Stave Off War, Erika Solomon, Vivian Nereim and Adam Rasgon, Oct. 26, 2026. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan made a rare joint visit to Tehran amid reports that the U.S. and Israel were drawing up plans to renew their attacks on Iran.
Senior representatives from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan met with Iranian officials in the capital, Tehran, on Monday, amid widespread concern that the United States and Israel could soon launch fresh attacks on Iran.
Ali Bagheri Kani, the deputy secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council, said the meetings were aimed at promoting regional security, according to an Iranian state news channel, Press TV.
The visit is the latest in a flurry of diplomatic efforts by regional mediators to stave off further turmoil in the Middle East. American and Israeli officials are said to be drawing up plans to potentially attack Iran after the U.S. midterm elections next week, according to U.S. officials and others briefed on the deliberations.
Saudi Arabia’s conflict with the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has also escalated rapidly in recent weeks as the two sides have exchanged deadly attacks, including on airports and oil sites around the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan formed a new collective defense agreement, known as the Mecca Pact, this year. Monday’s talks are their first joint high-level meeting with Iran since the Saudi-Houthi conflict flared up.
Drop Site Daily, Israel expels 3,100+ Palestinians in Hebron, Staff and Wire Reports, Oct. 26, 2026. Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday. 800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp. Israeli operation in Hebron forcibly displaces over 3,100 Palestinians as attacks continue across the occupied West Bank. Israel kills at least 14 Palestinians in Gaza over the weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in tight race against Eisenkot in Israeli elections tomorrow.
Iran: In unexpected diplomatic move, Saudi, Pakistani, and Turkish officials travel to Iran for talks. Iraq keeps borders closed to pressure Iran, orders arrest of Iraqi official opposing the closure. Oil spill off UAE coast widens, satellite images show.
Yemen: Saudi-led coalition carries out strikes in Yemen as Ansarallah claims attacks on airport, military bases, and oil infrastructure. Egyptian parliament authorizes Sisi to send military reinforcements to Saudi Arabia if requested. Over half of Taiz’s hospitals and medical centers shut down amid Ansarallah siege. Saudi-coalition strikes kill 21, wound 30 in Yemen.
U.S.: Former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump attend dueling rallies in Michigan; Trump spouts Islamophobia to stir his base. U.S. military gives SpaceX access to precise space-tracking data, raising conflict-of-interest questions. NYC set to sign no-bid deal with Israeli tracking company. Trump says U.S. will “take care of Cuba”; Rubio urges Cubans to partner with CIA. White House considers mass pardons for junior staff, sources say. Attorney General Todd Blanche defends DOJ suit to block automatic certification of Alaska’s Senate result if Republican candidate loses. SNAP enrollment has fallen 13% since the One Big Beautiful Act, straining food banks and school meal programs. U.S. presses Mexico for deeper cooperation against cartels.
International: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva re-elected president of Brazil, defeating far-right Flávio Bolsonaro. Serbian student-led movement ousts right-wing leader Vučić, wins big in parliament. The Guardian: U.S. military “weaponizing” El Niño in Somalia. Remains located in Haiti during search for missing Salvadoran soldiers. North Korea accuses South Korea of fabricating demilitarized zone blast, places howitzers on border. Jordan arrests three suspected of deadly church attack. Opposition figure María Corina Machado returns to Venezuela after more than 10 months in exile. Rapid Support Forces attacks power stations, causes outages across southeastern Sudan. Amnesty: Gunmen kill at least 40 in Nigerian village. Algeria authorizes army deployment to Niger, first foreign troop mission since 1973.
Seven Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Monday: Israeli attacks on Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed at least four Palestinians, including a seven-year-old girl, and wounded more than ten, while one Palestinian was killed and several others wounded Monday in a drone strike in the Rimal neighborhood of western Gaza City, according to WAFA. A separate Israeli drone strike in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, killed two Palestinians and wounded two.
Over the past 24 hours, eight Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks and 35 injured across Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Three bodies were recovered from beneath the rubble.
The total recorded death toll since October 7, 2023, is now 74,555 killed, with 175,727 injured. Since October 11, 2025, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 1,559 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 5,608, while 845 bodies have been recovered.
800 Palestinians forced to flee from Shujaiya after Israel set fire to camp: Over 800 Palestinians have been forced to displace yet again from Shujaiya, an eastern neighborhood in Gaza City, after Israeli forces set fire to a displacement camp, according to Al Jazeera.
New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.
More Global News
New York Times, Israeli Jews Across the Spectrum Face an Election of Fears, David M. Halbfinger, Oct. 26, 2026. Supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, have expressed intense anxieties about isolation abroad, security at home and the future of Israel’s identity.
At an event in Jerusalem in July, an opposition candidate for Israel’s Parliament kicked things off by asking what voters feared most if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing, religious government won another four-year term. The answers were startling.
Israel would become even more of an international pariah, one said. “I’m afraid my children would leave,” said another. “I’d want my children to leave,” said a third.
It got darker from there. “Tyranny of the majority.” “Civil war.” “Collapse.”
Every national election is important, and many play on voters’ fears. But none has felt so consequential and dire to so many Israeli Jews as the one on Tuesday.
And no wonder: They have the chance to render a verdict on polarizing decisions that have torn the country apart for years — and to choose between starkly different visions for Israel’s future.
Perhaps the rawest emotions among Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents surround the question of whether the long-serving prime minister, legendary for his political survival skills, will be held accountable for the worst national-security failure in Israel’s history, the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.
As traumatic and shocking as that attack was, many other deep questions about Israel’s character hang in the balance.
Will the country weaken its judiciary and grant the government far more power? Will it rewrite the social contract to demand service and sacrifice from all sectors of society?
Will it arrest accelerating emigration before a brain drain threatens its tech-driven economy and, close behind, its vaunted military?
Will Israel defy global opprobrium and try to thwart Palestinian aspirations to statehood once and for all, potentially risking its relationship with the United States? Or will it reverse course and attempt to repair ties, at least with Washington?Finally, will it end Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure precisely at a moment when his staunchest supporters believe that his fortitude and skills are most needed to face down Israel’s adversaries on the global stage?
These issues are so divisive, and the country so polarized, that even a clear election result may not begin healing the rifts.
“Whoever wins, the other side will feel that they’re not part of the Israeli state,” said Yuval Eylon, a retired Israeli rear admiral and researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
In a recent poll, the institute found that 39 percent of Israelis fear violence between different segments of society — as many as fear an Iranian nuclear weapon.
New York Times, The Expat Voters Hoping to Swing Israel’s Election, Bethlehem Feleke, Alex Pena, Meg Felling and Monika Cvorak, Oct. 25, 2026. The return of thousands of Israeli expats to vote in their country’s tight election has set off debate over their political influence. We traveled to Tel Aviv to find out why.
“We’re at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where tens of thousands of Israeli expats are arriving to vote in Tuesday’s election. There’s no absentee voting. So many are flying in for what’s expected to be a very tight race.
Moshe Lavi just arrived from New York City and is meeting his sister Lishay. Her husband spent over two years in Hamas captivity. Their family is still displaced and living in a kibbutz in southern Israel.” “I lost trust with the government because they need to own the failures. They need to take responsibility. And now it’s my turn to use my voice. The diplomatic moves of the state of Israel influences the life of Israelis in the diaspora and abroad. And so my vote, in my opinion, is legitimate because I’m going to be impacted by the policies.”
“In Oct. 7, I promised to myself two things — that Omri [Miran] is here again. The girls call him Daddy. And to do everything that I can that this world and this land is going to be better and good for them.”
Despite widespread criticism of the government’s response to the attacks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is nearly tied with the opposition in the polls.
Around 6 percent of Israelis live overseas, a number that has only grown since the Hamas attacks. In a fragmented Parliament, their votes could shift the election.”
New York Times, Opinion: In India, I Saw Things That Should Scare Trump, Lydia Polgreen, Oct. 26, 2026. Narendra Modi, the barrel-chested strongman leader of India for the past dozen years, has finally met his match — and it looks a lot like Mohini Majumdar. Just 20 years old, slender and voluble, Majumdar is an English student at Delhi University: an unlikely antagonist for an omnipotent autocrat.
Yet early on Oct. 10, she shared an early morning taxi to the center of Delhi with a gaggle of classmates. Dressed casually in flowing cotton and sensible shoes, Majumdar and her friends could just as easily have been on their way to a stroll in one of this city’s splendid gardens. But their plan, she told me, was to march across the street to a place called Jantar Mantar, a historic monument at the center of Delhi that has for decades served as a designated ground for protest.
They had been there before, over the summer, joining thousands of other young people in raucous, meme-driven protests after a leaked paper led to the cancellation of a college entrance exam. Eventually, under the banner of the upstart Cockroach Janata Party, they forced the resignation of India’s education minister. It was the first time Modi’s government had dismissed a top official under pressure from public protests.
Now, they were back for an even bigger fish: Modi’s handpicked chief election commissioner, who had overseen the deletion of more than 130 million people from the country’s voter rolls in a murky process that threatened to undermine faith in the voting process in the world’s largest democracy. “These kinds of protests really prove that you should be political, and everything is political in our life,” Majumdar told me as she waited for the march to begin.
New York Times, Brazilian Markets Convulse After Unexpected Election Result, Joe Rennison, Oct. 26, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election victory prompted a sharp reversal in financial markets that had expected his opponent to win.
Stocks in Brazil plummeted on Monday after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election victory and his opponent’s early dispute of the results.
The Bovespa Index, Brazil’s benchmark stock index, fell more than 10 percent as trading began, triggering a 30-minute circuit breaker — a tool that pauses trading to prevent runaway sell-offs. Futures trading pointed to a decline of around 18 percent.
More On U.S. High-Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times Magazine, A.I. Companies Want to Write the Rules Governing Themselves. Can They Be Trusted? Emily Bazelon, Oct. 26, 2026. Five experts on how best to limit a rapidly evolving technology.
Artificial intelligence is alarming many of its human creators by leaping the guardrails designed to contain it. In the last few months, safety researchers have resigned from OpenAI and Anthropic, warning that their former employers could be courting disaster: A.I. that escapes our control irrevocably. The companies are reportedly gaming out scenarios of a catastrophic cyberattack or other event in the next six to 12 months.
Regulating this powerful and evolving technology would pose serious challenges for any Congress and White House. As it is, President Trump undermined the chances for bipartisan regulation by calling predictions of an A.I. catastrophe a “hoax” in September. Yoshua Bengio, a scientist and godfather of A.I., wrote in October, “I do not believe we are on track to see sufficient government regulation in time.”
What should the government do? We asked a panel of experts to assess the risks A.I. presents and the tools of governance that could be adopted to address them.
Matt Stoller's BIG: Monopoly Round-Up: What Happens When Cybersecurity is Bad for Business, Lee Hepner, Oct. 25-26, 2026. How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.
Lots of monopoly-related news this week, as usual. The AI bubble continues to blow off steam, as even Elon Musk is saying the neoclouds are going bust, which BIG predicted a couple of weeks ago. And, as we race toward a consequential midterm election, Republican voters are demanding financial services reform, and a new Congressional report called “Settling for Less” is laying the foundation for oversight and accountability regarding the Trump Administration’s failed approach to antitrust enforcement.But before we get to all of that, which is below for paid subscribers, you may have seen a lot of chatter last week about a wave of AI-enabled cybersecurity failures that resulted in the preemptive takedown of government websites around the world. The effects were also local and diffuse. I was talking about this with a friend who said the platform for coordinating his kid’s soccer league was shut down for a couple of days, leaving parents in the lurch on upcoming schedules.
Basically, the internet is being ruined by a massive new AI-fueled set of hacks, a situation nicknamed “Black October” by cybersecurity experts. Big or small, there’s a lot to unpack here and an opportunity to reflect on what this says about our failure to anticipate and govern for risk. Let’s dive in.
New York Times, Owners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The $41 million lawsuit contends that the A.I. company used Presley’s music to train its models without permission. Anthropic disagrees with the claims.
The owners of Elvis Presley’s music sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, saying it trained its models on more than 200 of Presley’s songs without their permission, and accusing it of copyright infringement.
The suit, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of several parties, seeks a jury trial and more than $41 million, or $150,000 per song, in damages.
The owners of the music, who include the licensing company Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing, multiple trusts and at least one individual, also accused Anthropic, the company behind the popular chatbot Claude, of circumventing measures used to protect the music and removing or altering copyright management information from the songs.
“The Elvis plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before,” the lawsuit said.
Anthropic infringed on 274 of Presley’s songs, the lawsuit contends, including hits like “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return To Sender.”
A representative for Anthropic said in a short statement on Sunday that the company disagreed with the claims and that it intended to defend itself against the case.
Last week, the music company Reservoir sued Anthropic, accusing it of stealing copyrighted lyrics and melodies from songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” by Joni Mitchell, and “Papa Don’t Preach,” by Madonna, as well as songs by Kings of Leon and Evanescence. Anthropic told Billboard magazine that it disagreed with the allegations.
Anthropic was also sued for $3 billion by Universal Music Group in January. UMG claims that the A.I. company built Claude using “pirated libraries” of songs. This month, Anthropic asked a judge in the case to rule that its actions are protected under fair use laws.
The A.I. music company Suno, whose song creation tool has divided the industry, has faced its own copyright lawsuits from record labels. That company repositioned itself as a partner to those labels and artists, and released an A.I. model trained on songs licensed from the Warner Music Group. Warner settled its suit against Suno, though UMG and Sony have so far not done the same.
In the wider landscape of A.I. and the music industry, there are continuing discussions over whether artists should adopt the technology, the ethics around its use and the demand for guardrails for musicians.
Other industries are also grappling with A.I. The New York Times has sued the artificial intelligence company OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.
In the lawsuit concerning Presley’s catalog, the plaintiffs say they are “deeply protective” of the music, describing it as “some of the most valuable in the world” with “some of the most renowned lyrics and melodies in music history.”
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 26, 2026 (print ed.). A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.
Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.
Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.
In doing so, Mr. Trump harnessed the power of the federal government to try to interfere in the voting process before Election Day — essentially trying to nullify an opponent’s potential win before the game has been called.
Even for a president who worked to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election, the anticipatory strike reflects a new intensification of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use his official powers to achieve the election results he wants — one that undermines the democratic process, according to election and legal experts. While they say the administration’s lawsuit is unlikely to be successful, the tactic could still further Mr. Trump’s goals by shaking the confidence of voters in the outcome of the race.
“This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” said Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development who has studied election issues around the world, including in El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the D.O.J. and it’s been weaponized.”
The latest phase of Mr. Trump’s strategy centers on the Justice Department, which asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.
The issue has already been litigated in the state: In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired elementary schoolteacher, could appear on the ballot.
But Attorney General Todd Blanche maintained on Sunday that the federal government had a role in inserting itself into the process.
“We’re not saying that the federal government is going to decide who the next senator from Alaska is,” Mr. Blanche said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added: “But if it’s clear that there was confusion and that confusion led to an unjust, improper result that is not the will of the Alaskan voters, we want to make sure that the Alaskan system and the Alaskan state courts and the Alaskan electoral process can understand that in a way that lets them do the right thing.”
When asked for comment, the White House referred to an exchange Mr. Trump had with reporters on Saturday about his administration’s efforts to intervene in Alaska, a lawsuit he said was made at his direction. Republicans have asserted that the candidacy of the second Mr. Sullivan is a Democratic scheme to confuse voters. Democrats have said they have no connection to that candidate, who will appear on the ballot without any party affiliation and has said he is running a genuine campaign.
“It is a totally corrupt weaponization situation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it,” Mr. Trump said of the Democrats in Alaska. “So I recommended it to the D.O.J. They looked at it, they agreed with me, and they’ve gone to court. Let’s see what happens. But that’s pure corruption.”Election law specialists say Mr. Trump’s lawsuit in Alaska lacks legal basis and will likely fail. But that might not be the point.
The lawsuit is just one piece of a blitz of federal actions by the Trump administration to assert more control over the electoral process that have run into court challenges. Mr. Trump introduced a plan to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots, only to have it be blocked by the Supreme Court.
The administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to cede to the federal government’s demands to turn over voter rolls. The administration has lost 27 of those cases. The other cases are pending.
Mr. Trump has deployed homeland security investigators to find evidence of illegal voting in states where it has claimed without evidence there is widespread noncitizen voting. A federal judge restricted much of that effort this week.
But with each claim of election fraud, Mr. Trump is creating another platform to sow doubt about the elections and, some state officials and election experts worry, lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the specific contests.
More On U.S. MidTerm Elections
The Contrarian, Opinion: Who Has Already Won and LostI Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 26, 2026. 🚨 8 Days to the Midterms 🚨 We have been tracking “days to the midterms” — Nov. 3 — but early midterm voting has been underway and from all appearances looks more robust than it has been at this point in past years.
According to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, some 28 million people have already cast ballots. We won’t know until the ballots are counted whether those additional early ballots were “cannibalized” from the 
Election Day vote or whether the turnout will be elevated, but the flood of early voting is itself an expression of democratic determination to thwart the Trump regime’s efforts to muck up mail-in voting and to intimidate voters.An early-voting station on Oct. 16, the first day of early voting for the midterm elections in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Tim Evans/AFP via Getty Images)
An avalanche of early voters perceived a threat to democracy and took effective evasive action, casting ballots that are now “banked” for their party/candidates. Not only does this avoid problems that might interrupt voting on official Election Day — whether personal or regime-inflicted — but it also allows the party/candidate engaged in get-out-the-vote operations to focus on lower-propensity voters, increasing the chance to boost overall turnout.
Regardless of the results when votes are tabulated, the “winner” here is the anti-regime, pro-democracy coalition that pulled off a political jujitsu — converting Donald Trump’s desperate effort to interfere with elections and rig the midterms into a historic early-voting exercise.
Conversely, the entire anti-democratic, election-suppressing exercise — from demanding state voter rolls to harassing immigrants to sending bogus lists of supposed noncitizen voters to re-redistricting to filing preposterous lawsuits — not only failed in virtually every court case but also arguably boosted a historic blue wave. It’s been a spectacularly inept and counterproductive authoritarian effort (akin to Viktor Orban’s failed stunts in his losing election in Hungary) to cling to power.
A lawsuit filed Friday (which Donald Trump confessed he personally ordered) purported to challenge the eventual result in Alaska’s Senate race unless the incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan wins. Republicans are whining that an independent candidate with the same name as the incumbent will be on the ballot, but a state court has already handled the matter. As strictly a matter of state law, “the administration has absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when or how to certify the results of its Senate election,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said in a statement. The ACLU and ACLU of Alaska on Saturday swiftly intervened to dismiss the case and seek Rule 11 sanctions against the Justice Department. (The latest baseless assault on voting should renew calls for the impeachment of Attorney General Todd Blanche, who now presides over a lawless voter intimidation operation.)
Even Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski declared that “Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates,” pointing out that a state court “already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot.” She acknowledged, “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.” The attack on their voting rights and implicit insult to Alaska voters (who, with ranked-choice voting, will have a chance to indicate preferences for each candidate) may well boost Democrat Mary Peltola, who was already leading in the polls.
Again, Republicans’ laughable efforts to meddle in the election remind us that Trump’s MAGA cult has lost the battle between voting suppression and voting enthusiasts.
In addition to the larger fight between anti- and pro-voting forces, the campaign has already produced winners and losers among the surrogate forces spread out around the country. Regardless of who wins races in which they are offering their help, several potential 2028 contenders’ performances in the midterms have changed, for better or worse, their future prospects.
Certain Democrats on the radar for 2028 have improved their profiles through energetic appearances and/or fundraising. “JB Pritzker is pouring tens of millions of dollars of his own money into boosting Black and Hispanic candidates this cycle. That could help him win over critical voters in 2028,” Politico reported. “The billionaire Illinois governor — who’s also considered a potential presidential contender — is investing at least $38 million in battleground races.”
However, no 2028 contender has been more visible or effective than former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, who, by Politico’s count, made about 100 endorsements and appeared in person for half of those. By election day, he’ll have stopped in roughly 40 states since leaving office (recently appearing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Georgia, Mississippi, Minnesota, Colorado, and Wisconsin) and been “welcomed in places where candidates shunned some of his potential rivals.”
Buttigieg will finish on Nov. 3 in Detroit. Michigan just happens to be Buttigieg’s home state, and the state where progressive star Abdul El-Sayed is poised for a win in the Senate and Democrat Joyce Benson in the governor’s contest, and an early 2028 primary state.
Buttigieg’s biggest accomplishment has been his success in defining himself not as a remanent of the old guard (a Cabinet member in an administration whose president many Democrats deeply resent for dooming the party’s 2024 prospects) but among the most articulate of the new generation of reformers with bold ideas, including popular vote for president and expansion of the Supreme Court. (It has not hurt him that former vice president Kamala Harris, a potential rival, has been almost invisible during the campaign and, likewise, that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, under fire from progressives for blessing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, has been a nonfactor on the trail.)
Meanwhile, no one — with the exception of his addled, grossly uninhibited, and unhinged boss — has done more damage to his image than Vice President JD Vance. (Indeed, Vance’s role as No. 2 for someone so obviously unfit for office will elevate a whole set of 25th Amendment questions should Vance decide to run. Haven’t you noticed his deterioration? Don’t you have an obligation under the 25th Amendment to ensure the president is mentally fit?)
In addition to Trump’s blatant snub in refusing to endorse Vance for 2028, Vance’s sparse crowds, clumsy interviews, awkward performances, cringeworthy defense of Vivek Ramaswamy’s widely denounced vile ad, and feeble attempts to distance himself from Trump (e.g., on Iran via his leaks to the New York Times, on the economy) have cemented the imagine of a soulless, creepy character without ideas of his own or a modicum of likability. Simply being “not Vance” might be the best calling card for a flock of lesser-known Republicans eyeing 2028 runs.
We don’t know the ballot winners yet, but the surrogate race has been decided. If Buttigieg is the big surrogate winner, Vance is the undisputed surrogate loser of 2026.
In sum, the extent of the blue wave remains an open question. However, this historic midterm has already shaped the battle to preserve free and fair elections and the two parties’ 2028 nominating contests. What happened during the 2026 race won’t be forgotten after Nov. 3.
Robert Reich, Opinion: Watch, Read, and Share, Robert Reich, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Obama said it as clearly as it can be stated.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to see or read Obama’s speech in Cleveland Saturday night, please do both. And then share it as widely as you can.
TEXT (I have taken the liberty of putting certain sentences in bold type.)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Ohio!
Yes! Hello, Cleveland! (Cheers/applause.)
All right, all right, all right, settle down! Settle down, come on!(Cheers/applause.)
Thank you! Thank you! All right, all right, all right!
Hold up, hold up! Y’all got too riled up. (Laughter.) Man, it is rocking in Cleveland right now! (Cheers/applause.) It is good to be back. (Applause.)
It is great to be with your next governor, Amy Acton! (Applause.) Your next senator, Sherrod Brown! (Applause.)
And by the way, if y’all got seats, feel free to sit down. I’ve got some stuff to say here today. (Applause.)
Let’s face it, I’ve been doing this a long time. Sherrod talks about the first time I came here, did not have a single gray hair, not one. (Laughter.)
And so, I’ve been doing this a long time, and some people might say a little too long. And one of those people is Michelle Obama. (Cheers/applause.) But she gave me a hall pass this weekend.
And when you have been campaigning as long as I have been campaigning, when you’ve worked as many elections as I have, you can tell when an election comes along that just feels a little bit different. (Applause.)
An election where people are so ready for something new, so hungry for something better, so sick and tired of being sick and tired that everywhere you go, it feels like change is in the end. (Cheers/applause.)
And in Ohio, that’s how I’m feeling right now. That’s what you get a chance to do in 10 days. After two years of chaos and cruelty, and corruption, and incompetence, the likes of which we have not seen in modern times, you get a chance to say enough’s enough. We are voting for change right here in Ohio! (Applause.)
And the great thing is here in Ohio, you can vote early through November 1st. So don’t procrastinate, don’t equivocate. Make a plan to vote early in person or on election day. If you need to find out how to do it, go to iwillvote.com/oh.
AUDIENCE: I-O!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: O-H?
AUDIENCE: I-O!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Some things don’t change. (Laughter.)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, Barack!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I love you back! You know that.
Now, you’ve heard some great speakers. I do not have to tell you how tough things are out there, but I do think it’s worth reminding ourselves how we got here, and the promises that the current occupant of the White House was making on the campaign trail two years ago.
AUDIENCE: Boo!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Don’t boo! And by the way, y’all must not have been to my rallies before, because you know you’re not supposed to boo. What are you supposed to do?
AUDIENCE: Vote!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Correct. They can’t hear your boos. They’ll hear your vote! (Applause.)
Now, two years ago, there were a lot of people who, they weren’t crazy about the guy’s character, but they were frustrated about post-COVID inflation.
They were seeing prices go up, and they heard him make a bunch of promises to get costs under control.
And those weren’t the only promises he made. He also promised he’d impose tariffs that would bring down the deficit. He promised he’d stop getting us involved in unnecessary wars. He promised he’d pass a beautiful healthcare bill, the most “beautiful bill” that would make everyone’s lives better. So, I think we should examine how did these promises work out.
Well, first of all, if you thought everything cost too much before you know who, everything is more expensive now. Your mortgage costs more. Your healthcare costs more. Your utility bills cost more. Interest rates are up, and then there’s gas, $4 a gallon, $5 a gallon. Diesel is over $y and climbing.
Now, I want to be fair. As a former president, I can tell you sometimes, factors beyond the president’s control end up foiling the best laid plans; that happens. A president doesn’t have control over the entire economy, but that is not the case here. (Applause.)
In this case, this administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs. The current president chose to make a series of bad decisions. Most importantly, he decided to start an unnecessary war that nobody asked for and nobody voted for. (Applause.)
Now, this is something I know a little about. Let’s think about this Iran war. The original rationale was, we’re going to go in there and get them to give up their nuclear program, their nuclear weapons.
Now, the thing was, Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons because I had put a deal in place — (Applause.) — that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes. And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it. I just had to engage in diplomacy.
He pulled out of it, starts this war. Seven months later, six months after they declared victory, because remember they said, “Oh, this is the best war ever, it’s going great,” seven months later, how’s that war going? Our allies and our bases have been attacked. Americans have been killed. Hundreds of Americans have been wounded. We have run down our stock of missiles, and Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz, where oil goes through to the world market.
This is the reason why the price of oil is up. Nobody disputes that. This is the reason the price of diesel is up. This is the reason why the price of just about everything is up. Meanwhile, you’ve got the defense secretary, who’s squarely focused —
AUDIENCE: Boo!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Wait, wait, don’t boo! Wait, wait! No, no, no, he’s very focused on important matters like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops — (laughter) — and live streaming executions, because that’s how he thinks you cultivate that manly warrior spirit.
How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking himself in the mirror in the morning? (Laughter.) I mean, you know he’s working his hair because that’s how warriors look.
These are not serious people. They’re not serious people, and the problem is you end up having to pay the price for their lack of seriousness. (Applause.)
Now, oil prices aren’t the only reason prices keep going up. There’s also this whole tariff business. Our current president loves tariffs, loves them, tariffs!
Now, he was warned at the time, when you impose tariffs, consumers pay the tab because it’s not just the goods that you use directly that have been imported from someplace else. It’s also the car you build here in America. They might need a part from somewhere else, and now suddenly there’s a tariff on it, so the prices go up. He was warned about that. “No, no, no, that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s going to be great. Everything’s going to turn out great.”
No, that’s not what happened! In fact, tariffs helped contribute to rising prices. And the big trade war he’s starting now is with that well-known evil empire, Canada! (Laughter.) Canada! I mean, these are the people who gave us maple syrup and Martin Short. (Laughter.) Canadians, they’re the nicest people; they’re so nice! They’re like our friendly neighbors to the north, and he’s picking a fight with them. And instead of bringing down deficits like he said with these tariffs, we’re now running a debt to the tune of $40 trillion, 40 trillion!
Now, you would think that with all this going on, our current president must have at least passed some legislation to bring down prices. You would think, right? But the only bill they passed of any significance in the last two years was a trillion-dollar tax break that mostly benefitted the richest Americans.
AUDIENCE: Boo!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: What did I say? What did I say? Don’t boo, vote!
AUDIENCE: Vote!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Vote! Now, I’ve heard the argument, the president’s done some things folks wanted him to do, like tightening up the border. And you know what? I believe that we do need to make sure that our border is orderly and secure, and that people who want to come here do so lawfully.
And in fact, when I was president, I got criticized by some close Democratic allies for tightening up enforcement at the border. But I don’t recall anybody campaigning on sending masked agents running through our streets. I don’t recall anybody talking about law-abiding citizens being arrested, detained, or shot! We did not ask for that! That’s not what we have to do to get our borders under control. (Cheers/applause.)
When you go through all this, the tally of promises, things have not worked out the way we might have expected, although I must say, I did expect it. (Laughter.)
And let’s be honest. Does anybody really think this guy in the White House right now is spending all that time thinking about these issues?
AUDIENCE: No!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. (Laughter.) The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? (Laughter.) Everything, more gold. He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. (Laughter.) Just gold everywhere. (Applause.)
He’s clearly not focused on lowering prices for you!
Now, there is one thing he does seem to focus on in addition to home renovation, and that is how to enrich himself and his family and his children. Just look at the last couple weeks. We’ve got a United States Ambassador shaking down a donor to pay off a $100,000 credit card bill. Then we learned there’s a Venezuelan billionaire who wanted a pardon, paid one of Trump’s personal lawyers $50 million to be general counsel at a company nobody knows anything about. And lo and behold, he gets the pardon, falls out of the sky.
And this culture is set at the top. We have never seen a president excel so wildly and just straight up grifting on your dime. (Applause.) Never seen a president so intent on selling favors and shaking folks down. We have lost count of all the deals he and his family have done, from meme coins to taxpayer-funded contracts for his kids’ companies. And this is someone who has become billions of dollars wealthier in office.
And by the way, this is not disputed. I’m not making this up. It’s all there, and not a single Republican in Congress has done anything to stop it, not Jon Husted, not any of the Republicans on the ballot here in Ohio. Most of them have supported him every step of the way.You remember that old thing about drain the swamp? The only thing that got drained was the reflecting pool in the National Mall after some no-bid contract got it all messed up. And then they tried to blame a three-time Olympian and say he vandalized it. (Applause.)
All right. I mean, the list could go on.
And here’s the tough part, all right? Like it or not, I want a little reality check. We’ve got two more years in this administration.
AUDIENCE: No!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Wait, wait, wait! I mean, wait, hold up. I mean, that’s how our system of government works, but you know what? You know what we’re not stuck with? We’re not stuck with a spineless Congress and Republican governors who are enabling lawlessness and carelessness and cruelty, and indifference for working people. (Applause.)
We’re not stuck with that. We’re not stuck with folks who are enabling policies that take more and more out of your paycheck, and cut your health care, and drive up prices. We’re not stuck with that.
This election is our last, best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration. (Applause.)
It’s the circuit breaker in the system. We need to flip that circuit breaker! We need to start bringing some accountability to this administration. And just as important, we need to start showing the American people, who are hungry for solutions, what real leadership looks like, what concrete plans look like that actually lower costs and actually make healthcare more affordable, and make housing more affordable and get utility bills under control. We can’t just be against this administration’s behavior. We have to start showing them what a future on the other side of this administration can look like. (Cheers/applause.)
And that starts with you, Ohio. That starts with you. That starts with electing Amy Acton governor! (Applause.)
That starts with sending Sherrod Brown to the United States Senate! (Applause.)
It starts with them.
I almost feel bad for their Republican opponents, almost, because after spending the past couple years just singing this president’s praises, doing his bidding, they’ve now come to realize everybody’s pretty upset about all these broken promises.
So, what are they doing? First of all, they’re pretending like they’ve never heard of the guy. (Laughter.) “Donald who? I’m sorry. Who?” (Laughter.) And then, of course, they’re also doing what they always do, we’re just running all kinds of scary ads to make you think Democrats are radicals and communists, and that the woke police will arrest you and force feed you tofu. (Laughter.)
We are not going to fall for that. They run that same okey-doke every election, and it’s tired, tired. We’re clear about the choice in this election. Jon Husted is a guy who, as Sherrod already mentioned, voted not once, not twice, voted 14 times to support the Iran war that’s helping drive up gas prices here in Ohio, 14 times.
AUDIENCE: Boo!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Don’t boo.
AUDIENCE: Vote!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Voted three times to block folks from reining in the tariffs that have been driving up costs, voted to kick hundreds of thousands of Ohioans off Medicaid and raise healthcare costs.And by the way, this is the same guy who, as lieutenant governor, pushed so hard for data centers, he’s been called a data center’s best friend. Now, I don’t know if that’s a title I want, but that’s it.You know who hasn’t been called that? Sherrod Brown. (Applause.)
If there is one thing we all know about Sherrod Brown, and I’ve known him for two decades, is that he is not looking out for the high and mighty. He’s not working on behalf of people living high on the hog. He’s looking out for folks who are doing an honest day’s work and are still having trouble getting by. And that’s who he is; that’s who he’s always been. (Applause.)
And by the way, you can tell by how he’s dressed. (Laughter.) I mean, this is not a guy who enriched himself, cozying up to corporations. He still is wearing the same suit he was in when I met him 20 years ago! (Laughter/applause.)
He got a haircut for this rally — (laughter) — but y’all know he’s too cheap to get a haircut more than, I don’t know, once every couple months. He’s got this quarter zip. Connie told him, you know what? We’ve got to spruce you up a little bit. (Laughter.)
Sherrod is not somebody pretending to look out for working folks. He has always been there for you — (Applause.) — even when it’s hard, even when he might lose an election, even when he knows folks are going to spend millions of dollars against him! He’s always challenging the status quo, always taking on the system, always fighting for you!And that’s what he’ll do in the United States Senate. He’ll ban members of Congress from trading stocks, ban them for life from lobbying after they leave. He’ll put a cap on how much utility companies can raise rates. And when it comes to data centers, he’ll make sure corporations and not Ohioans are paying the full cost of their energy needs. (Applause.)
He’ll fight to make sure decisions about data centers are made not in secret deals, but out in the open by you, in Ohio communities. It’ll build on the great work we did because he was there every step of the way, passing the Affordable Care Act, and he’s going to make it illegal for drug companies to charge Americans more than what they charge in other countries — (Applause.) — and taking on insurance companies who are denying Ohioans care and protecting health care for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans. That’s who Sherrod is.So, if you want lower costs, vote for change. Vote for Sherrod! (Applause.)
You want to end the war and get gas prices under control, vote for change and vote for Sherrod. You want to stop corruption and grifting, vote for change. Vote for Sherrod Brown! (Applause.)
And then you’ve got a governor’s race here. Let’s talk about that.Now, there’s one political observer who was recently asked whether Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be a good governor or some kind of political celebrity, and the political observer said, “I don’t know. I assume he wants to be both.” This wasn’t some Democratic pundit who said this; it was Republican Governor Mike DeWine.
Vivek’s own supporters know it’s all about what’s in it for him. We all know that guy, who’s just thirsty, just wants to get attention no matter what, willing to do anything. And in recent days, we’ve seen there is no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to, to try to get in the limelight. I mean, think about this latest ad he ran.
AUDIENCE: Boo!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Do not boo. I want us to just focus on this. Wait, wait!
There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials. (Applause.)
And I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that. There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, no office is worth stooping that low, because you know what? Character matters.
Amy has spoken movingly about her painful childhood and all she’s experienced, and the abuse, neglect, and homelessness. And she’s never forgotten the people who looked out for her, who refused to look the other way when she needed a helping hand. And that’s why she dedicated her life and her career to looking out for Ohioans, looking out for people in need, looking out for people who maybe didn’t get a fair shot. (Applause.)
That’s what she did when Mike DeWine recruited her to join his cabinet and lead Ohio’s Health Department. And that’s what she’s going to do as governor. (Applause.)
She’ll cut taxes for as many as 775,000 Ohio families to lower costs and put money in your pockets and lift people out of poverty. She understands childcare shouldn’t bust the family budget, so she’ll make childcare more affordable, forgive medical debt, because no one should go broke because they need a medical procedure. (Applause.)
And on day one, as governor, she will sign anti-corruption executive orders to make sure Ohio’s government is working for Ohioans and not special interests. (Cheers/applause.)
Amy Acton is not in this to be some kind of political celebrity. She’s in it for you. (Applause.)
Look, these are unsettling times. These are unsettling times. The economy is changing fast. AI is here, and we need to make sure it benefits everyone, not just a few billionaires. We need to revamp our education for the new era that AI is ushering in. (Applause.)
We’re facing a housing shortage, and we need to build millions of homes. We need to rein in the cost of childcare so young families can afford it. We need to make sure no one has to worry about high healthcare premiums.
I get the frustration; I get the anger and the cynicism because the system is not working, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because rich and powerful folks are able to buy and sell elections like never before, pouring the kind of money we’ve never seen, partly because we’ve got a Republican Party that used to stand for smaller government and now seems to stand for corrupt government, or inept government, or no government — (Applause.) — and partly because this is also true too often, even among well-intentioned folks, including Democrats, there are times when we get so caught up in process and bureaucracy that we don’t deliver the goods fast enough to make a real difference in people’s lives. And people get frustrated. They don’t see enough change out there.
And that’s the reason we need serious people in Washington and in state capitals. These are serious times. (Applause.)
And what is striking about this moment is just how unserious the people in charge are right now, people who are more interested in performance, and flexing, and texting, and putting people down instead of lifting them up. (Applause.)
And what all that means is that when you see somebody like Sherrod, when you see somebody like Amy, somebody who genuinely cares about people, somebody who has a strong track record and is offering real solutions, somebody who isn’t in it to enrich themselves or because they want the limelight, but because they want to serve, then you’ve got to realize how precious that is.
And we’ve got to deliver for them. We’ve got to make sure we elect them as United States Senator and as governor. (Applause.)
Because Sherrod and Amy understand this election is not about them. It’s about you; it’s about us.
And there’s one other thing they understand. They understand that what ails us right now, what is throwing our country so out of kilter, it’s not just about prices. It’s not just about economics. Those things are really important, but it’s also about values. (Applause.)
There is a moral component to the choices we face right now. We are not going to fix the economic system or the political system that’s broken. We’re not going to unrig our economy, so long as we’ve got a culture where anything goes, and where people in the highest offices in the land think it’s okay to lie and cheat and bully, and where money is the only measure of our worth. (Applause.)
And that’s part of what’s going on right now. We have lost touch with those things that really matter in life, caring for our families, and helping our neighbors, and looking after our children, and laughing with them, and hugging them, and keeping our word, and having integrity, and treating other people with respect — (Applause.) — just basic stuff, stuff that used to be, it wasn’t Democratic or it wasn’t Republican. It was American. It was human. It was how we treat each other, just basic decency! (Cheers/applause.)
Yeah! That’s what we are missing in our public discourse, just basic decency.
We need to remember the words of a 25-year-old preacher who gave a sermon in 1954, where he said, “If we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind.” That was Martin Luther King, Jr. at 25 years old. (Applause.)He said, “We haven’t learned how to be just. We haven’t learned how to be honest and kind and true and loving, and that is the basis of our problem.” (Cheers/applause.)
“The real problem,” he said, “is that through our scientific genius, we have made a world of neighborhood, but through our moral and our spiritual genius, we failed to make it a brotherhood.”
And Ohio, what was true then is true today. Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets. Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington, but we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation, if we don’t return to some of those old-fashioned virtues –(Applause.) — if our fundamental attitude to each other is to try and hurt other people so they don’t hurt us first, if we’re driven by fear instead of by hope, if we think it’s okay to snatch children from parents or cut programs for the aged or the infirm, so the powerful can get whatever they want, we will continue to fester in anger and division.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being angry, and I’m tired of being divided. (Applause.)
I want to reach out and shake my neighbor’s hand. I want to get to work doing something for somebody else.
We didn’t get into this moment overnight. We won’t get out of it overnight, and none of us should pretend that any single person in any single office is somehow going to save the day for us, and that the rest of us can just go back to acting the same way. We’re going to have to all make some changes.
But Ohio, here’s what I know. This election can be a start. This election can be an inflection point. This election can be a course correction in America’s long journey toward a more perfect union — (Applause.) — because if we’re willing to turn out in big numbers here in Ohio and across the country, if we’re willing to vote for change and vote for Democrats up and down the ballot, then this election might just mark the moment this country began moving in a better direction — (Cheers/applause.) — when we leave our worst impulses behind and start aligning our politics with our highest ideals!
Ohio, you and I have proved before that it is hard to stop a change whose time has come. (Applause.)
In 10 days, you have a chance to do it again! So, I’m asking you: Are you fired up?
AUDIENCE: Yeah!
PRES. BARACK OBAMA: Are you ready to go? (Cheers/applause.)
Let’s make Amy Acton governor! (Applause.)
Special Report: Fighting Fascism Globally
Wayne Madsen Report, Opinion: The West must embrace defensive democracy, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 26, 2026. Democratic constitutions cannot be suicide pacts. Far-right fascist parties and movements that advocate violence against ethnic and religious minorities must be banned.Wayne Madsen Oct 26READ IN APP
Democratic constitutions that guarantee political and civil rights cannot serve as suicide pacts. Far-right political parties that advocate unconstitutional fascist rule and violence against ethnic and religious minorities should be banned.
Some democracies, including Germany, Greece, France, United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, allow organizations to be banned when they use constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms to undermine constitutional democracy or the rights of others.
This is called defensive democracy and the United States should apply it to the Republican Party and its “Make America Great Again” or “MAGA” movement as soon as it is feasible.
Today, the term MAGA is indistinguishable from the terms “Nazi” or “Klan.”
More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion
New York Times, Bob Woodward Thought Jeff Bezos Had His Back. Now He Feels Disillusioned, Peter Baker, Oct. 26, 2026. Six takeaways from a new memoir by Mr. Woodward, the star Washington Post reporter, including his disappointment with the newspaper’s billionaire owner.
When Bob Woodward, the veteran star Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, was about to publish a hard-hitting book about President Trump in 2018, he called the owner of his newspaper, Jeff Bezos, to warn him.
“Don’t worry, I have your back, Bob,” Mr. Bezos told him. “I’ll always have your back.”
“Always” turned out not to be as long as it used to be, Mr. Woodward now says he discovered. After more than a half-century breaking stories about Washington, one of the scoops in Mr. Woodward’s new memoir is his own breakup in all but name with Mr. Bezos, who in his view turned out to not have the backs of the journalists working for him, after all.
Instead, Mr. Woodward writes, Mr. Bezos has been “compromising public trust in The Washington Post’s aggressive and independent journalism” in deference to Mr. Trump. While he says Mr. Bezos has not interfered in news stories, Mr. Woodward writes that the billionaire owner’s sweeping staff cuts, reorientation of the editorial page and personal ingratiation to the president have betrayed the legacy of a newspaper known for courageous coverage.
The condemnation of Mr. Bezos by his most famous employee is one of the headlines from “Secrets,” the long-awaited memoir of his 55 years in journalism to be published Nov. 24 by Mr. Woodward, who still holds the title of associate editor at the paper.
A copy of the memoir was obtained by The New York Times. Here are six takeaways:He names sources.
For decades, Mr. Woodward guarded the identity of the sources of his blockbuster stories and best selling books. But now, he finally names names. Many of his early sources have died, and he received permission from others still alive to identify them.
While W. Mark Felt, the former deputy F.B.I. director, unmasked himself in 2005 as the famous Watergate source called Deep Throat, much of Washington will pore through this new book to learn who else talked. It turns out that lots of people did, including presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, spymasters, Supreme Court justices and F.B.I. agents.
Mr. Woodward discloses for the first time his sources for one of the most iconic scenes he ever reported, a moment shortly before Richard M. Nixon resigned because of Watergate, when the sobbing president asked Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to fall to his knees and pray with him.
The sources, the book now reveals, were two of Mr. Kissinger’s lieutenants, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence S. Eagleburger. While neither was present for the scene, Mr. Kissinger described it to them shortly afterward and the two then listened in on the phone when Mr. Nixon called Mr. Kissinger to ask him not to tell anyone he had cried.
Mr. Woodward also describes lengthy conversations with two of Mr. Nixon’s own lawyers, J. Fred Buzhardt Jr. and Leonard Garment, neither of whom seemed to hold their client in high regard. “He flat out lies,” Mr. Buzhardt told Mr. Woodward. Mr. Garment separately told Mr. Woodward that Mr. Nixon was “a very strange man, very strange” and “guilty of misdemeanors.” By not destroying his secret Oval Office tapes, Mr. Nixon was “letting America into the toilet of his mind,” Mr. Garment said. “The impeachable offense was letting us all see.”
The new memoir also describes Mr. Woodward’s closeness with Richard G. Darman, a key Republican official under multiple presidents who became both one of his best sources and best friends. As excerpted in The New Yorker, the conflict ultimately led to a rupture after Mr. Woodward published a harsh series on President George H.W. Bush’s economic policies shortly before the 1992 election, based in part on Mr. Darman’s descriptions.He took a document from a groggy clerk.
One of Mr. Woodward’s earliest books was “The Brethren,” a penetrating look inside the normally secretive chambers of the Supreme Court, written with Scott Armstrong, that stunned the legal world and beyond. For years, lawyers and judges wondered how Mr. Woodward got inside one of the most tightly guarded institutions in Washington.
In “Secrets,” Mr. Woodward discloses the names of five justices who spoke with the authors, all of whom have since died: Potter Stewart, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Byron R. White, Harry A. Blackmun and William H. Rehnquist. And he describes how he obtained one of the documents that informed the book: a secret history of the Nixon Watergate tapes case, which revealed the internal debate among the justices over how to rule.
He went to the home of Steven P. Goldberg, who was a clerk to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and had authored the case history, but refused to give it to Mr. Woodward. The reporter convinced him to instead read it to him, which Mr. Goldberg proceeded to do. But it was long and Mr. Woodward took his time scribbling down notes. Finally, an exhausted Mr. Goldberg nodded off.
Mr. Woodward waited 20 minutes so that Mr. Goldberg would reach a deep sleep. He decided not to simply take the document — “that seemed a little too far, even for me” — so he nudged Mr. Goldberg and simply told him that he would borrow it and bring it back the next morning. The groggy clerk stirred and mumbled his assent. Mr. Woodward wrote that he did his best not to race out the door with the document. “If I was on a security camera I wanted to be behaving properly, with whatever might be left of my dignity,” he writes.Supreme Court justices revealed candid views.
Mr. Woodward also writes about encounters with more recent justices. He reports that his wife, Elsa Walsh, a former journalist for The Post and The New Yorker, sat next to former Justice Stephen G. Breyer at a dinner and he told her that he was “forced out” to make way for someone younger on the court.
He also recalls running into Justice Elena Kagan at a Washington party in 2023. Justice Kagan expressed admiration for “The Brethren” and Mr. Woodward noted that the main point was how the ideological center of the court in that era dominated. “Yes, I prefer it that way,” Justice Kagan said. “That’s exactly what it should be.”
When he asked her if she was happy on the court, Justice Kagan said no, she was not, given the situation.His investigative instincts started close to home.
For all his fame, Mr. Woodward is known in Washington as something of a closed door himself. He loves talking about reporting and politics, but has generally been reticent about his personal life. While this book, his 24th, is not exactly an exercise in introspection, at age 83 he finally opens up at least a bit more than he has done in public.
He recounts growing up in a broken home in Wheaton, Ill. He caught his mother kissing another man and then discovered that his parents were getting divorced when he rummaged through his father’s sock drawer and found a private letter. He writes that he “learned at a very young age the pain of secrets and how they can destroy lives and started down a path of trying to find them.”
Mr. Woodward also writes that a fire gutted his home as a child, leaving him so anxious to this day that he keeps multiple fire extinguishers throughout his Washington home. He describes finding a way as a young Navy officer to get out of a deployment to Vietnam, only to learn later that the man who went instead ended up dying. And he recalls falling out with his Watergate partner Carl Bernstein during the writing of their second book, “The Final Days,” and how it took years to repair the friendship.He takes on some journalistic controversies.
Mr. Woodward addresses some of the controversies of his career. He insists that, despite denials and doubts, he did get into a hospital room to see a dying William J. Casey, the C.I.A. director in the 1980s — he was let in, he writes, by a security agent he had befriended. He publishes images of the notes that he took quoting Mr. Casey acknowledging a role in the Iran-contra affair by saying, “I believed.”
By contrast, he accepts blame for “my spectacular failure” as an editor in publishing a fabricated story by the Post reporter Janet Cooke about what turned out to be a fictional 8-year-old heroin addict. That incident convinced him “that I was not cut out to be an editor.”He is ‘pained’ that Bezos remains silent about Trump’s attacks on the press
One of the other mistakes in judgment Mr. Woodward acknowledges was his faith in Mr. Bezos. “I remember feeling relief when Jeff decided to buy The Post in 2013,” he writes. “I believed at the time that Bezos would provide the finances for The Post to continue to operate courageously.”
But his views began to change in 2024, when Mr. Bezos decided just before the election to pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris and declare that The Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates. “At the time, I thought, is he not reading his own newspaper or my books about Trump?” Mr. Woodward writes. The timing made it look “like Bezos and the newspaper were capitulating to Trump.”
Mr. Bezos then shifted the opinion pages to only advocate “personal liberties and free markets” with no dissenting views. “I could only imagine the agony this kind of decision would have caused Kay or Ben,” he adds, referring to Katharine Graham and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the publisher and executive editor during Watergate.
He came to believe that the “benefit of the doubt” that he had given Mr. Bezos was unwarranted. While he notes that The Post continues to produce aggressive coverage of Mr. Trump, Mr. Woodward laments that Mr. Bezos has not publicly defended independent journalism against the president’s campaign of intimidation the way that A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, has. “It pains me that Jeff Bezos has remained silent,” he writes. “It is not too late for media owners to prioritize moral courage over financial gain.”
A representative of Mr. Bezos did not respond to a request for comment. Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said that he appreciated Mr. Woodward’s praise for the paper’s recent coverage and added that Mr. Bezos had never interfered in news reporting.
“With Jeff’s backing, the company is getting back in shape and poised for our best decade,” he said in a statement. “More than that, the Woodwards and Bernsteins of today are breaking consequential stories that have people talking about us in a way they haven’t in years, with total independence and encouragement from our owner.”
Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics, News and Comment: Pope Leo’s Mar-a-Lago Bishop Rebukes Trump’s Oval Office Photo Op, Christopher Hale, above, Oct. 26, 2026. Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez says the Church backs no candidate, and Kansas City’s archbishop disowned his predecessor’s visit. Sources in Rome say the Vatican wants more bishops to follow.
The dam has broken.
Bishop Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez of Palm Beach, whose diocese takes in President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, reminded his flock on Monday that the Catholic Church “does not endorse or support any political candidate or political party.” He never named the twelve bishops who prayed over Trump in the Oval Office last Thursday, and he did not have to.
“Such actions, when undertaken in the name of the Church, even in the form of ‘prayers’ or ‘blessings,’ are contrary to its nonpartisan mission and should be regarded solely as expressions of individual political preference,” Rodríguez wrote.
Look at the quotation marks he put around the word “prayers.” Coming from the bishop of Trump’s winter home, that bit of punctuation says more than a page of diplomatic regret.Pope Leo’s man in Palm Beach
Pope Leo XIV named Rodríguez bishop of Palm Beach last December, choosing a Dominican-born pastor from Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, Queens. It is the largest parish in the Diocese of Brooklyn, and migrants make up most of its 17,000 parishioners.
The Associated Press called him a staunch advocate for migrants on the day the Vatican announced the appointment. At his installation in February, he told the cathedral that “in the Church there are no foreigners or immigrants — only brothers and sisters,” crediting the line to both Pope Francis and Pope Leo.
So Leo sent a pastor of immigrants to shepherd the place where Trump spends his winter weekends. On Monday, that pastor spoke.Kansas City splits
Two more statements came out of Kansas City on Monday. Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Naumann, who stood behind Trump’s chair on Thursday, put the blame on the White House: his office said in a statement that “the bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public,” according to TIME.
His successor wanted no part of it. Archbishop Shawn McKnight told TIME that Naumann went “in his own individual capacity,” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”
American archbishops rarely put daylight between themselves and the men they replaced, least of all in print. McKnight did it on the record, eight days before an election.An evangelical script
Writing for Religion News Service, in a story America magazine carried on Friday, Claire Giangravé noted that the gathering echoed the prayer sessions Trump holds with his evangelical supporters. I think she has it exactly right.
In July 2017, evangelical pastors laid hands on Trump in the same room, in nearly the same pose. Paula White-Cain, whom one of those pastors credited with the idea, was standing in the Oval Office again on Thursday.
Evangelical preachers who have endorsed Trump turned that image into a campaign ritual years ago. Catholic bishops had no business borrowing it twelve days before a national election.The man who arranged it
Of all the threads in this story, the one that has drawn the least attention is the Heritage Foundation official at its center. Mario Enzler, a former Swiss Guard who now advises Heritage’s president, spent weeks inviting prelates to the Oval Office, The Pillar reported, and some turned him down because of how a prayer with Trump would look this close to an election.
As I wrote last week, his résumé does not hold up. The Houston Chronicle found that the Italian university where he claimed a doctorate does not grant one, and that the school listed for his bachelor’s degree is a high school; he left his post as a business dean in Houston in 2022 after professors went to the board.
A man with that record brokered a moment of prayer between successors of the apostles and a president twelve days before an election, which is a corrosive thing for the Church to absorb. Golka never mentioned him, and Heritage now tells Religion News Service that Enzler “didn’t set anything up.”Why the dam broke
I have two updates on why bishops are moving now.
The first comes from Rome. Sources I have spoken with at the Vatican, and others connected to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made clear to me that the Holy See expected American bishops to start distancing the Church from the Oval Office photo. Last week, a senior official at the Dicastery for Bishops told me it was “a highly inappropriate meeting and an insult to Pope Leo.”
The second is impatience at home. According to my sources, frustration had been growing among brother bishops over the slow drip of statements from the twelve, and many wanted a cleaner break much sooner.
Milwaukee Archbishop Jeffrey Grob’s apology, the first, arrived three days after the prayer (by then The Pillar had reported that USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley was “deeply frustrated”).
That frustration is what pushed bishops like Rodríguez, who never set foot in the Oval Office, to speak for themselves.The people of God are speaking
None of this happened in a vacuum. More than 2,500 of you have signed our letter asking the twelve bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
Four of the twelve have now spoken. Grob apologized on Sunday, and Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines said the White House exploited the meeting. Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, told his own paper he never meant it as an endorsement, and Naumann has now pinned the photos on the White House.
The rest of the bishops on the White House’s list have said nothing at all, among them Edward Burns of Dallas, Michael Barber of Oakland, Thomas Hennen of Baker, Steven Raica of Birmingham, Scott Bullock of Rapid City, James Wall of Gallup, and Elias Zaidan of the Maronite eparchy in Los Angeles. We will keep pressing every one of them.
Lay Catholics have a real stake in how their bishops act. As the people of God, our task is to walk alongside our shepherds and, when they stray, to hold them accountable to the flock they were sent to serve.
I am proud of every one of you who spoke up. I am also sorry to keep filling your inbox with this story, but the updates keep coming, and you deserve to have them.Eight days
Starting now, I am going to try my hardest to get back on program. The election is eight days away, and in this busy stretch I want to put the issues that matter, and the candidates who are running, at the front and center.
I have said this before. Next Tuesday, two names may sit side by side on your ballot, yet what we will really decide is our posterity, which is to say the future we hand to our children.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Bishop Rodríguez and with every shepherd who refuses to let a prayer
Oct. 25
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News Roundups
right, Oct. 25, 2026. Tonight, in Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
right, Oct. 25, 2026. The big news so far is the incredible turnout surge we are seeing with Hispanic/Latino voters across the country.and Jason Easley, Oct. 25, 2026. Attorney General Todd Blanche was on CBS’s Face The Nation, and host Margaret Brennan went right after him on the lawsuit related to the Alaska US Senate race.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Donald Trump's Grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).
Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.Oct. 24, 2026. At 7:15 tonight [Saturday], in the historic town of Perry, known as the place “Where Georgia Comes Together,” Donald Trump stood in front of a room full of his most devoted followers and said one of the most out-of-touch and offensive things a President of the United States has ever said.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
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More On U.S. History, Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Oct. 25, 2026. In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.
Top Headlines
New York Times, Live Updates: Brazil Re-Elects Lula, Rejecting Predecessor’s Son, Adam B. Ellick and Ana Ionova, Oct. 25, 2026. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fended off a right-wing movement led by Flávio Bolsonaro, whose father was convicted of a coup attempt after the 2022 election. Transportation delays and bad weather disrupted Election Day.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil surged to re-election on Sunday, according to official preliminary results, delivering a rebuke to a conservative movement sweeping Latin American presidencies that President Trump has trumpeted.
Mr. Lula fended off a challenge from Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the last president who had attempted a coup four years ago, after a judge on Brazil’s electoral court ordered that polls remain open two extra hours because of transportation delays and bad weather. The chaotic ending raised the prospect of a contested result; Mr. Bolsonaro said that flooding in a part of the country where he held electoral advantages would unfairly hurt him, while Mr. Lula accused public officials of purposefully slowing down public transportation in areas where he won in an earlier round of voting.
Numerous poll workers nationwide said they received confusing and sometimes contradictory orders from electoral authorities. At a polling site in central São Paulo, one election worker said that by 5 p.m. local time, she and her colleagues heard that the Supreme Court had ordered polling sites to remain open two more hours. However, local authorities ordered them to shut down. The worker, who gave her name only as Bárbara because she feared repercussions, said they eventually got orders to reopen by 6 p.m., but it was too late for many voters.
New York Times, News Analysis: Trump’s Election Attacks Enter New Pre-emptive Phase, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 25, 2026. A lawsuit by the Justice Department challenging a potential narrow loss by the GOP Senate incumbent in Alaska reflects a new tactic by the president to try to shape the election results.For months, President Trump has mounted a sustained effort to attack the integrity of U.S. elections while using the federal government to try to assert more control over the voting process overseen by states.
Last week, Mr. Trump opened a new front.
Rather than simply push false claims at his rallies or target voters his administration claims should not be on the rolls, Mr. Trump moved to pre-emptively challenge the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses.
In doing so, Mr. Trump harnessed the power of the federal government to try to interfere in the voting process before Election Day — essentially trying to nullify an opponent’s potential win before the game has been called.
Even for a president who worked to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election, the anticipatory strike reflects a new intensification of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use his official powers to achieve the election results he wants — one that undermines the democratic process, according to election and legal experts. While they say the administration’s lawsuit is unlikely to be successful, the tactic could still further Mr. Trump’s goals by shaking the confidence of voters in the outcome of the race.
“This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” said Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development who has studied election issues around the world, including in El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the D.O.J. and it’s been weaponized.”
The latest phase of Mr. Trump’s strategy centers on the Justice Department, which asked a federal court to block the certification of the election if the Republican incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose by a slim margin. The administration argued the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical name on the ballot has skewed the election toward Democrats.
The issue has already been litigated in the state: In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired elementary schoolteacher, could appear on the ballot.
But Attorney General Todd Blanche maintained on Sunday that the federal government had a role in inserting itself into the process.
“We’re not saying that the federal government is going to decide who the next senator from Alaska is,” Mr. Blanche said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He added: “But if it’s clear that there was confusion and that confusion led to an unjust, improper result that is not the will of the Alaskan voters, we want to make sure that the Alaskan system and the Alaskan state courts and the Alaskan electoral process can understand that in a way that lets them do the right thing.”
When asked for comment, the White House referred to an exchange Mr. Trump had with reporters on Saturday about his administration’s efforts to intervene in Alaska, a lawsuit he said was made at his direction. Republicans have asserted that the candidacy of the second Mr. Sullivan is a Democratic scheme to confuse voters. Democrats have said they have no connection to that candidate, who will appear on the ballot without any party affiliation and has said he is running a genuine campaign.
“It is a totally corrupt weaponization situation, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do it,” Mr. Trump said of the Democrats in Alaska. “So I recommended it to the D.O.J. They looked at it, they agreed with me, and they’ve gone to court. Let’s see what happens. But that’s pure corruption.”Election law specialists say Mr. Trump’s lawsuit in Alaska lacks legal basis and will likely fail. But that might not be the point.
The lawsuit is just one piece of a blitz of federal actions by the Trump administration to assert more control over the electoral process that have run into court challenges. Mr. Trump introduced a plan to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots, only to have it be blocked by the Supreme Court.
The administration has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to cede to the federal government’s demands to turn over voter rolls. The administration has lost 27 of those cases. The other cases are pending.
Mr. Trump has deployed homeland security investigators to find evidence of illegal voting in states where it has claimed without evidence there is widespread noncitizen voting. A federal judge restricted much of that effort this week.
But with each claim of election fraud, Mr. Trump is creating another platform to sow doubt about the elections and, some state officials and election experts worry, lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the specific contests.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 25, 2026. I did it. This morning, I finished my first ever marathon in 4 hours and 35 minutes. My legs are destroyed, and I cramped the entire second half, but I kept going, and I’ve never been prouder to cross a finish line. Thank you to everyone who sent good energy my way this morning. I felt it, especially around mile 20.
And what a day to finish. Tonight, in Serbia, a student-led movement that spent two years marching against corruption just toppled Aleksandar Vucic, one of Europe’s longest-serving strongmen, with the highest turnout in more than 30 years. It’s a powerful reminder that when ordinary people refuse to give up, even entrenched power can fall.
Here at home, the cracks are showing too. Trump told a rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans struggling at the pump. Republicans’ own polling shows the bottom falling out in once-safe seats. And Elon Musk is now openly cheering for Zelensky’s removal while the Pentagon hands his company sensitive military data.
The next nine days will decide the direction of this country, and I’m going to be with you every step of the way. I have some big interviews coming this week that you won’t want to miss, daily coverage as the final stretch unfolds, and a major election night livestream on November 3rd with guests I can’t wait to share with you.
None of it is possible without you. I don’t have a corporate owner or a billionaire backer. This work runs on readers who believe in independent journalism. If you want to be part of what we’re building as we head into the most important week of the year, become a paid subscriber today. It’s the single most powerful way to make sure this reporting keeps reaching the people who need it, all the way to the finish line.Subscribed
Here’s what you need to know tonight.
Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat to a student-led protest movement, ending his more than decade-long grip on power in a historic election. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” Vucic said Sunday, projecting the students would take between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament to his party’s 105. A representative sample by pollsters showed the student list winning 138 seats to 104 for Vucic’s party. Turnout hit nearly 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, with long lines snaking from polling stations across the country. The vote followed almost two years of student-led protests against corruption and creeping authoritarianism, sparked when a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024, killing 16 people. Belgrade’s streets erupted in celebration, with cars honking and students chanting “victory” and “he’s done,” as one celebrating woman said, “We have finally got rid of this mafia.”
Brazil’s Supreme Court extended voting by two hours in the razor-close presidential runoff between President Lula and far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s campaign requested the extension citing “incidents” affecting buses in several states, while Bolsonaro’s campaign also asked for more time in areas hit by heavy rain, and polls will now close at 6 p.m. ET. Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, beat Lula by 2.2 million votes in the first round, turning the 80-year-old president into the underdog as voters across Latin America shift right amid concerns over crime, corruption, and the cost of living. The race may hinge on women, who make up 53 percent of voters and favor Lula 49 percent to 40 percent, and on turnout, after one in five eligible voters stayed home in the first round. Trump said Sunday he is “monitoring” the election and has praised Bolsonaro, though he hasn’t formally endorsed him. A Bolsonaro win would pull Latin America’s largest economy closer to the Trump administration, while a narrow result could test Brazil’s stability after Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to overturn his 2022 defeat led to the Jan. 8, 2023, attacks on government institutions.
The Bottom Is Falling Out for Republicans as Trump’s Own Words Drag Down His Party
Trump told a Georgia rally he “doesn’t give a damn” about Americans paying more at the pump, bragging that the U.S. is “making a freaking fortune” off high oil prices. “We’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, but my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher,” Trump said Saturday. He predicted the headlines would say he was bragging about money while people suffer at the pump, then added, “I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.” The remarks came as inflation rose to 3.7 percent in September, hotter than expected, and consumer sentiment sits near the lowest point on record. “Congratulations to Big Oil on their very successful, record-profits presidency,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded, while former Obama adviser David Axelrod quipped it was “not a great closing message.” New Yorker writer Susan Glasser called it “the epigraph for the entire Trump 2.0 presidency.”
Republicans’ own internal polling shows the bottom falling out in seats that were once considered safe. GOP leaders received polling in late September showing that districts Trump won by 10 points or more in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada, and elsewhere are now competitive, and all three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa look likely to fall, according to Politico. Even longtime incumbents who haven’t faced serious races in years, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin, are now at risk. “I think the scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is,” one senior House Republican said. Their worst fear is that white working-class voters, angry over fuel prices and the Iran war, won’t just stay home but will vote for Democrats. Arkansas Rep. French Hill, whose deep-red seat is now a Democratic target, blamed “President Trump’s lack of favorability at the top.” Democrats say they’re confident of winning the House and could reach as many as 240 seats.
Election analysts say Trump himself is the reason, warning of a “red undertow” that could sink Republicans in both chambers. Cook Political Report founder Charlie Cook said rising prices, tariffs, and the Iran war all hit at once just as voters started paying attention: “It was almost like the bottom fell out suddenly.” He said the coming wave “isn’t pro-Democrat. It’s anti-Trump,” predicting Democrats will flip 20 or more House seats and likely four Senate seats, enough to take both chambers. A New York Times poll this week showed Democrats leading by 11 points, with Trump’s approval at a new low. Early voting data also shows Democrats and independents far more energized than Republicans. And Trump’s own past attacks appear to be backfiring: after spending months calling mail-in voting fraudulent, he’s now frantically urging Republicans to vote early by mail.
Obama Hammers Trump Over the Iran War as Trump Fumes Over Obama’s Crowds
Obama blasted Trump for starting an unnecessary war with Iran, arguing he had already kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons without firing a shot. “Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, because I put a deal in place that everybody acknowledged kept them from getting nukes,” Obama said in Cleveland. “And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it; I just had to engage in diplomacy.” Trump withdrew from that 2015 deal in his first term, then launched strikes on Iran alongside Israel in late February, promising a quick operation that has now dragged on for nearly eight months. “So seven months later, how’s that war going?” Obama asked, noting that 21 Americans have been killed, 865 wounded, missile stockpiles depleted, and Iran now holds “veto power” over the Strait of Hormuz, driving up the price of oil, diesel, and “just about everything.” The war has become a liability for Republicans, with a new AP-NORC poll finding 56 percent of Republican voters and 47 percent of Democratic voters say ending it should be a top priority for the next Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton now leads Vivek Ramaswamy 50 percent to 43 percent in a Marist poll taken before his controversial ad aired, and Sherrod Brown leads Sen. Jon Husted 48 percent to 44 percent.
Trump lashed out over the size of Obama’s Detroit rally, complaining that the media “never” talks about his crowds. Obama rallied Saturday in Detroit with Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson on the first day of in-person early voting in the state. Speaking at a rally in Georgia that night, Trump mocked the turnout: “A massive crowd has shown up? Where are they? They never talk about my crowd.” He referred to El-Sayed as “Mohamed,” a name drawn from the candidate’s middle name that Trump has repeatedly used against him. Trump then revived an old grievance about Sen. Bernie Sanders, claiming Sanders drew “like 900 to 1,000 people” while he drew tens of thousands. In reality, Sanders’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew an estimated 36,000 people in Los Angeles and more than 34,000 in Denver last year. He attacked Obama on Truth Social too:
Musk Doubles Down on Ukraine Starlink Cuts as Kyiv Fires Back and Pentagon Hands SpaceX Sensitive Military Data
Elon Musk is defending his decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starlink, lashing out at critics as “bloodthirsty warmongers” and agreeing that Zelensky “needs to go.” In a string of posts Saturday night into Sunday, Musk said Ukraine violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes, writing, “We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed.” He warned that if Starlink were switched off, “the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately,” adding, “This is NOT a threat, it is simply a statement of fact.” Musk accused his critics of wanting the war to continue “until every last man in Ukraine has died in a ditch,” and when one user wrote that Zelensky needs to go, Musk replied, “Yes.” Until this weekend, neither Musk nor the U.S. government had taken responsibility for the cuts, with Musk previously insisting that limits were “decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Earlier this month, Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev hailed Musk’s attacks on Zelensky as a “tipping point” in the war. Today, he celebrated Musk again:
Ukraine flatly denies Musk’s claim, saying it would have been physically impossible to use commercial Starlink the way he described. “It’s very strange that Elon Musk doesn’t know about the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine,” said Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov, noting that Starlink doesn’t work over Russian territory, so Ukraine “PHYSICALLY CANNOT USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK” for deep or mid-range strikes. A former drone adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry said any drone mission requiring satellite links had to run through Starshield, the U.S. government-controlled military version, and that Ukraine “did not violate the terms of use.” Ukrainian officials say the cuts capped Starshield at about 100 miles per hour, hampering their ability to shoot down Russian drones and forcing them to cancel operations. The restrictions came as Trump struck a diesel deal with Russia, waived sanctions, and called for Ukraine to get a new president, and coincided with an interruption in U.S. intelligence warnings of incoming Russian attacks. Zelensky has said he believes both Trump and Musk were involved.
Russia pounded Ukraine as the satellite fight played out, and Kyiv is now racing to build its own system so it never depends on Musk again. Zelensky said Russia launched about 1,600 guided bombs, 48 missiles, and nearly 2,300 attack drones at Ukraine in the past week alone, killing and injuring people almost every day. Ukraine’s defense ministry has partnered with Nokia and Finnish satellite firm ICEYE to develop a “sovereign” Starlink-style network built on European technology. “We must all rely on capabilities that we can control,” Zelensky said. A security analyst told NBC News that Musk’s control over Starlink gives him “enormous leverage,” which is exactly why Europe is pushing to build independent space infrastructure. This isn’t the first time: Reuters reported last year that Musk ordered a 2022 Starlink disruption during a pivotal Ukrainian counteroffensive, which SpaceX called inaccurate.
At the same time, the Pentagon has handed SpaceX access to sensitive military space-tracking data, raising new national security and conflict-of-interest concerns. The Space Force gave SpaceX “enhanced” access to U.S. Space Command’s most detailed catalog of objects in orbit, a first for any commercial company, including radar tracking data on objects as small as about 4 inches. The data has been closely held because it could expose the limits of U.S. defense capabilities used to monitor other countries’ satellites. Critics say it gives Musk an edge over competitors and moves toward privatizing space traffic control, after Musk’s DOGE fired much of the staff at the federal program meant to handle it and the administration twice tried to defund it. “It’s like giving a trucking company control of all the traffic lights,” said a former employee of that program. Public Citizen said Musk “has bought his way into the favor of President Trump,” and his “political investment is paying off very, very handsomely.”
Other news:
The Trump administration has pushed 13 percent of Americans off food stamps, forcing more families to turn to food banks or go hungry. SNAP enrollment fell from 41.6 million in July 2025, before Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill took effect, to 36.5 million in June 2026, according to USDA data. The law expanded work requirements to people ages 18 to 64 without children under 14, up from 18 to 54, and shifted more administrative costs onto states, with Arizona’s enrollment plunging 50 percent. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called it “a pretty big win” to “move 5 million people off of food stamps,” but advocates say job data doesn’t show people are leaving for work, with the economy adding just 776,000 jobs from January 2025 to September 2026. Food banks report empty shelves, Michigan’s food helpline was forced to suspend service after calls tripled, and 26 Houston schools lost eligibility to serve free meals to all students. “If people were getting paid enough, they would not be on the SNAP program,” said one anti-hunger advocate.
White House staffers are publicly floating Nicki Minaj as Trump’s next press secretary, days after Katie Zacharia was fired after just five days on the job. Communications Director Steven Cheung shared a video of the rapper praising Trump’s foreign policy aboard Air Force One, writing, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary!” The official White House account replied with an “eyeballs” emoji, and Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz chimed in, “Hey Barbz, what do we think about this idea??” Minaj responded with an American flag and a nervous-laughter emoji, while posting her own video marveling at the inside of Air Force One. It’s unclear whether the White House is seriously considering her, but the episode comes as the administration scrambles to fill the role amid a string of staffing embarrassments. Minaj, who last month urged young fans to vote Republican, is set to appear alongside Trump at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, Sunday evening.
Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado has returned to Venezuela after nearly a year in exile, despite reported opposition from the Trump administration. “I’m here. With you,” the opposition leader posted Sunday, with footage showing her surrounded by supporters at a church in Barquisimeto. Machado left Venezuela last December to accept her Nobel Prize, weeks before the U.S. seized Nicolás Maduro, and has reportedly made more than half a dozen failed attempts to return since. Many expected Trump to back Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have won the 2024 election, but he instead embraced Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who now governs a country widely seen as a U.S. protectorate. The Trump administration reportedly opposed Machado’s return, fearing it would complicate its relationship with Rodríguez, her political archrival. Asked about it Sunday, Trump said, “She gave me her Nobel prize, so how can I say anything else? I hope she’s safe.”
The Southwest is bracing for more flooding after days of heavy rain forced evacuations and rooftop rescues. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for much of the Four Corners region, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet, even as swollen rivers begin to recede. The home of San Juan County, New Mexico, Sheriff Shane Ferrari took on about four feet of water. County officials say floodwaters left behind mud and silt contaminated with sewage after failures at waste plants, and power outages could last several more days. “It’s a pretty active disaster zone,” a county spokesperson said. “We’re not on the downswing by any means.” The flooding follows two months of on-and-off heavy rain from tropical Pacific moisture, ending a summer of drought.
A Cornell fraternity member is asking a judge to dismiss him from Jane Doe’s gang-rape lawsuit. Diego Sarabia, one of seven men originally sued over the alleged assault at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024, denies the allegations and says the claims against him were filed too late. His attorney argued that as far as Sarabia is concerned, “this is essentially a lawsuit about a forced kiss,” and that the complaint doesn’t allege he supplied drugs or took part in the alleged sexual assaults. Doe accuses him of grabbing her face, kissing her, and snorting ketamine off her body with other fraternity members. The local district attorney declined to bring charges in 2024, but Gov. Kathy Hochul called that review inadequate and appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor, a move two of the accused men are now trying to block. Cornell has also hired former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to lead an independent review of how the university handles sexual assault.
Bulgaria is voting for president in an election dominated by economic hardship and Russian drone attacks on Black Sea shipping. The race is the first major test for Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s Moscow-friendly Progressive Bulgaria party, which won parliamentary elections in April. Incumbent President Iliana Yotova, backed by Radev’s party, leads polls with 40 to 45 percent and favors improved relations with Russia and lifting sanctions. Her main challenger, pro-Western former caretaker Prime Minister Andrey Gyurov, polls at 25 to 30 percent and signed a security agreement with Ukraine during his time in office. With 27 candidates and turnout expected below 40 percent, a Nov. 1 runoff is likely, where Gyurov could gain ground. Recent drone strikes on commercial vessels off Bulgaria’s coast have heightened security fears in the NATO and EU member country.
Twelve people, including six children, were injured in a shooting near Florida A&M University’s stadium during homecoming weekend. The shooting broke out around 8 p.m. Saturday near Bragg Memorial Stadium in Tallahassee, after the historically Black university’s homecoming football game. Eleven people were shot, three with serious injuries, including one minor, and the youngest victim is just 11 years old. Police believe a single shooter was involved in what they called “an isolated incident between two or three individuals,” but no arrests have been made. Tallahassee’s police chief praised officers who ran in not knowing where the shooter was, some carrying victims in their arms because vehicles couldn’t get through the crowd. Police are asking witnesses to come forward.
A bus crash in Kenya killed at least 22 people on the same highway where 17 died just three weeks ago. The bus collided with a truck on the main highway linking Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa on Sunday morning, injuring 24 others. The passengers were returning to Mombasa after attending the funeral of their church pastor in western Kenya. One survivor said a truck hit the bus from behind, causing it to roll, while transport authorities suspect improper overtaking led to a head-on collision. “I don’t know the fate of my two children who were on the bus,” said one mother who survived. Speeding and poor road conditions have long contributed to deadly crashes in Kenya.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Some Additional Notes On The Early Vote, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 25, 2026. The big news so far is the incredible turnout surge we are seeing with Hispanic/Latino voters across the country.
We are nine days out, tens of millions of people have voted, and I wanted to go a little more in depth in what we are seeing in the early vote and what it might mean for the election itself. Consider this more of a sketch than a complete painting for while there are things we can see in the data so far there is a lot that we just aren’t sure about yet.
But I want to be clear that looking at how people are voting in an election can tell you something about how people are voting in the election!
What follows has been put together from the TargetEarly early vote data, recent polling, Exit Polls from over the years, and my own experience in recent cycles analyzing the early vote and elections. I warn you in advance it is data rich and might be confusing for folks, as admittedly, it is even a bit confusing for me right now.
First, here’s where the national early vote stands today via TargetEarly’s noon update. We are up 2 points over 2022, 11 points over 2024, and turnout is running higher than 2022 when the early vote was 50% of the total vote (in 2024 it was 54% of the total). This is good.
We also know that Democrats are voting less by mail this time - as we hoped - which means more of our vote will come in person this time. This meaningful change in how people are voting makes it a bit harder to make cycle to cycle comparisons, particularly in states without a lot of in-person voting so far.
One of the things that makes interpreting the early vote challenging is there is a lot of unaffiliated or independent vote in the data. We also don’t know how partisans themselves are voting for we only know whether someone has voted not how they’ve voted. We do know from polling that our candidates are doing well with independent voters and even some Republicans, so our 2026 vote is almost certainly more Democratic than top line Democrat and Republican totals suggest. Let’s look a little deeper at the independent vote this time.
First, note that in many polls these past few weeks the vote intent of independents is as high as Republicans, which shows a lot of motivation among independent voters. In other words, they are pissed. This is new data from CBS:Image
We know Trump’s job approval is terrible among independent voters but we also know that indies are favoring us this cycle at a much higher rate than recent elections. Here’s a summary of recent polls of the generic ballot among independent voters:Image
Using +19 Dem as an estimate here’s how that would compare to other recent elections. Big yikes for the Rs:Image
This means that any of the data you see about the early vote in 2026 using just the Dem and GOP registration or modeled party is likely to be more Democratic than top line data you are seeing. Some of our vote is hiding in the independent column this cycle.
Next, as we’ve been discussing we know now that young people, Blacks, and Hispanics are voting at much higher rates this time than 2022. Here’s the latest summary from the noon TargetEarly release:
While the data bounces around from update to update it has been remarkably consistent. So more young people, Blacks, and Hispanics are voting. What do we know about how they are likely to vote, particularly given our struggles in 2024? Let’s look.
Without going through all the math and sourcing of the data (for time and space reasons) I took recent polling of young people, Blacks, and Hispanics and compared it to the historic performance of each group. First, young people:
Next, Blacks:
Next, Hispanics:
So what this data tells us is that not only are more young people, Blacks, and Hispanics voting than in 2022 but in each case the vote will be more Dem than in 2022 and certainly more than 2024. So more votes, higher Dem share = lots more Dem votes this time. That’s good, everyone.
Finally, the Dem performance that we can track by state varies wildly from state to state this year, making it hard to assert broad trends. Some of this is a data issue, as states without party registration are just harder to see into even with the “Modeled Party” capacity of TargetEarly. So what I’m going to share now are states where the data is very clear that we are performing incredibly well, and remember the swing of indies to us gives us a bit more vote in each place.
Georgia. Ds are running 6 points over 2022, and 17 points above 2024. Turnout is keeping pace with 2022.
Kansas. Dems are running 15 points higher than 2022, and 20 points higher than 2024. Overall turnout is also running way, way above 2022:
Nebraska. Dems are running 10 points higher than 2022 and 9 points higher than 2024. Turnout is also running ahead of 2022:
North Carolina. Dems are running 13 points ahead of 2022, and 22 points ahead of 2024. Turnout is also running way, way above 2022. Anderson Clayton is kicking ass!
The Daily with Sarah Jones, News and Comment: Todd Blanche Gets Destroyed By CBS On Alaska Senate Race Lawsuit, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Oct. 25, 2026. Attorney General Todd Blanche was on CBS’s Face The Nation, and host Margaret Brennan went right after him on the lawsuit related to the Alaska US Senate race.
Brennan asked, “It seems you already are taking action up in Alaska. Just for our audience to understand, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot there. There's the incumbent senator, a Republican, Dan S. Sullivan, and then there's a challenger there, Dan J. Sullivan. The Justice Department is suing Alaska preemptively to block the certification of the results if Senator Sullivan loses. Now, President Trump was asked about this lawsuit. He said quote, "I'm the one that said do it." Who did he tell to do this? Did he tell you to do this?”
Blanche answered:
Well, first of all, let me correct you, okay. You describe facts that were just simply either at best misleading, but really a lie to your viewers. It is not two Dan Sullivans, one an incumbent and one running. That's not true. The head of the Alaska Election Commission, not- not President Trump, not me, has said that the second Dan Sullivan is running solely to confuse voters, solely to pull votes away from the incumbent senator.
Okay, so that is something that we're dealing with. It's not just two Dan Sullivans running on the ballot in Alaska. That is not true. And second, President Trump has been talking about what a travesty this is for many, many, many months, and the Department of Justice has been looking at it for many, many, many months, as we should under federal law.
And you saw what we did earlier this week- late last week. And it was not- it's not to let the federal government take over the Alaska system of selecting their next senator or certifying who's going to be senator. It's asking the court to step in where the Alaska Supreme Court didn't, which is to look at federal law, and if necessary, to allow a process for Alaska to decide who should be who should be certified as a winner.
Brennan was ready and came with receipts.Margaret Brennan Showed Viewers Alaska’s Ballot
Brennan said, “Well, the Alaska Supreme Court did uphold lower court's ruling on this matter. They found the assertion that Mr. Sullivan seeks to confuse or misguide voters is not supported by preponderance of evidence. The Alaska Supreme Court did take on this matter. I also want to show our viewers what the ballot will look like. We have a picture of it.”
Video:
Blanche tried to argue that the Alaska Supreme Court ruling was only about state law, so Brennan reminded him of how elections operate in the United States, “In this country, the states administer the elections- this is how the state came up with the issue and how to handle any confusion. Our viewers are seeing it right now. It's ranked choice voting.”
Brennan later added, “It's on the screen. It says Dan S. Sullivan is listed as the incumbent. Why is that- it says incumbent. Why is that not sufficient?”
Blanche admitted that he didn’t know if it was sufficent of not, but the DOJ thought that it would cause confusion for voters.
Brennan asked Blanche why the DOJ filed this suit 11 days before the election, and Blanche didn’t have a good answer.
Brennan asked, “What right does the federal government have telling a state not to certify or how to certify?”
Blanche couldn’t answer that question either.
The final question is key.
The federal government has no role in elections, so it can’t tell a state how or not to certify an election, and that is why any and all lawsuits that the Trump DOJ files or may file in relation to election certification will fail.
The new Congress will decide how to seat its new members. Trump and the DOJ have no role, and the weakness of the Alaska lawsuit was exposed by Margaret Brennan asking basic questions about why the Trump administration is trying to go outside the lines of our election system.
This interview did not go well for Blanche, and it is only going to get worse if Trump keeps having the DOJ file lawsuits.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Donald Trump's Grandfather's suspected foreign intelligence connections (Wayne Madsen Report chart).
Wayne Madsen Report, Historical Commentary: A future Trump Treason Truth Commission needed, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 25, 2026. Four generations of Trumps have been connected to intelligence activities on behalf of foreign powers against the U.S. Let’s start with the first generation and Fred (Friedrich) Trump, above.
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump should be worried, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 24, 2026. At 7:15 tonight [Saturday], in the historic town of Perry, known as the place “Where Georgia Comes Together,” Donald Trump stood in front of a room full of his most devoted followers and said one of the most out-of-touch and offensive things a President of the United States has ever said.
After being introduced at this latest rally by country music singer Jason Aldean, a man whose marriage reportedly ended not too long after he was seen kissing a woman in her 20s who was over a decade younger than he was at the time, while still married to his high school sweetheart, Donald Trump slapped his upper right thigh and used both hands to pull himself up the stairs.
Once on stage, he embraced Aldean, whispered into his ear, and then began speaking with a hoarse voice. At one point, he appeared to forget why he was even giving this rally when he went on a tirade about how it is fine for Americans to suffer through high gas prices because American oil companies are making “hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars.”
His whole explanation was even worse. He started by acknowledging high oil prices, saying: “And while oil prices are temporarily high and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time, as soon as that war is over, because there’s so much oil all in the Hormuz Strait.”
Then he jumped straight to the truth, calling the candidates he was there to campaign for monsters: “The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. So I said, I wonder if I should say this. I’d like a little advice from my two people, my two big monsters that are going to do so well. They’re going to be the biggest stars in the country in a week.”
He was talking about the enormous profits being made by oil and gas companies while everyday Americans are facing an affordability crisis. He was so excited to share just how much money his friends and enablers are making that he decided to ignore the warning about how terrible it would sound to the millions of Americans struggling to afford gasoline.
After that, he went into a deeper explanation about how oil companies were making all of this money because of the war in the Middle East: “So, our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East because they’re coming to Texas and they’re coming to Oklahoma and they’re coming to Louisiana and they’re taking that oil. They’re making hundreds of billions of dollars, our country is, on oil.”
The President of the United States was trying to twist a global fuel crisis that was caused by the war he started in Iran into a net positive for the American people who are actively suffering because billionaires are getting richer. He tried to convince us that the war is actually good for the economy, even as people struggle to afford basic necessities like groceries, housing, and gasoline. He thought he could really convince the American people that record corporate profits were somehow a sign of economic prosperity for everyone, as though they were benefiting the families who are paying more every time they fill up their cars.
“And then on top of it, we have Venezuela and we have Greenland because Greenland has a lot of oil. So we’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. But my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir, because people are paying a little higher.’ That number is going to come way down. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before.”
Greenland is not ours, and neither is Venezuela. Maybe he has convinced himself that they are, but their people would beg to differ with him. His own advisers, according to Trump himself, had warned him not to brag about the money being made by these oil companies while Americans were paying higher prices. But he does not care about people suffering or how his comments could be received, especially so close to the midterms.
“So I said, Let me say it very gingerly, very softly. Because somebody would say the fake news he’s bragging about making money while people are suffering at the you know because you know you’re still paying lower than Biden and Obama and they don’t have nuclear weapons but they’re going to be coming.”
He is absolutely right that this will be something the news covers, and for good reason. He has lost all touch with reality and the ability to control his words. Actually saying this and expecting anyone other than his sycophants to believe that this is somehow good news is beyond absurd. And then shifting the blame to Biden and Obama all these years later makes absolutely no sense. But what was perfectly clear was that he understood exactly what he was doing. He knew that Americans were suffering because of high gas prices, and he knew that bragging about oil companies making enormous profits would make him look terrible. And he did it anyway.
“No, I could just see the fake headlines. President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump. That’ll be the headline. But I said I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time, and those pump prices are going to come down.”
He got that exactly right. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Right after those last few words, he went straight back to reading from his teleprompter.
What he said about oil companies and the money they are making might be the thing that gets the most people talking, but he said something else that was even more disturbing. Deeper into his speech, Donald Trump told the audience, and those watching from home, exactly how he plans to use the power of the presidency against any state that dares to elect someone he doesn’t like. “There’s a big difference when a president, president has a lot of power,” he said. Then he acted out an imaginary phone call from Georgia’s Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, who is up for re-election and whom he loves calling Peewee Herman: “Sir, Peewee Herman’s on. Tell him I’m not in. I’m not in. But he needs money for Georgia. I don’t give a damn what he wants. I’m not in.”
He even stopped to admit that he probably shouldn’t be saying that because people would say it wasn’t appropriate, and then he said the rest of it anyway: “When other people call me, I’m terrible. I’m just terrible.” What we all know, and the President seems to forget, is that he isn’t really talking about Jon Ossoff when he says that. He is talking about hurting the very people in that room, and the others who voted for him, who will need help the next time a hurricane hits. They and the roughly 11 million people who live in Georgia, and who pay their taxes like everyone else, are the people who would suffer if he refused to send help. That money has never belonged to Donald Trump, yet he still stood there and acted like it was his to use to help or hurt those he likes or doesn’t like.
He also spent time bragging about sending the National Guard into American cities, describing the soldiers as “the best looking people you’ve ever seen,” and then told a very strange story about National Guard members who “happen to be very large people” going up to supposed gang members and saying to them, “Why are you guys here? Why you standing here? Don’t hit us because we will hit back. Really?” Then he told the audience that they “beat the sh*t out of them and they send them back to the countries from where they came.” Why he felt the need to tell what sounded like a made-up story about soldiers beating people on American streets and shipping them out of the country right before the elections is anyone’s guess. Maybe he is foreshadowing what he plans to do soon?
The rest of the rally was filled with more Trump absurdities. He told Jason Aldean, with his second wife sitting right there in the audience, “The day you stop selling records, she’s gone,” because he sees everything as transactional, even relationships, although he might be right on this one. He said, “You know, I know more about stone than any human being outside of Italy,” and he once again twisted the unrest in France into an attack on immigrants, claiming that “France is right now burning down because it opens its borders to people who hate it,” when the people marching there are protesting over teacher shortages and crumbling conditions in their schools, a movement that has since grown to include many of the same rising costs Americans are struggling with here. Each one of these absurd statements could pass for the ramblings of a man in mental decline, and they very well may be, but this is the President of the United States of America, who has access to nuclear weapons and the ability to start wars and send our military members into harm’s way.
Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.Subscribed
He has completely abandoned any and all restraint, and it raises the question of exactly what Donald Trump will do if Democrats take back Congress in ten days. This is one of my biggest concerns right now. Will there be another January 6 moment? Will he send another mob to storm the Capitol to stop the certification of another election his party lost?
I also keep asking myself whether he will lean on Mike Johnson to keep people from being seated, because we already know Johnson is willing. Remember last year, when Adelita Grijalva won her special election in Arizona in September, and Johnson wouldn’t allow her to take her oath for 50 days, the longest any member of Congress has ever waited, while two Florida Republicans had been sworn in the day after their own special elections. Remember how her signature was the one that forced the vote to release the Epstein files, and Arizona’s attorney general had to go to federal court while more than 800,000 Arizonans went without a voice. That feels like a lifetime ago now. I had to read through my posts from last year to remember all the details because there is so much corruption and so many anti-American actions by this administration that the details start to fade so new atrocities can take center stage in our minds.
Then there is the fear I carry that is just as heavy when I think about us not taking back Congress. What if the elections are rigged? I don’t mean rigged the way Trump uses that word, as an excuse for losing. I mean actually rigged, by Trump and his yes-men. Or what if not enough people show up, because they are exhausted and have convinced themselves their vote no longer matters? Trump told us tonight what comes next if Republicans hold on: “We will pass voter identification, proof of citizenship, and the Save America Act to defend our sacred American elections very soon,” which would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans, especially married women who changed their names, to register and vote during our next big presidential election in 2028, which will be here before we even know it.
We have to think about what our country will look like at the end of next January. I’ve been finding myself thinking about this more and more, usually late at night, right after I finish writing. I think about the generations that will come after us and what will be left of the country they inherit, whatever version we end up handing them. The answer splits into two very different Americas depending on what happens on November 3rd. In one, a Congress with real power starts asking questions under oath, the courts that have been holding keep holding, and the long, hard work of accountability finally begins. In the other, we face at least two more excruciating years of Donald Trump’s unchecked power.
There could be more wars. Just yesterday, at a rally in Fort Myers, Florida, Donald Trump said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We’ll do a little stopover.” Then he described exactly what that stopover would look like: “Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We’ll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They’ll raise up their hands, and then we’re going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal.” There could be more troops in our cities, and they might not stop at their current targets. They could begin rounding up others whom this administration has already started targeting. Our LGBTQIA+ neighbors, those who are neurodivergent, especially those on the autism spectrum, politicians like Ilhan Omar, whom Donald Trump singled out again in his speech tonight. The press, whom Donald Trump threatened just today to move out of the briefing room, writing on Truth Social that he “may move the Fake News to a less obnoxious location.” Writers and content creators, and anyone sharing the truth about what is happening in this country. And once he has removed or silenced those voices, what is to stop him from coming for the rest of us who have resisted and refused to remain silent? That is just the authoritarian way.
There is still time to stop this, and it starts with getting as many people out to vote over the next ten days as we possibly can, and more people are stepping up in even bigger ways to make sure that we do. Because while Donald Trump was spreading hate and trying to further divide us, Barack Obama was in Detroit today doing the opposite. He was reminding us what real leadership looks like. He was making us remember that we do not have to live this way and that we each hold the power to change it. He said, “After ten years of chaos, and cruelty, and corruption, and incompetence, tomfoolery, nonsense, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times at least, you get to say enough is enough.”
Donald Trump saw the writing on the wall today and tried to dismiss Barack Obama’s crowd in Detroit as “empty,” when in reality, more than 4,300 people had shown up, filling the gymnasium and an overflow area at Cass Technical High School. The contrast between what he was claiming and what was actually happening speaks for itself.
Most of us want this to end. We don’t want Donald Trump’s masked men patrolling our streets and kidnapping our neighbors without the constitutional protections of due process, which apply to everyone on American soil regardless of immigration status. We want our kids to grow up with leadership that does not find joy in anyone getting the sh*t beat out of them, and we do not want our brave members of the military risking their lives in another one of Donald Trump’s wars or military actions, whatever he is calling them today. Barack Obama told that overflowing room exactly what we need to do: “find some people who might not otherwise vote,” and make sure they know what is on the line and then help them make a plan to cast their ballot.
Tomorrow, my whole family will be under one roof again, including my two adult daughters, and we are going to drop off our ballots together. It has become our tradition ever since my oldest turned 18 and could vote for the first time. Her first presidential election was in 2020, the year the world felt like it fell apart. Her being able to cast her vote felt like a beacon of light in a very dark time. Standing beside her, I felt the weight of every generation that came before her, the ones who crossed oceans for a chance at this country’s promise, the ones who were kidnapped and enslaved and still fought for it, and the women who marched and were jailed so that she and I could have a say in our own futures.
This election feels every bit as important as that one did. Maybe more, in a different way, because the generations that came before us are counting on us to protect what they fought for, and so are the ones who will come after us. The responsibility we carry extends far beyond our own families and even our own borders. So many people around the world are also affected by the decisions made by the President of the United States, and the responsibility we have to them is resting on us as well.
Donald Trump told the people of Georgia tonight that he doesn’t give a damn what their senator wants. On November 3rd, we get to show him how much we give a damn about each other, about our families, and about a country that has never belonged to him, but has always belonged to us and those who come after us. In ten days, we will make them proud. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, The Epstein Files Produce an Unlikely Weapon for the Houthi Messaging Wars, Ephrat Livni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). The Yemeni militia is using the culture of its sworn enemies in the renewed fighting with Saudi Arabia.
The Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen is not only firing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia, but also waging a propaganda war against the kingdom on social media.
A key character in the group’s communications campaign is, oddly, Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased American sex offender, some of whose files the U.S. Department of Justice has released.
The Houthis have recently homed in on a particular set of revelations to try to undermine Saudi Arabia’s leaders — namely, reports showing that associates of the Saudi royal court sent tapestries that had draped the holiest site in Islam to Mr. Epstein’s private island.
The Houthis control much of Yemen. Their communications show a profound awareness of news that their sworn enemies generate. They are willing to deploy the information in many forms — songs, videos, speeches, statements, influencer posts and more — to build support and target foes, including Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally recognized Yemeni government they are fighting. They portray themselves as defenders of Islam against corrupt foreign influences.
Now, the group has stepped up its messaging efforts, after Yemen’s civil war reignited this summer amid the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.Plugged In
The Saudis last month accused the Houthis of firing a drone at the Muslim holy city of Mecca, saying the attack was a “disgraceful” act that intended to provoke Muslims. The Houthis denied the accusation.
Rallying their expansive network to try to turn the accusation of religious betrayal against the kingdom, the Houthis pointed to the reports that Mr. Epstein had received tapestries that had draped the Kaba, the cubed building in Mecca that is the spiritual center of Islam.
“Those who gave Epstein the Kaba’s cover are the ones targeting Mecca,” Mahdi al-Mashat, the Houthi president, said in a statement to the group’s official news media.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Katie Phang, Analysis and Opinion: It’s The Trump DOJ’s Turn to Confess, Katie Phang, 
right, Oct. 25, 2026. The Catholic Church Is Naming Names. Why Won't the Trump DOJ?
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: right now, the Catholic Church is doing a better job of naming abusers than the U.S. Department of Justice.
Late on October 24th, lawyers for survivors announced that every single one of the roughly 1,300 people suing the Archdiocese of New York had signed off on a settlement worth more than $800 million. Every single plaintiff. The deal is set to be formally signed in early November. To pay for it, the archdiocese cut its operating budget by 10%, sold its First Avenue headquarters, and sold the land it owned under the Palace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
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That’s an enormous settlement amount, although I should note that prior reporting from the NY Times back in April stated: “The archdiocese [of New York] is also one of the city’s largest landowners, with billions of dollars in real estate holdings” so I think it could have given more to the victims. But it isn’t the money that stopped me cold. It’s the naming of names. To understand why that matters, you have to remember what this Church did for decades.
In 2002, the Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team exposed in its “Abuse in the Catholic Church” investigation how the Archdiocese of Boston, under Cardinal Bernard Law, moved Father John J. Geoghan from parish to parish for roughly three decades as the accusations piled up. More than 130 victims eventually alleged that Geoghan abused them over the span of 30 years. Ultimately, “internal church records revealed nearly 1,000 allegations of abuse against approximately 237 priests in the Boston Archdiocese over a span of six decades.” Cardinal Law resigned in disgrace and then landed a prestigious post in Rome.
Boston wasn't an outlier; it was the model. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury found that more than 300 predator priests had abused over 1,000 children across six dioceses. The grand jury described what church leaders followed as a "playbook for concealing the truth." Don't call it rape; call it "inappropriate contact." Don't call the police; instead send the priest away for “evaluation,” then quietly reassign him to another parish…with new children to abuse.
And here in New York? The state’s Catholic Conference spent years lobbying against the Child Victims Act, a January 28, 2019 law passed by the New York Legislature reforming the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse survivors. That’s the very law that finally let these 1,300 survivors walk into a courtroom to seek justice. The Archdiocese didn’t publish its first list of “credibly accused” clergy, 120 names, until April 2019, after that law passed. Secrecy wasn’t a bug; it was the blessing.
That’s why this prospective settlement matters. Under the agreement, the Archdiocese of New York must publish on its own website the names of the clergy members and lay leaders who were credibly accused of sexual abuse, and keep that list updated as new claims are substantiated. Not just priests, but everyone who had power and abused it. That means the documented instances of abuse don’t get buried in some church basement. Rather, they go into a public archive at Iona University, where anyone can walk in and read them.
None of that was guaranteed. For example, if the archdiocese had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it’s not clear it would have ever been forced to disclose anything at all. The survivors fought for those names to be made public. Some of the plaintiffs held out for months, saying the deal didn’t do enough to make up for what was done to them. Some plaintiffs died before they ever saw a resolution. One of their lawyers put it plainly: this settlement is “not just about money.”
He’s right. Survivors don’t just want a payment. They want the truth. They want the people who hurt them, and the people who covered for them, to be seen. Because you cannot heal a wound you aren’t allowed to look at.
Now, let’s talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the Epstein Files. In November 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act 427 to 1. The U.S. Senate then passed it unanimously. With that kind of (almost) unanimous and bipartisan support, Convicted Felon Donald Trump had no choice but to sign it into law. And the law was simple: the Attorney General of the United States shall release the entirety of the Epstein Files by December 19, 2025. The exceptions for redactions and withholdings were detailed and intentionally narrow. But, the priority was to protect the victims and to expose the abusers.
So what happened? That December 19, 2025, federally required deadline came and went. In January of 2026, Trump’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, released three million pages, declared that was the last major production, and announced the Trump DOJ was “done,” even though in the same breath Blanche acknowledged he was still sitting on another 3 million or so pages of materials.
Survivors’ names and other personal identifying information were shockingly revealed in the Files. Sometimes a first name in one document and a last name in another. However, Congressmen Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie reviewed the unredacted versions and said that at least six men's names were redacted from public view. A group of 18 survivors said it better than I ever could: they were exposed “while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected.” The very people the Epstein Files Transparency Act was written to PROTECT were exposed, while the abusers remained protected.
I know a little something about this, because I sued Attorney General Todd Blanche in April over the Epstein Files. In June, my presiding judge, Emmet Sullivan, found I was likely to win. He granted my motion for a preliminary injunction, ordering (among other things) Blanche to unredact — or justify why he won't unredact — names in emails referencing a “torture video,” the identities of Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, and handwritten FBI interview notes alleging Epstein introduced a 13-year-old victim to Donald Trump. The DOJ’s response to the ruling? A spokesperson accused Judge Sullivan of a “perverse interpretation” aimed at “driving misleading headlines.” Perverse.
Then, when Judge Sullivan ordered Blanche to submit to the Court the unredacted records for his own review, Blanche admitted that the Trump DOJ had “inadvertently” redacted…Jeffrey Epstein’s own email address. You can’t make this up.
So here’s where we find ourselves: an institution that spent decades hiding abusers, shuffling them from parish to parish, has now agreed to name names. It did it under pressure, facing possible bankruptcy, but it did it. Meanwhile, the Trump DOJ is fighting tooth and nail in federal court to keep the names of abusers, facilitators, co-conspirators, and perpetrators hidden from the public eye. The Archdiocese of New York is building a public archive of its own sins, while the Trump DOJ is building a wall of black ink.
I’m a lawyer so I understand that a name appearing in the Epstein Files is not, by itself, proof that someone did anything wrong. But Congress already accounted for that: the law was written to protect the victims. The statute explicitly does not protect embarrassment or powerful men who’d rather not be seen. Transparency isn’t a suggestion; it’s the law. The Catholic Church eventually figured out that you can’t ask survivors to trust you while you hide the people who hurt them. The Trump DOJ continues to hide the abusers and to protect the Epstein Elite. Sounds like Blanche needs his own come to Jesus moment.
More Global News
New York Times, Serbia’s Longtime Strongman Concedes Defeat in Parliamentary Election, Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva, Oct. 25, 2026. “It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Aleksandar Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating his opponents.
Serbia’s longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat Sunday in a general election held after his once-tight grip on power was weakened by nearly two years of student-led street protests.
Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a close ally of Mr. Vucic. The Serbian leader had adopted many of the Hungarian’s authoritarian methods — and, at the end, his gracious acceptance of defeat, as well.
“It is clear that we have lost these elections,” Mr. Vucic said in a surprisingly early speech congratulating the victors, a new political grouping called Student List-Students Win. He said that the slate of candidates selected by protesting students had won at least 135 seats in Serbia’s 250-member legislature, compared with around 105 for his own party.
Mr. Vucic’s speech set off joyous celebrations by tens of thousands of mostly young people in central Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Car horns honked and flares lit the sky as the crowd, waving Serbian flags and cheering, welcomed a day that many feared would never arrive.
New York Times, Four Ways Israel’s Election Could End. Eventually, Aaron Boxerman and Josh Holder, Oct. 25, 2026 (interactive). Determining the winner could take weeks. Here’s how one side could gain power in Israel’s electoral system.
It takes 61 seats to win a majority in Israel’s Parliament. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, is expected to get there on his own. Instead, they will need to assemble a coalition with other parties.
More On U.S. History, Media, Education, Sports, Religion
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 24, 2026 [U.S. Stock Markets Black Friday in 1929, Revisited], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 25, 2026. In the election of 1920, Americans handed a landslide victory to the Republicans and their presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, giving them control of both Congress and the White House. After the moralizing of the Progressive Era and the horrors of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed it, Americans looked forward to an era of “normalcy.”
Once in charge, Republicans rejected the Progressive Era notion that the government should regulate business and protect workers and consumers. Instead they turned the government over to businessmen, believing that only men who had built businesses truly understood how to build the country.
Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon—one of the richest men in America—cut taxes on the wealthy to spur investment in industry. He also gave rebates and tax abatements: between 1921 and 1929 he returned $3.5 billion to wealthy men.
At the same time, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, who had made a fortune as a mining engineer and consultant, expanded his department to fifteen thousand employees with a budget of more than 37 million dollars, working as a liaison between businessmen and the government and helping businesses to avoid antitrust lawsuits. He urged European countries to buy American.
Their policies seemed to work brilliantly. Between 1925 and 1926, more than twenty-two thousand new manufacturing companies formed. Industrial production took off. Business profits rose, and if wages didn’t rise much, they didn’t fall, either.
And oh, the changes the new economy brought! By 1929, more than two thirds of American homes had electricity, which brought first electric lights, then refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, and radios. Consumers rushed to buy them, along with ready-made clothing, beauty products, and cars, all of which the new advertising industry, which grew out of the government propaganda campaigns of World War I, promised would bring them glamor, sophistication, romance, and power.
In the Roaring Twenties, it seemed that government and business had finally figured out how to combine government promotion with the efficiency of an industrial economy to benefit everyone. Business was booming, standards of living were rising, and Americans were finding the time to read, learn, invent, and improve. In 1928, Republicans tapped Hoover for president. He promised that continuing the policies of the last eight years would bring the U.S. “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” He won with a whopping 58.2% of the vote.
With Hoover in the White House, Americans wanted in on the inevitable growth of the economy. They invested in industries producing steel, coal, and consumer goods, and in utilities and transportation. Stock prices rose. And rose, and rose. By 1929 the rush to buy stocks had become a rush to speculate in the stock market. Prices that in spring 1928 had seemed too high to be real were laughably low by fall. Radio had been at 94½ in March 1928; by September 1929 it was 101 but had split so often that the holdings from 1928 were actually worth 505. And so it went, down the stock lists.
Those with less money to burn could get into the market by buying on margin, putting down 10 or 20 percent of the cost of a stock and borrowing the rest from a broker with the promise that the loans would be paid off by the anticipated increase in the stock’s value.
Those excited by the scene dismissed skeptics who warned that stock prices were a bubble as ignorant, anti-American naysayers. “Be a bull on America!” boosters urged. “Never sell the United States short!”
October 24, a Thursday, was the beginning of the end. Heavy trading in the morning slowed the ticker tape that recorded trades. Brokers fearful of being caught sold more and more heavily. When the tape finally caught up after 7:00 that night, it showed that an astonishing 12,894,650 shares had changed hands. By afternoon, bankers managed to shore up the market, which regained the ground it had lost in the morning. But those dreadful early hours had wiped out hundreds of thousands of small investors.
The market seemed to recover on Friday and Saturday. But then, on Monday, October 28, prices slid far in heavy trading. And then, on October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down.
When the opening gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange sounded at ten o’clock, men began to unload their stocks. The ticker tape ran two and a half hours behind, but that night it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion.
Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. Within two years, manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade fell from $10 billion to $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 cents a bushel to 33 cents or lower; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.
By 1932, over a million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
Republican leaders blamed poor Americans for the Great Depression, saying they drained the economy because they refused to work hard enough. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Mellon told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
But the problem was not lazy workers. The rising standards of living that had gotten so much attention in the new magazines of the 1920s mainly benefited white, middle-class, urban Americans. Farm prices crashed after WWI, leaving rural Americans falling behind, while workers’ wages did not rise along with production. The new economy of the 1920s benefited too few Americans to be sustainable.
Hoover tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country…is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But he rejected public works programs to provide jobs, saying that such projects were a “soak the rich” scheme that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By 1932, Americans were ready to try a new approach. They turned to New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.
Under Roosevelt, Democrats protected workers’ rights, provided government jobs, regulated business and banking, and began to chip away at racial segregation. New Deal agencies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.
They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where by 1939 they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden—and abroad.
Oct. 24
Top Headlines
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.
right, Oct. 24, 2026. Hispanic early turnout in Texas is surpassing 2024 presidential levels; Trump rallies in Georgia while his own Senate candidate admits he’s down at least 7 to Ossoff; Obama is in Detroit while Trump is in Georgia for dueling rallies; The White House is weighing MASS PARDONS for junior staffers;The Financial Times reports Russia secretly controlled a Trump-linked $25 billion Alaska gas project.right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s been an intense couple of days. On Friday, I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia. Since then, the attacks on me and on this work have only grown louder. I’m safe, and I’m taking the necessary precautions. But I want to be honest with you about what’s happening, because you deserve to know: when reporting hits a nerve, the people in power don’t respond with facts. They respond by trying to discredit, intimidate, and silence the people doing the reporting.Probes Of Trump Goverance
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: More Signs Of Trumpian Unraveling And Decline, On Alaska: “I’m The One That Said Do It,” More Encouraging Early Vote Data, We Are Prepared Not Scared, Simon Rosenberg, right,Oct. 24, 2026. There is a lot of news today. Let’s get to it…..Oct. 24, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
U.S. National Security, Military
Lev Remembers, Analysis and Opinion: Putin's Money Was Inside an Alaska Gas Deal, and It Was on the Table With Witkoff and Kushner, Lev Parnas, right, 
Oct. 24, 2026. Three days ago, I told you what Steve Witkoff’s three hours with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg were really about. My sources said it was not about peace for Ukraine. It was about energy. It was about gas. It was about business between Trump’s people and Putin’s people.Middle East Wars
New York Times, Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say, Edward Wong, Jonathan Swan and Julian E. Barnes, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. The U.S. government has ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave Saudi Arabia. It is also drawing down staff at other missions in the region.More On Russian War Against Ukraine
Major U.S. Sex Scandals, Political Hypocrisy
More News Updates
Oct. 23, 2026. This morning [Friday], I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia, laying out the documented record in one place, from Soviet bloc surveillance files to waived sanctions and delayed air defense missiles for Ukraine. The response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of you read it, shared it, and sent it to people who needed to see it.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Oct. 24, 2026. Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
right, Oct. 24, 2026. As I write this, I’m packing my bags and my briefs (the legal kind). Next week, I’ll be in federal court in California to help argue against Donald Trump’s latest effort to sabotage our elections: his efforts to disrupt California voting using a demonstrably junky list of 20,000 supposed unauthorized voters.As a number of outlets have reported, Davey Hearn’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, has requested the DOJ and DOI Inspector Generals investigate how Hearn got charged for damaging the reflecting pool that Trump’s no-bid contractors damaged.Top Stories
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.
Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Update: Early Voting Data is Terrifying the GOP, Trump Eyes Mass Pardons, Musk Hiding Our Book + MORE, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s Saturday, so I’m going to make this quick and get you everything you need to know so you can get back to your day.
Here are the top headlines:
Obama is in Detroit while Trump is in Georgia for dueling ralliesA few important notes before we dive in:
Again, our book, WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy, is OUT NOW!!! If you’ve been considering ordering, go ahead and grab your copy now! TODAY will determine whether WTF AMERICA?! makes the New York Times bestseller list! We are SO CLOSE, and every order right now makes a difference. Help us get across the finish line!
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Republicans Are Terrified of What They’re Seeing in Texas
This is a number that everyone needs to see. Per data shared by Tom Bonier, Texas early turnout is nearing 3 MILLION votes, and Hispanic turnout is now AHEAD of where it was in the 2024 presidential election. And young voters are driving it.
Remember, Texas Hispanic voters were supposed to be Trump’s big success story. The Republicans in Texas based their gerrymander around trends in the 2024 election. Those trends have completely reversed. Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly supporting Democrats this cycle, as are young voters. And the turnout trends suggest a huge amount of backlash toward the incumbent party.While Trump Rallies in Georgia, His Candidate Sees the Writing on the Wall
Trump posted on Truth Social that he’s holding a “Big Rally in Georgia today.” His Senate candidate needs all the help he can get. And he knows it. On Newsmax earlier, Rep. Mike Collins admitted he’s at least 7 points behind Jon Ossoff. The chyron on the screen while he was lamenting about his polling was “EARLY VOTING SURGES AS DEMOCRATS OUTPACE GOP IN KEY STATES.” Even Newsmax couldn’t hide it.
Trump’s rally sets up a dueling moment with Barack Obama, who is in Detroit tonight working to energize Democratic voters. We’ll be streaming it live on MeidasTouch.Panic and Pardons
The Washington Sun reports that White House attorneys are evaluating whether to issue MASS PARDONS to junior staffers, with Trump allies pushing the regime to shield lower-ranked officials from prosecution and other legal challenges. They know what happens if and when they lose power, and they are terrified.Russia, Alaska, and a Trump Family Friend
The Financial Times says U.S. executives QUIT a $25 billion gas venture over claims that Russia was secretly in control. The former CEO of Polar Train LNG told the FT that Russian gas giant Novatek financed and controlled the project without U.S. approval, which triggered a mass resignation over fears the company was violating sanctions.
Polar Train is building a gas export terminal on Alaska’s North Slope as part of a Trump regime push to expand energy exports to Asia. The venture was launched with the involvement of Gentry Beach, an investor with close ties to…the Trump family. Per FT, the project has also come up in high-level talks between Washington and Moscow over business deals connected to ending the war in Ukraine, deals that of course would benefit Trump and his cronies. Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 was blacklisted by the U.S. in 2023, and U.S.-Russia discussions have floating lifting sanctions in exchange for help building an export terminal in Alaska.
So a Trump family friend’s energy project was allegedly being run by a sanctioned Russian company while Trump’s people negotiate with Putin.
ProPublica has a new investigation into the terms of Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal, which centers on Alejandro Betancourt, a 46-year-old Venezuelan energy baron who has been the target of corruption investigations. Venezuelan opposition leaders and congressional Democrats have both criticized the deal.Subscribed
Per ProPublica, the deal is built with a corporate firewall meant to STOP future U.S. presidents and Venezuelan leaders from changing or dismantling it. Some of the regime’s partners could stay anonymous behind a parent company based in Barbados. And it could be YEARS before the venture produces enough oil to matter to the U.S. at all.
Put this next to the Alaska story, and you see a clear pattern. Trump ties, hidden ownership, and secret business deals designed to outlast any accountability.Trump’s Pool Denial
Carney and Zelenskyy Hit Back
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a few moments worth sharing in Türkiye. Asked about a trade deal with the U.S. before midterms, he put the ball back in the U.S.’s court, saying the United States is “a little hard to 
predict.” On Elon Musk throttling Starlink, he said he was searching for the right adjective for whoever made that call against a country fighting for its citizens’ lives against naked aggression. And on Trump’s threats: “We’ll never be the 51st state.”
Carney also launched a new Canada–Türkiye Strategic Partnership with President Erdoğan, and Sen. Rick Scott lost it, claiming Canada “sides with dictators, terrorists & thugs.”
Zelenskyy, in an interview with ABC, again confirmed that SpaceX slowed Starlink down and said he’s sure Elon knows about it. Asked whether Trump is friends with Putin, Zelenskyy said they’re in “quite good relations.”Speaking of Musk…
Now to something personal. X is putting an “age restricted adult content” warning over posts about our book WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. A reader named Caroline posted a photo of the book saying she couldn’t wait to start reading, and X hid it behind the warning. Others have confirmed the same thing.
Here’s why the timing matters. The New York Times bestseller list comes out Wednesday, but first-week sales only count through today. Suppressing the book today could decide whether it reaches a whole new audience.
The response from readers on Threads, Bluesky, and TikTok has been incredible. People are calling it the book of our time, saying they can’t put it down, and a follower named Patricia told us she just ordered two more copies for two special women in her life. Thank you all.
New York Times, In Second Term, Trump’s Justice Dept. Submits to His Election Demands, Glenn Thrush, Katie Rogers and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Oct. 24, 2026. With moves in Alaska and California, the department has stepped up interventions in the midterm elections as the president’s instrument of unmediated executive power
The Justice Department is sharply intensifying efforts to intervene in the midterm elections, goaded by a president unfettered by even the limited restraints of his first term.
The next several weeks represent a critical moment for federal law enforcement, a test of whether a department repurposed by President Trump as an instrument of unmediated executive power will be effectively mobilized as a guarantor of his political power.
In recent weeks, the department has taken several new steps, including an extraordinary effort to invalidate any potential Democratic victory in the Alaska Senate race, that reflect Mr. Trump’s growing agitation as his party faces the possibility of losing control of Congress precipitated by his sagging popularity.
On Thursday, the department asked a federal court to block certification of the election if the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, were to lose narrowly, claiming that the presence of another candidate with a nearly identical full name tainted the election. The move, the first of its kind in generations, came in response to the president’s rants about the issue, officials said.
Hours after the papers were filed, Mr. Trump abandoned any pretext that department officials had acted without his say-so, telling reporters, “I’m the one that said do it.”
Mr. Trump has grown increasingly agitated about the dueling Sullivans, among other election-related grievances. He has demanded the department take legal action, even as some department officials raised concerns about the merits and constitutionality of the case, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
The episode comes amid the department’s widening push to exclude large batches of mail-in votes on suspicion that some had been cast by noncitizens, despite evidence that such voting is exceedingly rare. At the same time, Attorney General Todd Blanche has abandoned departmental norms by promoting prosecutions and investigations of politicians, within 60 days of the election.
Late Friday, the department escalated the fight, sending letters to local election officials across California demanding that they help identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls and set aside their ballots. The letters came with a threat. Those who failed to comply would “risk significant federal scrutiny.”
All of this has administration critics, and even some in the department, asking: Just how far are Justice Department leaders willing to go?
“The department is taking commands from the president and throwing spaghetti at the wall to file meritless lawsuits,” said Vanita Gupta, the No. 3 official at the department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “The ultimate goal is undermining faith in the election, intimidating voters and discrediting results the administration doesn’t like.”
It is by no means certain that any of these legal actions will ultimately succeed. But election officials from both parties have expressed concerns that it represents a dangerous effort to discredit functional election systems administered by the states.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump may claim foreign interference in the election as a reason to seize voting machines, citing Mr. Trump’s dubious claims in a speech over the summer.
Over the past year, the department’s civil rights division, under an outspoken Trump ally, Harmeet Dhillon, has undertaken a series of actions intended to demonstrate they would aggressively pursue his agenda. This included an unsuccessful legal effort to obtain sensitive state voter data and dispatching 1,000 federal monitors to oversee elections, all the while sowing broader doubts about election integrity.
This has apparently not been enough for Mr. Trump, who has become increasingly impatient. He was especially fired up after a meeting in the Oval Office this month with election deniers, including Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official who was imprisoned for her role in a security breach of election systems before obtaining a pardon, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.
New York Times, Court Says Trump Violated Law in Los Angeles National Guard Deployment, Laurel Rosenhall, Oct. 24, 2026. The ruling, which comes as the midterm election nears, could make it more difficult for President Trump to seize control of the National Guard.
President Trump violated federal law by seizing control of the California National Guard last year and deploying troops to the streets of Los Angeles during immigration protests, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.
With the midterm election less than two weeks away, the ruling could provide an extra layer of legal assurance on the limits a president faces in using the military on American soil.
Mr. Trump’s top military adviser has said there are no plans to deploy troops to polling stations for the midterm elections. But Mr. Trump has said in the past that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. And in recent months, he has taken unusual steps to disrupt voting procedures in several states.
“To the extent people were concerned that he could try to federalize Guards, try to send them to polling places, I think this clearly says no, you can’t,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Friday’s decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals applies the reasoning the Supreme Court used when it ruled that Mr. Trump did not have the power to send National Guard troops into Chicago last year.
Though the ruling was largely predictable, it amounts to another procedural win for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. The state has been in a protracted fight with the Trump administration over the immigration protests and troop deployments that rocked Los Angeles when Mr. Trump took command of troops over the governor’s objections.
“California fought back against this potential power grab, and in doing so created essential legal precedent that not only protects Californians but all Americans,” Governor Newsom said in a statement.Get updates whe
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
“Should your parishioners ask you about the reports after Mass this evening or tomorrow, please let them know that much progress has been made, that a resolution to these cases is imminent, and that their prayers are still very much needed for all involved,” Archbishop Hicks wrote. “You can assure them that life in your parish should continue uninterrupted.”
Coming to an agreement was a long and delicate process, at times stymied by the deaths of some plaintiffs and objections from the holdouts, who said they felt the terms of the proposal did not do enough to rectify the harms they suffered.
Weeks before the agreement, lawyers for the plaintiffs said that the archdiocese negotiated with one of its insurers to increase the amount of money it would pay the holdouts. They would now receive a pot of $20 million to be evenly distributed among them — an uncommon arrangement that hinged largely on the availability of insurance funds.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: End of a Presidency’ — White House Prepares for Trump ‘Rampage,’ Secret Russian Money Tied to Alaska Deal, Hitler’s Estate Burns Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. It’s been an intense couple of days. On Friday, I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia. Since then, the attacks on me and on this work have only grown louder. I’m safe, and I’m taking the necessary precautions. But I want to be honest with you about what’s happening, because you deserve to know: when reporting hits a nerve, the people in power don’t respond with facts. They respond by trying to discredit, intimidate, and silence the people doing the reporting.
It won’t work. And today’s news shows exactly why this work matters. Trump’s own aides are bracing for a post-midterm “rampage.” A New York Times investigation found a sanctioned Kremlin-linked company secretly funding an Alaska gas project discussed in Ukraine peace talks, the same kind of pattern I laid out in Friday’s investigation. And Ukraine finally got its satellite access restored, but only after Congress started threatening to block Trump’s nominees.
Here’s the truth about independent journalism: I don’t have a corporate legal team, a billionaire owner, or an advertiser footing the bill. When the attacks come, it’s this community that stands between this reporting and anyone trying to shut it down. No advertiser dictates my coverage. No political office shapes my reporting. I answer only to you.
If this work matters to you, and you want reporting that doesn’t back down when powerful people push back, become a paid subscriber today.Subscribed
Here’s what you need to know today.
Trump’s Presidency at a Breaking Point as Aides Brace for Midterm Wipeout
White House aides are bracing for a Trump “rampage” if Republicans lose Congress, according to a new CNN report. Administration officials, advisers, and allies told CNN they’re increasingly convinced steep GOP losses will trigger major firings across the government, as Trump looks for someone to blame. The fear has turned the White House into a hub of infighting, leaking, and what insiders described as preemptive finger-pointing. “It’s more brutal than any other situation in modern times in the White House,” one Trump ally said. “You can’t trust anybody here.” Another adviser put it bluntly: “If we lose both the House and the Senate, there’s really no telling what happens. Everyone is fair game.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya are among those seen as at risk. Hegseth is expected to be an early target for congressional Democrats and has long faced speculation that he could be pushed out, though Trump has repeatedly defended him. Some officials think Wright, who has been managing the economic fallout of the Iran war, could leave for a more lucrative energy-sector job. Allies of Bhattacharya fear he could be fired after a high-profile clash with White House budget chief Russ Vought over grant spending. The Pentagon and Energy Department both denied the rumors, and the White House called the reporting “baseless speculation,” insisting Trump is “laser-focused” on holding Congress. People close to Trump say that if Republicans suffer big losses, he is certain to find someone to blame, and it won’t be himself.
The infighting has already spilled into public view through a string of embarrassing crises in just the past two weeks. Trump ousted Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece after a GOP donor disclosed she had asked him for $100,000 to pay off her credit card. He fired his new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, after just five days amid widespread backlash, and ordered his White House counsel to investigate a feud between allies over allegations that Kennedy Center money was misallocated. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles faced questions about her standing after it emerged she wasn’t present when Trump offered Zacharia the job, though Trump says there’s “zero chance” he’ll replace her. Many of Trump’s own aides now believe the House is likely lost and are focused on limiting the damage. Trump himself sounded resigned this week, saying, “The president always loses, for whatever reason, the midterms.” Governor Gavin Newsom called it the beginning of the end of his presidency:
Even some of Trump’s former boosters abroad now argue a weakened Trump would be good for the world. In a column for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, Matthew Lynn wrote that Trump is likely about to become “the lamest of lame duck presidents,” and that political paralysis would be a big improvement over the chaos of the past two years. He pointed to prediction markets giving Republicans more than an 80 percent chance of losing the House and a 69 percent chance of losing the Senate, with Trump’s approval at a record low of 32 percent. Lynn argued that with Trump hemmed in, tariffs could fade, trade wars could ease, and there might “even be peace with Canada.” A column in Britain’s Independent went further, arguing the country is watching Trump’s presidency “die on live TV,” pointing to the Iran war’s toll on prices and his attack on Ukraine for striking Russian refineries. Both writers say Trump’s playbook of deny, deflect, and blame may finally have hit its limit.
Analysts warn a lame-duck Trump won’t simply fade away, and Democrats in charge would bring a wave of investigations. If Democrats take the House, which polls suggest is highly likely, Trump, his family, and his associates would face subpoenas, congressional investigations, and potentially impeachment, with Democrats already preparing inquiries into Trump family business dealings, the Iran war, and the Epstein files. A Democratic Senate would also block his ability to confirm judges and executive branch nominees, including any potential Supreme Court picks. But analysts across the spectrum told the Christian Science Monitor that Trump is likely to respond by bypassing Congress even more aggressively, using emergency declarations, redirected funds, and foreign policy moves. “He will have the full authority of the presidency until noon on January 20, 2029,” one Republican strategist said. “I expect he will use it.”
Ukraine’s Starlink Restored After Two Weeks as Congress Ramps Up Pressure and a Secret Russian Link to an Alaska Gas Deal Emerges
Ukraine says full speed has been restored to its Starlink and Starshield satellite systems after two weeks of restrictions that crippled parts of its military. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday its monitoring systems now show stable connections for drones flying faster than 400 kilometers per hour, after speeds had been capped at around 160. The limits had hampered Ukraine’s ability to shoot down Russian attack drones and resupply frontline troops, and forced some operations to be canceled. The ministry credited Zelensky’s “direct dialogue” and “firm stance at the highest level” for the restoration. Zelensky had viewed the throttling as retaliation by Trump and Musk for Ukraine’s refusal to stop striking Russian oil refineries, while Trump denied any White House involvement and claimed for days that service was already back. Just a day earlier, Zelensky told ABC News that the administration’s recent actions were “not supportive,” taking a swipe at Trump envoy Steve Witkoff for calling Putin a humanitarian: “Maybe not such a big humanitarian as Putin, of course.”
A bipartisan group of senators is preparing to block Trump’s nominees until Ukraine’s satellite access is guaranteed, according to The New York Times. The holds would hit during the lame-duck session after the midterms, when Republican leaders hope to confirm dozens of executive and judicial nominees before the new Congress begins. Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent who worked on Russian counterintelligence in Kyiv, said he’ll push to fire whoever was responsible for the disruption and cut funding for their agencies, adding, “I personally don’t believe in the coincidence theory.” Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Thom Tillis said in a joint statement that “funding the Russian war machine, cutting off Ukraine’s satellite communications, and degrading its air defenses all stand in the way of peace.” Congressional committees are also weighing a formal investigation into SpaceX and have told companies involved in Trump’s Russian diesel deal to preserve their records. Separately, six House Democrats gave Musk until Oct. 31 to explain the restrictions.
A New York Times investigation found that a sanctioned Russian energy giant secretly funded an American company pitching an Alaska gas project discussed in Ukraine peace talks. The company, Polar LNG, markets itself with American flags and a bald eagle as “America’s Arctic Advantage,” and plans to use Russian technology to liquefy and export natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope. Putin discussed the broader idea with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner last month, though a U.S. official said it was only mentioned broadly and there’s no indication the envoys knew of Polar LNG’s Russian ties. The company’s former CEO, Joel Riddle, says he resigned after learning that at least some of its funding came from Novatek, a Kremlin-linked firm under partial U.S. sanctions, and that he warned the Trump administration before leaving. Novatek has now confirmed it is moving to take a minority stake in the project, a striking effort by a Russian company to own a piece of American gas production. The project’s Novatek connections are complicated by the new Graham sanctions law, which specifically targets the company, though Trump waived the law’s Russia sanctions last week.
The Oleshky ceasefire is set to begin Oct. 29, as Russian diesel heads to the U.S. and Ukraine strikes deep inside Russia. The White House celebrated the ceasefire as Melania Trump’s achievement, posting that she had “forged a ceasefire in war-torn Oleshky” and calling it “peace through strength,” with up to 2,000 residents cut off from aid and facing starvation. Meanwhile, Russia’s deputy prime minister said the first three tankers of Russian diesel are headed to North America under Trump’s deal, with one expected to arrive in the U.S. on Nov. 7. Overnight, Ukraine struck a petrochemical plant in the Russian city of Togliatti, and an attack on a substation in southern Russia reportedly knocked out power across occupied Crimea, including Sevastopol and Yalta. Russia and Ukraine also completed their first prisoner exchange since August, swapping 270 servicemen each, which Zelensky called a “very important result.” British Prime Minister’s office, meanwhile, publicly rejected Witkoff’s description of Putin as a “humanitarian.”
Iran War Escalates as Strike Threats Mount, Oil Surges, and U.S. Officials Warn of a Year More of Fighting
Tensions between the U.S. and Iran are spiking, with an American official warning strikes could come as soon as this weekend. Iran’s armed forces chief declared Saturday that U.S. military ships will never be allowed in the Persian Gulf “under any circumstances,” adding that Trump “will take that dream to his grave.” The warning came after Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, told Israeli army radio that a strike on Iran this weekend could “absolutely” happen, even though Trump has said any new strikes would wait until after the Nov. 3 midterms. A spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard dismissed Trump’s threats as “largely for media consumption,” warning that any U.S. action would be met with a response “several times greater.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces elections Tuesday, has repeatedly vowed to topple Iran’s government. European and Middle Eastern foreign ministers meeting in Istanbul urged both sides to show restraint, with France’s foreign minister warning further escalation “would leave no winners.”
U.S. intelligence warns that Iranian plots to kill Americans abroad have reached “advanced stages.” In an unclassified memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio obtained by CBS News, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said Iran has “substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel” in the Middle East and other countries. The memo did not name specific targets or say whether attacks were imminent. The State Department is now reducing staff at U.S. embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, and the UAE, after ordering nonessential diplomats and families to leave Saudi Arabia earlier this week. The U.S. military has also been quietly shrinking its footprint in the region amid threats from Iran and its Houthi allies in Yemen. Meanwhile, Iran’s president is set to travel to Moscow next week to meet Putin, the first such meeting in Russia since the war began, as Iran’s foreign minister says the two countries are closer than ever.
The Trump administration now admits the war Trump promised would last weeks could drag on for another year, as oil prices soar. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz told the Financial Times the war could still be going 12 months from now, even though Trump initially said it would last “four to five weeks.” Trump, meanwhile, claimed the U.S. could “take all of the oil” and “take the whole country,” and said the real question is whether to “finish it off” or “let it wither.” Brent crude jumped to over $117 a barrel Friday, its highest level since March and up from under $97 at the start of October. The Dow fell more than 550 points as rising oil prices weighed on the market. Trump has accused Iran of faking attacks on ships to drive up oil prices ahead of the midterms, claiming more oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war, though overall shipping traffic remains sharply below prewar levels.
The war is spilling across the region, with oil washing up on UAE beaches and Saudi Arabia under fire from Iran-backed rebels. The UAE closed beaches and warned fishermen away after an oil spill, which analysts traced to a tanker hit by a projectile earlier this month and say covers roughly 60 square miles, with residents as far as Dubai reporting strong gas smells. Saudi Arabia intercepted Houthi missiles aimed at the major oil hub of Yanbu and the city of Taif, briefly triggering danger warnings across regions including Mecca. Airstrikes in Yemen, which the Houthis blame on Saudi Arabia, have killed at least nine people over two days, including women and children. The U.N. warned that time is running out to get aid into the Yemeni city of Taiz, cut off by Houthi fighters for 20 days, where water production has fallen by about half. Britain has committed fighter jets to defend Saudi airspace, and Egypt is weighing sending troops.
Other news:
Hitler’s former mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, was engulfed in flames overnight, and a person has been taken into custody. The fire alarm went off around 9:15 p.m. Friday at the building, perched on a cliff more than 6,000 feet up in Germany’s Bavarian Alps, and firefighters were still battling the blaze Saturday morning. Its remote location made it hard to get fire engines to the site, and crews could only enter with respiratory protection. Police said it’s not yet clear whether the detained person had anything to do with the fire, and no one was found inside or injured. The building was commissioned by the Nazi Party and completed in 1938, and Hitler visited at least 14 times for social functions and official business. Since 1952 it has operated as a café, restaurant, and history exhibition popular with tourists.
Trump merchandise stores are shutting down across the country as MAGA retailers confront an unpopular lame-duck president. At least four of the roughly 20 stores nationwide selling Trump gear have closed in the past year, including locations in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, according to NPR. “He’s no longer a viable business model for entrepreneurs because he has peaked,” one Trump supporter told the outlet. The owner of a Trump superstore outside Knoxville said sales collapsed from a high of $200,000 a month to just $20,000, and that some of Trump’s own policies, including DOGE spending cuts, hurt business. He also noticed customers asking to have their purchases bagged instead of wearing their new Trump apparel out of the store. The closures come as Trump’s approval sits at record lows amid frustration over the cost of living and the Iran war.
Newly released Pentagon UFO files describe federal agents spotting a mysterious “black triangle” near a sensitive U.S. national security site. According to an FBI report, two agents at an observation post in the western United States saw a matte black triangular object resembling a delta-wing drone in June, with an estimated wingspan of nine to 15 feet. A Defense Department memo, which included a corroborating account from a third official using long-range thermal equipment, said the craft rose straight up for about 10 seconds, hovered for 20 seconds, then shot into high-speed horizontal flight. Observers said it moved as fast as a fighter jet and dove into a canyon in two to three seconds, yet made no detectable sound. The object was warmer than the surrounding air but showed no visible exhaust. The files are the latest release since Trump directed his administration to give the public full disclosure on unidentified objects, though many details remain redacted.
Crushing debt is souring Gen Z on politics, threatening Republicans and raising alarms about disillusionment across the board, according to a Politico Magazine report. Gen Z adults now carry higher credit card, auto loan, and personal loan balances than millennials did at the same age, with record drops in credit scores and rising delinquencies. Unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds is about 8 percent, nearly double the national rate, and entry-level job openings have fallen 35 percent since 2023. Many young voters who backed Trump in 2024 over his promises to lower prices now say he failed them amid tariffs and the Iran war, and are preparing to reject the GOP in the midterms. But experts warn the bigger risk is that young people give up on voting altogether, with only 33 percent saying they’ll definitely vote and just 15 percent saying they trust the federal government. “Everything’s too damn expensive. Nobody has any money. The job market is shit for young people,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, the only Gen Z member of Congress.
A top ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has quit the Trump administration, exposing a widening rift between the MAHA movement and the White House. Calley Means, the senior adviser who helped broker Kennedy’s 2024 endorsement of Trump, resigned Thursday after a White House meeting on defining ultraprocessed foods was postponed, which one official called “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Officials say Means was frustrated with resistance inside Trump’s orbit to Kennedy’s efforts to steer Americans away from junk food. MAHA influencer Vani Hari wrote that Kennedy’s commitments are “being stalled by corporate capture and special interests at the very top of the White House.” Many MAHA supporters have also been angered by Trump’s executive order promoting glyphosate, the weedkiller ingredient they believe causes cancer, and the administration’s backing of Roundup maker Bayer at the Supreme Court. With the midterms less than two weeks away, Democrats are actively courting disillusioned MAHA voters who helped elect Trump in 2024.
Medical experts are calling Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike malpractice after new details emerged of what happened inside the death chamber. According to an account from Pike’s lawyer, the execution team spent nearly an hour on Sept. 30 jabbing her arms with about 10 needles while struggling to find a vein, at one point using a catheter so small that one expert said it’s meant for babies. Team members said they worried her veins had “blown,” and Pike repeatedly grimaced and said her arm was “really burning,” yet the team pushed ahead with the lethal dose of pentobarbital. Pike survived, spent days on a ventilator, and can now talk and walk, though her long-term prognosis is unknown. “The level of incompetence is astounding,” said an Ohio State surgery professor, adding that no clinician would ever administer the drug that way. Tennessee has called off all executions pending a review, as the case prompts a national reckoning over lethal injection.
The Oregon father who stopped the Silver Rail Elementary shooting says he wants every school to have a resource officer. In his first interview since the Oct. 15 attack, Kaylub Giamanco described telling a 911 dispatcher, “I have to go in. People are going to die,” before crawling into the school and fatally shooting the 16-year-old gunman. The attacker had already killed 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert and three boys, including 5-year-old Rhoam Summer. Giamanco, whose own children attend the school, says he lies awake at night wondering whether he could have done more. “I want to apologize for not saving their babies,” he said. He hopes to raise money to support school safety efforts.
Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday is a dead heat, as President Lula tries to become the first candidate ever to overturn a first-round loss. Far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for a failed coup attempt, won the first round on Oct. 5 and has said he would pardon his father if elected. But polls have narrowed sharply in the three weeks since, and the two are now nearly tied, with Bolsonaro ahead by only fractions of a point. Analysts say much of the shift comes from voters turning away from Bolsonaro after an aggressive debate performance and a speech vowing to “change the constitution,” along with two federal police investigations into him. Lula’s campaign has energized young voters who took to the streets in large protests, and his team overhauled its online strategy, with his digital reach now surpassing Bolsonaro’s for the first time. All eyes are on the bellwether state of Minas Gerais, where no candidate has ever won the presidency without carrying it.
Texas Democrat James Talarico is taking aim at Elon Musk, accusing him of trying to buy the state’s Senate seat for Ken Paxton. Musk has poured $158 million into a super PAC backing Paxton, which Talarico says makes him the force behind nearly every attack ad, mailer, and text targeting his campaign. “Texas is not for sale,” Talarico told a packed rally at the University of Texas, calling Paxton, who was impeached by his own party over corruption allegations, the most corrupt politician in the state’s history. Talarico raised $64 million from July through September, more than triple Paxton’s total, with 97 percent of donations under $100, in what has become the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history. He holds a narrow lead, with the RealClearPolitics average putting him ahead by 1.8 points and a new Emerson poll showing him up 48 to 46. A win would make him the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994.
The Pentagon has designated Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes on U.S. college campuses a threat to national security. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video Friday that the centers have been operating in disguise, claiming that “80 new propaganda cells across 30 universities had popped up using different names and different charters.” He alleged their mission is to steal intellectual property and “infiltrate the minds of American students.” Hegseth said the Defense Department has spent the past two months “systematically” dismantling every one of the organizations. Washington has long accused Confucius Institutes of serving as Chinese propaganda tools and has taken previous steps to crack down on them. The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Probes Of Trump Goverance
New York Times, How Trump Gave the Worst Polluters a Free Pass, Eric Lipton and Maxine Joselow, Oct. 24, 2026. The president temporarily waived clean-air rules for industrial facilities that spew cancer-causing gases. Then his appointees worked to gut the regulations altogether.
Within sight of a southeast Texas middle school stands a chemical plant that President Trump excused from new federal rules intended to curb its cancer-causing pollution.
About a 30-minute drive from Pittsburgh, a steel-making facility has spewed carcinogenic chemicals near homes for years. Mr. Trump gave it a similar waiver from recent clean-air rules.
And on the outskirts of Richmond, Va., the owners of an industrial warehouse emailed the Trump administration asking for their own waiver. Their wish was granted. Nine months later, the facility accidentally released a large plume of carcinogenic gas into the community.
In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect. Some were among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants. About 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one affected facility.
71 coal plants, 71 chemical plants, 40 sterilizers, 19 steel-related facilities and 1 copper smelter exempted from clean-air regulations.
The exemptions represent the biggest presidential intervention in enforcement of the Clean Air Act in the half-century since President Richard M. Nixon signed the bedrock environmental law. And that is only one of the ways the Trump administration is dismantling a variety of federal environmental protections.
Before Mr. Trump’s return, the chemical industry was losing its fight to block or at least delay tougher E.P.A. requirements to reduce toxic emissions. It had pleaded with agency officials, filed lawsuits and appealed to Congress. But officials and the courts had largely rejected the industry’s claims of undue expense and regulatory overreach.
Now, Mr. Trump is prioritizing the economic interests of corporations and easing costs for polluting industries, and their immense clout is striking.
The president’s exemptions were good for two years, with the possibility of an extension. The reprieve for the companies gave Mr. Trump time to stock the Environmental Protection Agency with appointees who had lobbied for the industries they now regulate. Those officials then quickly went to work from the inside to gut the rules altogether.
Mr. Trump has taken an expansive view of executive power in his second term. On the environmental front, he has unilaterally shredded regulations, withheld science funding appropriated by Congress and ordered coal plants that planned to shutter to continue running.
Even so, his evisceration of the new Clean Air Act rules stands out.
Many of the details of how the Trump administration aided the chemical industry are being reported here for the first time. In one upside-down moment, industry executives provided the agenda for a meeting with E.P.A. staff and then effectively presided over it.
Mr. Trump also nominated Aaron Szabo, a former lobbyist for the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, a powerful trade group, to lead the E.P.A.’s air regulation office. Once there, Mr. Szabo helped handle the waiver requests and then pushed employees to pull back on enforcement, documents show.U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works near Pittsburgh, where smokestacks release not only steam but also benzene and sulfur dioxide. A commercial sterilizer plant near Richmond, Va., released hundreds of pounds of ethylene oxide in April.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times; Carlos Bernate for The New York Times
To understand how Mr. Trump gave a free pass to some of the worst polluters, The New York Times reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and spoke to more than 70 people familiar with the efforts, including former E.P.A. officials and industry executives.
“These companies, with their campaign contributions and the revolving door of former lobbyists and executives that now work in the regulatory agencies — that is where the petrochemical industry gets its power,” said Brent Coon, a Beaumont, Texas, lawyer who has spent decades squaring off in court against petrochemical firms over environmental and health risks.
The Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. — created in 1970 to protect public health and the environment — to periodically review the latest pollution controls and impose them broadly if they are affordable and effective. The most recent review began under the Biden administration, which in 2024 finalized new, tougher requirements.
In granting the waivers to those rules, Mr. Trump cited an obscure clause in the act that allows exemptions if complying with new rules would threaten national security and if the necessary technology is not widely available.
Yet the president approved the waivers even though the equipment was readily accessible and the industry’s national security claims had little detail to substantiate them, documents show.
The Biden administration pushed through the new pollution requirements after evidence emerged about the health threats posed by ethylene oxide, a colorless gas used to make products like plastic soda bottles and to sterilize medical devices like pacemakers.
E.P.A. researchers had concluded that ethylene oxide was 30 to 60 times as carcinogenic as previously thought, particularly for people who live near plants where the gas is made or used. The agency held meetings to warn community members about the elevated risks.
New York Times, 5 Takeaways From Our Investigation of Trump’s Waivers for Polluters, Maxine Joselow and Eric Lipton, Oct. 24, 2026. Chemical plants and other industrial facilities had been required to curb their toxic emissions. A New York Times investigation shows how they got out of it.
They are among the biggest sources of cancer-causing pollution in the United States: chemical manufacturers, steel-making plants, facilities that sterilize medical devices.
In 2024, they were required to take steps to reduce their toxic emissions. That all changed when President Trump returned to office and gave them a pass.
It was the biggest presidential intervention in the Clean Air Act since the bedrock environmental law was enacted more than 50 years ago.
Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in dismantling regulations designed to protect the environment, resulting in dirtier air and water. Even so, his aid to specific polluters stands out. To understand these efforts, The New York Times reviewed more than 10,000 pages of government documents and conducted more than 70 interviews.
Here are five takeaways from our investigation.Mr. Trump issued more than 200 waivers to some of the worst polluters.
Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from new regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency had adopted during the Biden administration.
The new rules came about because the Clean Air Act requires the E.P.A. to periodically study the latest pollution controls and impose them if they are affordable and effective.
The rules required medical sterilizers, chemical plants and steel facilities to monitor for emissions of cancer-causing gases along their property lines by 2027. If they detected certain levels of the gases escaping into communities, they had to fix the leaks. And they had to post the findings publicly, so that neighbors could see what was in the air.
New York Times, In U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project Emerges, Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. Interviews and documents show a Russian energy giant secretly funded a U.S. firm. The deal has been discussed in talks to end the war in Ukraine.
At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”
An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.
The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.
But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.
Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month with President Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Mr. Putin said publicly last year that “we are discussing with our American partners” the possibility of using Novatek technology to produce liquefied natural gas in Alaska.Credit...Pool photo by Gavriil Grigorov
Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.
“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.
These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”
Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”
But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that in fact, it was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.
The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.
The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff or Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.
The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.
The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”
The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatek about bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.
Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.
A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.
Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.
“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said.
U.S. National Security, Military
Lev Remembers, Analysis and Opinion: Putin's Money Was Inside an Alaska Gas Deal, and It Was on the Table With Witkoff and Kushner, Lev Parnas, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Three days ago, I told you what Steve Witkoff’s three hours with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg were really about. My sources said it was not about peace for Ukraine. It was about energy. It was about gas. It was about business between Trump’s people and Putin’s people.
Today the Financial Times and The New York Times put a name on one of those deals. Now it is in black and white. And this time, it didn’t take six months for the world to see it.
The project is called Polar LNG, a $25 billion plan to export liquefied natural gas from Alaska’s North Slope. It was built around equipment from Arctic LNG 2, Russia’s flagship Arctic gas project, which the United States sanctioned in 2023. The Russian company behind Arctic LNG 2 is Novatek, a company under partial U.S. sanctions whose owners include Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s oldest friends.
The company’s former chief executive, Joel Riddle, resigned in September. He says he discovered that Novatek was already financing the project and steering its direction before the U.S. Treasury had approved anything, and that he had been told the start-up money came from a company in the United Arab Emirates. Nearly the entire senior leadership walked out after him. Private messages show Novatek’s top executives, including its chief executive Leonid Mikhelson, discussing sending as much as $15 million through the project’s parent company in Abu Dhabi. Novatek now says it wants to become a minority shareholder. Polar LNG denies wrongdoing and calls Riddle a disgruntled former employee who was fired. Documents show he resigned six days before the company sent him a termination letter.
Then comes the part that turns a business story into a national security story. The deal on the table was an exchange: Novatek helps build the Alaska terminal, and in return the United States lifts sanctions on Arctic LNG 2. Putin personally raised the project with Witkoff and Jared Kushner as one of a series of energy deals the White House believes could warm relations with Moscow. The White House has confirmed that people from the project were in contact with the administration. The venture was launched with Gentry Beach, a Texas investor and longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., and it has come under fire over sanctions risk, environmental damage, and competition with a separate Alaska pipeline plan worth around $50 billion.
Sanctions relief for Putin, paid for with an American gas project, discussed in the middle of so-called peace talks. That is what I have been reporting to you, and now it is on the front page.
But Alaska is one deal. What I’m hearing is that it is one piece of something much bigger.
Now let me lay out everything I’ve been reporting, what my sources are telling me now, and who else is in this picture.
I Have Been Reporting This From Day One
My very first letters on this platform, in the spring of 2025, were about Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Putin’s money man, Kirill Dmitriev, and about secret talks to bring Nord Stream 2 back to life. Dmitriev runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. He is the man Putin sends when there is money on the table, and he has been at the center of every one of these conversations.
In November 2025, I told you the 28-point “peace plan” was a Russian document handed to Witkoff. Look at what was inside it: long-term American and Russian deals on energy and the Arctic. Remember that word, the Arctic. In December, Witkoff and Kushner spent nearly five hours in the Kremlin, and I told you it was a business meeting. Two days later, the Treasury eased sanctions on Lukoil.
On September 5 of this year, they sat with Putin in the Kremlin for more than three hours. Three days later, I told you those talks were about business. We later learned Putin pressed them on the sale of Lukoil’s foreign assets, worth around $20 billion, with bidders tied to Kushner, Witkoff and the Trump family. Now we know Putin also put this Alaska gas deal in front of them that same month.
On October 9, my sources told me Witkoff walked out of the Ukraine talks in Miami to get on a call with Trump and Putin. That was confirmed. Right after came the diesel deal, opening the door for Russian fuel. And on Wednesday, after Witkoff’s three hours in St. Petersburg, I told you Nord Stream was discussed, gas was discussed, and control of the energy that heats Eastern Europe was discussed.
Every one of these is the same story. The peace talks are the cover. The energy deals are the business. And sanctions relief is the currency Putin wants most.
I know how this works because I did it. In Trump’s first administration, I was his Steve Witkoff, the man sent to make deals in the shadows. The difference is that back then I was embedded in the cult. I truly believed we were fighting a deep state and saving our country. Witkoff knows exactly what he is doing.
What I’m Hearing Now
Put the routes side by side. Russian gas into Europe through Nord Stream, with Kushner leading talks this month on selling part of the pipeline to an American investor. Russian diesel onto the world market through Trump’s deal. And now Russian technology and Russian money behind American gas shipped out of Alaska. Putin gets paid on every one of them, and the sanctions meant to choke his war machine come off one by one.
Alaska is not the end of it. I’m hearing there are other deals in motion involving Saudi money, Qatari money, Jared Kushner and more of Trump’s inner circle. That should surprise no one. Kushner’s investment fund was built on $2 billion from the Saudi crown prince’s sovereign wealth fund, with Qatari money behind it too, and the secret money for Alaska ran through Abu Dhabi. The Gulf is the bank, the meeting place and the pass-through. I am still confirming the names, and I will bring them to you when I have them nailed down.
And watch Konstantin Sokolov. I first wrote to you about him in September. Sokolov was born in St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown, and came to America in 1997. He once ran a Russia-focused investment firm that bragged about its close ties to the Kremlin. Last year he gave $11 million to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., and he is one of the donors behind Trump’s White House ballroom. Then the rewards came. With no experience in government, he was put in charge of a $201 million American-backed fund for the “Trump Route” through the Caucasus. And in June, the Treasury gave his company a special license to buy a mine in Armenia from VTB, a sanctioned Russian state bank. Sokolov’s people say he has no relationship with the Russian government. What my sources tell me is that he is a Putin asset, deeply entrenched in Trump world, and his name keeps coming up again and again. Watch him closely.
Presidents Trump and Putin, United As One
The Dispatch, Opinion: Trump’s Capitulation to Putin Is Undermining U.S. National Security, Michael McFaul, right, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012-14), 
Oct. 22, 2026. The president’s admiration for the Russian dictator erodes American interests and values.
Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for Russia’s imperial dictator, Vladimir Putin. Shortly after taking office for his first term in 2017, President Trump was asked by Fox News 
host Bill O’Reilly to defend his respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called a “killer.” Trump replied, “We’ve got a lot of killers.
What, you think our country’s so innocent?” The following year, at a press conference in Helsinki during his first summit with Putin, Trump publicly questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The Russian leader was standing right by his side.
These expressions of affinity for Putin were shocking at the time, but crucially, they did not produce consequential shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The first Trump administration included many senior national security officials who had a different, more accurate assessment of how Putin’s policies threatened American national interests. Trump’s own 2017 National Security Strategy identified Russia (and China) as revisionist powers that “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” Reluctantly, in 2017, Trump also signed a new sanctions law, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, that focused on Russia and other adversaries. His first administration even provided a limited number of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine. The gap between Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Putin and actual policy was real.
Not anymore. No longer constrained by Gens. H.R. McMaster or Jim Mattis, Trump has gradually but consistently turned his effusive admiration for Putin into the most radical shift in American foreign policy in the last century—and maybe ever. Today, under Trump, the United States—a country that once was considered the leader of the free world—is now openly and shamelessly supporting an imperial dictatorship in Russia.
Trump is finally backing up his words with actions—actions that are both immoral and contrary to America’s national interests.
This tragic pivot started slowly after Trump returned to the White House for a second term. As a presidential candidate in 2024, Trump had claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in one day. Once back in power, he and his team seemed to be trying to mediate an end to the fighting. I applauded these efforts at the time. Putin’s barbaric invasion has killed too many people: soldiers and civilians in Ukraine, but also scores of young Russian men, many sent to the front only to become casualties within days and sometimes even hours of their arrival. Russia is losing on the frontline. Ukrainian warriors have stopped the advance of Russia’s invading army and have recently begun taking back chunks of occupied territory. So, Putin has changed tactics, focusing instead on expanding an intensified campaign of attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure. His military now targets Ukrainian civilians on a near-daily basis, while seeking to eliminate their energy and water infrastructure to heighten their suffering during the winter. This terrorism is motivated by the inaccurate belief that a traumatized Ukrainian society would pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to capitulate. Who could not support ending such a war?
I cannot say for sure if Trump genuinely was trying to end the war, or whether his desire to improve relations with Putin and do business deals with Russian companies was always the greater priority. What I can say is that his approach to negotiations has been fundamentally flawed and ineffective. Trump and his negotiators—real estate businessmen Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—decided early on that they would give concessions to Putin in the hope that he would stop fighting. For instance, while still allowing American companies to sell arms to Europeans who then transfer them to Ukraine, Trump has ended direct military and economic assistance to Kyiv. Trump has also made it clear that Ukraine could not join NATO while he was president, and he consistently ridicules Zelensky and berates him for not wanting peace. The latter is a talking point Kremlin propagandists could have written. Conversely, Trump hosted Putin for a summit in Alaska in August 2025, personally greeting him on the tarmac with a red-carpet welcome. But none of Trump’s gifts to Putin have produced even a small change in Putin’s commitment to continue his war.
This month, Trump’s pivot toward Putin became more pronounced, with real-world negative consequences for Ukraine. He eased sanctions on Russian diesel, allowing Moscow to release millions of barrels of fuel onto the global market. He then signed an executive order waiving most of the new sanctions and tariffs against Russia under the Lindsey O. Graham Act, two days before they were to take effect. Then, most damagingly of all, came the restrictions on SpaceX’s satellite communications service, which Ukraine relies on for battlefield communications and drone operations. Reuters reported that the order to limit access originated inside the White House, although it remains unclear who authorized it. Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have both denied personal responsibility, suggesting they knew how unpopular this decision would be with the public. But the effect on Ukrainian air defenses has been serious. As Zelensky put it: “We couldn’t use a tool that helps protect people. That’s very painful and frustrating.”
It’s the same old playbook—appease Putin and then hope he will kindly end his invasion. It hasn’t worked before; it isn’t working now.
Trump has defended the diesel deal and waiving of sanctions as necessary to keep Putin at the negotiating table. It’s the same old playbook—appease Putin and then hope he will kindly end his invasion. It hasn’t worked before; it isn’t working now. In fact, these new gifts will have the opposite effect. They will encourage Putin to keep fighting, knowing that if he does, Trump will offer him still more concessions. And to make things even worse, we have now learned that Putin has floated the idea to Trump of a meeting among China, Russia, and the United States to deal with the “Ukraine crisis,” just as imperial powers used to do in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Thus, the past week has been one of the darkest in the history of U.S.-Ukraine relations; Trump’s longstanding admiration for Putin has given way to a radically new American foreign policy that puts the United States unabashedly on the side of autocratic Russia and tragically against democratic Ukraine. Trump is finally backing up his words with actions—actions that are both immoral and contrary to America’s national interests.
Call me old-fashioned or idealistic, but I still believe that morality should play a role in American foreign policy. Of course, American presidents and diplomats sometimes must engage with autocrats to advance U.S. interests. I did as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. But we do not have to embrace them as friends or allies, especially imperial dictators like Putin, who uses terrorism and kidnapping as instruments of his war against Ukraine. I do not want my country helping such an evil leader. I want my country to be against imperialism and for sovereignty, to stand against dictatorship and for democracy, to aid those fighting for independence and against occupation.
But it’s not just the right thing to do; it’s also the pragmatic thing to do. Let’s be realistic. Putin is not going to abandon his autocratic partners in China, Iran, and North Korea just because Trump offers him concessions. That is a naïve reading of Putin. He sees the United States as his enemy, no matter how many gifts he gets from Trump.
By trying to appease Putin, Trump is also weakening America’s relationships with our democratic allies and partners in Europe. In this new era of great power competition with China and Russia, our democratic allies are America’s greatest comparative advantage. Together, the free world has far greater economic power and military strength than autocracies, and our democratic values and ideals have significantly more global appeal than those of autocracies. But Trump’s embrace of Putin and his abandonment of Ukraine are weakening these ties.
And Xi Jinping is watching too. As America proves feckless in standing with Ukraine, Xi must increasingly believe that Trump will show similar indifference when it comes to defending Taiwan.
The good news, however, is that the United States is not a dictatorship. We remain a democracy with competitive elections just around the corner. Polls show clearly that the American people do not share Trump’s admiration for Putin. According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in Putin “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.” A recent YouGov poll also found that most Americans sympathize with Ukraine, with just 4 percent saying they sympathize with Russia in the conflict. Another recent YouGov poll suggests that more Americans want to increase aid to Ukraine than decrease it. Therefore, I am hoping that early in the new year, with a new balance of power in Congress and Trump fully into his lame-duck era, the House of Representatives and Senate will introduce legislation to provide a new military aid package to Ukraine and another bill to make any business deal with Russian companies illegal until Putin ends his war. Dare President Trump to veto them.
In embracing Putin and abandoning Ukrainians, Trump is out of step with American society. Hopefully, more emboldened and courageous leadership in the U.S. Congress next year will realign American actions regarding Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine with the will of the American people.
Middle East Wars
New York Times, Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say, Edward Wong, Jonathan Swan and Julian E. Barnes, Updated Oct. 24, 2026. The U.S. government has ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave Saudi Arabia. It is also drawing down staff at other missions in the region.
The U.S. government has put employees on heightened alert across the Middle East and moved to reduce personnel levels at embassies and consulates because of intelligence showing Iran is in the advanced stages of planning attacks against Americans, U.S. officials said on Friday.
Intelligence officials raised alarms to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a memo on Friday that warned about the dangers to State Department employees in the Middle East and other regions, the officials said.
The memo, from Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, said that agencies had “received intelligence that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel. The lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries.”ImageTan stone buildings set against a gray sky.The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has been attacked by Iran.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Trump administration confirmed the memo on Friday night through a U.S. official. The move demonstrated the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking the threat, officials said. Axios earlier reported on the memo.
U.S. agencies assess that the threat against Americans in the Middle East and several other countries is at the highest level since the start of the war in February, U.S. officials said.
President Trump and top aides have received regular briefings on the rising threats, which go beyond the Middle East, one official said. Analysts have been examining the intelligence on the threats to U.S. officials, including ambassadors, in the past three weeks. Some material indicates Iran may have operatives in the United States, the official said. The Iranian plans also include potential targets in Europe, U.S. officials said.But another official cautioned that Iran’s ability to carry out attacks in the United States and other territories overseas is limited, and its ambitions to strike are greater than its capability to do so.
The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Mr. Clayton’s office and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
The State Department said through a U.S. official that “when it comes to our staffing at embassies, we constantly evaluate new information about the security environment.”
The official said that the threat of attacks by Houthi forces in Yemen and of “Iranian terror plots targeting U.S. officials” were informing State Department decisions on staffing adjustments for embassies. The missions were already at reduced levels under what the department calls “restricted operating status,” often invoked in conflict zones, the official said.
The State Department on Friday evening updated travel advisories for 13 countries across the Middle East. All of them are at orange level three, which means “reconsider travel,” or red level four, “do not travel.” In a statement on the advisories, the agency cited the potential for Houthi attacks across the region to escalate, and also underscored the persistent threat from drone and missile attacks by Iran.
Major U.S. Sex Scandals, Political Hypocrisy
New York Times, New York Archdiocese Agrees to Settle Sexual Abuse Claims for Over $800 Million, Maya King and Jeffery C. Mays, Oct. 24, 2026. The Roman Catholic archdiocese might now avoid bankruptcy by reaching a settlement with 1,300 people who said they had been abused by clergy members and lay leaders.
The Archdiocese of New York and plaintiffs’ lawyers reached an agreement on a proposed settlement in which the church would pay more than $800 million to settle claims from 1,300 people who said they had been sexually abused by its clergy members and lay leaders.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers said late Friday that they had finalized the settlement with the archdiocese and that all of the plaintiffs had signed off on it.
In an email to the priests of the archdiocese shared with The New York Times, Archbishop Ronald A. Hicks confirmed on Saturday that an agreement had been reached to settle the claims. He said the deal would not be final until the plaintiffs, lawyers and representatives for the archdiocese signed the settlement, which they were scheduled to do in early November.
“We are on the verge of being able to, please God, bring some measure of healing and reconciliation to all victim-survivors,” he said in the message, adding that the agreement “will also allow the archdiocese to turn its full attention once again to its mission of preaching the Gospel, healing the sick, caring for the poor and needy, welcoming the stranger, and educating our children.”
Terms of the settlement would call for each plaintiff to have the option of receiving a lump-sum payment of at least $250,000, or a potentially larger payout after a review of the extent of the abuse each plaintiff has claimed, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The proposal would end a multiyear saga that threatened to bankrupt America’s foremost Roman Catholic archdiocese. Litigation after the New York Child Victims Act opened the window for claims has been ongoing for seven years, said Jeff Anderson, whose firm, Jeff Anderson & Associates, represents nearly 300 clients who say they were abused.
Intense negotiations about the specific terms of the settlement have gone on for almost a year.
The terms of the proposed settlement required that all 1,300 plaintiffs accept it, and there were some holdouts, extending the timeline for the settlement as lawyers and archdiocese representatives worked to convince them that the proposal was the best deal they could get.
“Tonight, we were able to finalize the settlement with the Archdiocese,” Trusha Goffe, an attorney with Jeff Anderson & Associates, wrote Friday in an email to the firm’s clients. “All of the survivors agreed to the revised deal. This means that the settlement you agreed to will move forward.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they had repeatedly warned their clients that if they did not accept the proposal, the archdiocese would most likely declare bankruptcy, reducing the size of any eventual payout and prolonging litigation that had already lasted years.
To pay for the settlements, the archdiocese reduced its operating budget by 10 percent and sold off some of its most valuable properties, including its First Avenue headquarters and the land it owns beneath the Palace Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side.
Some parishes were also asked to help pay for the settlement. In an April meeting with priests, archdiocese leaders said they expected individual parishes to help raise money to fund the settlement or the archdiocese could face bankruptcy. Some parishioners are concerned about what the settlement will mean for their local church.
Archbishop Hicks sought to soothe some of those concerns in his email to priests on Saturday.
New York Times, Video by Left-Wing Group Claims Lindsey Graham Paid Men for Sex, Annie Karni, Oct. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Progressive activists released a video of three men making the allegations about the South Carolina Republican, who died in July. The New York Times has not confirmed their claims.
A video released on Thursday by a left-wing online news channel features three men who claim that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died suddenly in July, paid them for sex.
In the 30-minute video released by the Young Turks network, titled “The CLOSETocracy,” one man who identifies himself only by a first name, Kelvin, claims that Mr. Graham paid him for sex when he was 17 and surreptitiously taped him during the encounter.
Another man said he was picked up by a chauffeured car that delivered him to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he said he was paid to have sex and spend the night with Mr. Graham. That man, who is identified in the film as Cory, said he did not realize it was Mr. Graham until months later when he recognized the senator on television during the 2016 presidential race.
A third man said he was paid to have a sexual encounter with Mr. Graham.
Mr. Graham repeatedly denied that he was gay, even as rumors flew about the personal life of a senator who never married. After the release of the video, a spokesman for a conservative group said that Mr. Graham was gay, but dismissed it as an open secret and an attempt to distract voters in South Carolina’s Senate race.
The New York Times has not verified the identities of the men making the claims, or the veracity of their stories. A website promoting the video, called the Lindsey Graham Files, purports to show travel receipts and other documents from the time of the men’s alleged encounters with Mr. Graham.
The man who identifies himself in the video as Cory has also appeared in pornographic productions under the name Sean Harding.
In 2020, he posted online under the name Sean Harding: “There is a homophobic republican senator who is no better than Trump who keeps passing legislation that is damaging to the lgbt and minority communities. Every sex worker I know has been hired by this man. Wondering if enough of us spoke out if that could get him out of office?”
But it was not until after Mr. Graham’s death that he and others in the video went public in naming him and making claims that included allegations that he could not refute and could have resulted in a lawsuit when the senator was alive.
The video release came less than two weeks before the midterm elections, in which Mr. Graham’s sister, Senator Darline Graham, is in a tight race to retain her brother’s seat in South Carolina. Ms. Graham was appointed to finish the remainder of her brother’s term after his death and received President Trump’s endorsement.
A spokesman for Ms. Graham’s campaign declined to comment.
Representative William Timmons, Republican of South Carolina, posted online late Thursday that Mr. Graham was his longtime mentor and friend and that “after 45 years of service to South Carolina and our country, he deserves better than the Left spreading disgraceful lies about a man who is no longer here to defend himself.”
He did not explicitly address the claim that Mr. Graham was gay, but added “the willingness to stoop to homophobic attacks for political gain says far more about them than it ever will about Lindsey.” He said he expected Ms. Graham to win her race by 10 points.
A longtime top aide to Mr. Graham, Kevin Bishop, referred The Times to Mr. Timmons’s post when asked for comment.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican representative from Georgia who broke with Mr. Trump and left Congress this year, called the men who appeared in the video “brave” for telling “intimate details of their personal lives.”
“The worst kept secret in Washington DC came out today because 3 brave men came out and told the truth,” she wrote online.
“We all knew Lindsey Graham was gay. Everyone did,” Ms. Greene wrote. “So everyone is arguing about how this is old news, why now? Or arguing about being gay, and gay issues.”
But the true issue, she added, is “that America’s most powerful leaders keep secrets that comprise them in the most dangerous ways for the security, safety, and prosperity of our nation.”
Cenk Uygur, a co-founder of the Young Turks, promoted his video before its release as a “bombshell documentary” in which he would reveal a Republican senator who used male escorts. But the allegations were greeted with a shrug by some on the right, who called discussions of Mr. Graham’s sexuality the worst kept secret in Washington.
“Dear Democrats, This is why we called him Lady Graham,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, wrote online, using a moniker that circulated widely on social media in 2020 after Mr. Harding first posted the claim that a Republican senator was paying for sex, who he said had the initials “LG.”
“This isn’t an October surprise, we’ve known this for years,” Mr. Kolvet added. “And blaming his sister for the fact Lindsey was a poorly closeted gay man, is only going to backfire. No one cares.”
Mr. Graham, who died suddenly at age 71 of an aortic dissection, never married, and his single status for decades spurred questions about his sexuality. He was aware of the rumors, but always categorically denied that he was gay.
“I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2010. “I ain’t gay. Sorry.”
During his 23 years in the Senate, Mr. Graham, an energetic, omnipresent Washington fixture who condemned Mr. Trump before becoming his top ally in Congress, was a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage.
He voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy that barred openly gay people from serving in the military. And he opposed adding a provision to the annual defense policy bill to expand the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Opinion and Advocacy: More Signs Of Trumpian Unraveling And Decline, On Alaska: “I’m The One That Said Do It,” More Encouraging Early Vote Data, We Are Prepared Not Scared, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 24, 2026. There is a lot of news today. Let’s get to it…..
Desperate men do desperate things. The polling got worse for them this week. Their battlefield keeps eroding and they -- the Trumpies -- are spending money and campaigning in states like Kansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states he won by 16, 23, and 18 points just two years ago. This months’ jobs and inflation reports were terrible. His failed war that just keeps failing has caused oil prices to soar, again:
Consumer confidence has fallen to the lowest level in 65 years. It is a remarkable and full-throated vote of no-confidence in him and his band of buffoons, extremists, and quislings:
The early vote is also not going their way. Turnout is running above 2022 at this point (bad for them), Dems lead in the early vote by 15 points, 54%-39% (bad for them), and we now clearly seeing a surge of young people, blacks, and Hispanics voting early (really bad for them):
The regime itself has descended into chaos. Savage leaks are flying, internal infighting has spilled out into the streets, people -- usually women -- are getting fired right and left. We got brutal new stories documenting Trump’s corruption and looting this week. A major new Trumpian scandal in Alaska broke overnight. Trump is showing undeniable signs of cognitive decline on the campaign trail as his persistent praise of the bodies and looks of men has become a real and even for Trump just jawdropping thing:
Rejected, repudiated, losing; an historic, world-altering failure; a desperate and unwell Trump is resorting of course to rancid, impulsive, and outrageous fuckery. He has waged a deeply racist campaign against a sitting Rep. Illan Omar, who is black, a woman, and an immigrant. His DOJ just prosecuted another powerful black woman, State Senator Louise Lucas of Virginia. Trump has enthusiastically promoted Vivek’s vile attack on Dr. Amy Acton. Scared and worried he has run into the arms of his big daddy and protector, Vladdy, over in Russia. He launched a keystone cops effort to challenge the vote in California, one that was immediately debunked and discredited (though we have to keep fighting). And now, rattled and addled, the mad king ordered his henchmen at what used to be the Department of Justice to ensure that only the Republican candidate can win the Senate race in Alaska:
Just read what Trump is choosing to spend his time on in these closing days of the campaign. It’s so unhinged:
As we are, to quote our friend Jane Kleeb, prepared not scared, we are fighting all this Trumpian fuckery head on:
And that’s how I want to end today. We are prepared not scared. Pushing through all of his impulsive and desperate efforts to forestall the impending and resounding vote of no confidence in him and his regime the picture that is emerging is one of Trumpian desperation, weakness, and decline. It feels like we are nearing the end of his run. His powers have ebbed. Voters have had it. He has been too wild, corrupt, and crazy. He has done too much damage to the country. He is unfit and unwell. A reckoning is coming, and no one in our history has deserved it more than this terrible, terrible man and the cowardly enablers around him.
The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Does Ramaswamy’s Depraved New Ad Mark a New Low in the GOP’s Moral Collapse? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 24, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion.
Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election 
Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins.
Trump is now saying that he ordered this outrage. There are two Republican Dan Sullivans on the ballot, the first being their actual Republican guy and the other a guy with the same name from a remote part of the state. (The Democrats did NOT put him up to it; he’s just an eccentric Alaskan.)
When Republicans tried to get the second/spoiler Dan Sullivan kicked off the ballot it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that anybody named Dan Sullivan or anything else had the First Amendment right to speak on the issues and run for office. The state is trying to reduce confusion by making it clear on the ballot that the “real” Dan Sullivan is a Republican and the incumbent; the other DS won’t get either designation.But Trump’s subservient DOJ says that’s not enough and if Democrat Mary Peltola wins they’re claiming it’ll be because of “ballot confusion”…and she’s currently leading in the polls by two points.
The same day, AG and former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche refused to promise never to block a state’s certification, so this happening in other states, too, is moving from weird to probable. The US Constitution hands elections to the states, and a federal court has no business pre-rejecting a result that hasn’t happened yet, but the law and the Constitution have rarely stopped this criminal enterprise that’s taken over the GOP from moving ahead. And if they succeed in Alaska, it’s a safe bet they’ll try contesting as many Democratic victories as they can elsewhere. Will the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court again ignore the Constitution and the law to go along with Trump’s efforts to turn America into Russia (remember, as Bette Dangerous points out, 4 of them worked successfully to overturn the 2000 election and deny Al Gore his victory)? Stay tuned…
— The Supreme Court just told New Hampshire’s college students to go find a different ID two weeks before an election, and did it in the name of not changing the rules too close to an election. While Texas allows voters to use a gun permit as ID to vote, in an unsigned one-paragraph order Thursday the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court and an appeals court order so they could forbid New Hampshire college students from using student ID. The so-called “Purcell principle” — long followed by the Court — says that decisions that could influence the conduct or outcome of an election shouldn’t be handed down within 90 days of that election, as Kentanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, saying they shouldn’t now “disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order.” But here we are and this GOP-dominated Court has been doing everything they can to tilt elections toward Republicans for at least 20 years.
— Trump now says he has “the right” to run in 2028 because, you see, the election he lost in 2020 was stolen, so it doesn’t count. He made the claim at a rally Thursday night in Sioux City, claiming that with his constitutional brilliance and great mind he’s studied the 22nd Amendment and concluded, “I have the right to run again” because, he says, Democrats cheated and stole the 2020 election (which he lost by over 7 million votes) from him. There is, however, no “but they cheated” clause, no asterisk, and no loophole for an 80-year-old who’s been hustling “Trump 2028” hats out of the White House gift shop in violation of the Hatch Act. Maybe he’s just trying to grab another headline to distract from the rape allegations against him in the Epstein files, the cost of gas, the dead Americans and the cover-up of the damage to our facilities in the Gulf region, or his capitulation to his master, Putin? Hard to tell and few believe he’ll be in any shape to run for office in 2 years anyway, but he’s an ever-reliable source of outrage and lawlessness.
— Trump spent Thursday night demanding that Mike Johnson refuse to seat Ilhan Omar, and for good measure declared that her party had “conceded” her seat. On his Nazi-infested social media site Trump posted that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar was sworn in “under a fake name” because the ballots don’t have her middle name and therefore she must resign immediately and that Mike Johnson (who’s first name is really James) should force her to surrender her seat in the House. Trump has a long history of hating on Black people, and Black immigrants in particular, but this is particularly disgusting. He also dusted off the decades-old and well-debunked smear that she’d married her brother (another “othering” lie by Republicans). This all comes just a week or so after he had ICE’s HSI agents raid her home and take her phone and computer as Blanche is “investigating” her citizenship. Trump’s argument this time is that when she ran for office the ballot didn’t include her middle name, Abdullahi, but merely said “Ilhan Omar.” Weird that they didn’t object when Gerald Ford, born Leslie Lynch King Jr., and Bill Clinton, born William Jefferson Blythe III, ran for office. Or James Donald Bowman, now known as JD Vance, or Rafael Edward Cruz, now known as Ted, or Nimarata Randhawa now Niki Haley, or Newton Leroy McPherson, now known as Newt Gingrich. The Constitution says that the House is the sole judge of its members’ qualifications, so Trump’s leaning on Mike Johnson in what’s probably a dress rehearsal for a mass refusal to seat victorious Democrats come January 3rd.
— Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms are apparently pushing hard for Trump’s buddy’s son, Flavio Bolsonaro, to win Brazil’s presidential runoff. Yesterday, the corporate accountability group Ekō published a report that claims to have proved that billionaire and Trump suck-up Zuckerberg’s Instagram is flooding Brazilian users’ feeds with pro-Bolsonaro and right-wing content while “actively suppressing Lula’s official campaign account.” Lula’s campaign had already won a ruling from Brazil’s top electoral court ordering Meta to stop this sort of thing and guarantee equal treatment after showing that Meta’s AI would happily generate campaign images of Bolsonaro but refused to make them for Lula. Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders wrote to Zuckerberg Thursday demanding answers. Meta also suspended a pro-Lula WhatsApp group that had gathered 3.3 million members in days, while they blamed a “technical glitch” for tanking the reach of Lula’s campaign and other videos. Keep in mind, this is the same Zuckerberg who flew to Mar-a-Lago, killed fact-checking, and gave Trump $25 million for his personal account. When one American billionaire owns the public square for an entire hemisphere, democracy is in a full-blown crisis.
— Donald Trump looked an NBC reporter in the eye Friday and said he doesn’t “know anything about a stepfather,” which is a remarkable claim about an ad he’s spent three days defending. Ohio Gubernatorial candidate and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign is paying for and running an ad calling Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton a liar for claiming her father raped her when she was 12 years old. In fact, the police and a grand jury agreed with the rape allegation at the time decades ago; Acton’s mother chose to leave the state with the rapist (Acton’s stepfather) to avoid his prosecution and imprisonment (he’s now dead) rather than stay and defend her daughter, who hasn’t seen or talked with her mother since she was 12. Trump and Vance are lining up — unsurprisingly — with the rapist and his wife who’s calling Acton a liar, while other Republicans (including Republican Governor Mike DeWine and Senator Jon Husted) are mumbling soft critiques of the ad but still endorsing Ramaswamy after this astonishing display of bad judgment and lack of a moral core. When NBC’s reporter Monica Alba pressed Trump Friday on the sexual abuse at the center of all this, he called Alba a “horrible little reporter,” told her to “be quiet,” and tried to pretend he didn’t know anything about the rapist father. What would you expect from a guy who’s been accused of rape too many times to remember and two juries found sexually abused E. Jean Carrol? Apparently Republicans think this is “owning the libs.” This ad, and the GOP’s response to it, and the ongoing coverup of the Epstein files with 3 million records still being hidden by Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, should tell every American what today’s Republican Party has become: a home for some of America’s most disgusting and despicable humans.
— A new book alleges Jared Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in Gulf money while running Middle East policy out of the White House, and Trump’s considered response is that the reports are “fake news.” Journalist Matthew Cole has a new book coming out soon titled “Princes and Thieves” and Vanity Fair just released an excerpt claiming that Jared Kushner became a signatory on a roughly $750 million account in the United Arab Emirates held through a charity, and the UAE’s ruler separately routed about $1 billion through Azerbaijan to Israel’s central bank at Netanyahu’s urging, money allegedly meant for Kushner’s personal benefit. While Trump calls it fake news, former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt isn’t buying the denials, calling it “financial treason” and demanding Kushner’s immediate removal from every diplomatic assignment as well as a criminal investigation. Even though Kushner holds no official title, doesn’t answer to the Senate or have any confirmation, and openly took $2 billion from a Saudi Prince, he’s still representing the US. That lack of status, by the way, lets him avoid all the disclosures and security checks actual government employees would have to do. Democrats in Congress are salivating over a chance to get Kushner before a committee with a subpoena, although most are betting that Trump and Kushner will simply ignore the law and Blanche will refuse to enforce any contempt of Congress referrals to DOJ. This is getting more like a bad mob movie every day.
— Climate Alert! The American West has lost nearly 300 of its original 1,450 glaciers since the 1960s. A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a real shocker: the total area of glaciers across six western states has collapsed by a third in sixty years, and the loss is accelerating. Some were even leftovers from the last ice age. Many of these glaciers were essentially the reservoirs for downstream towns, farms, and hydro dams, presenting some very real problems that are just now starting to manifest. Meanwhile, Trump calls the climate crisis a hoax, pulled us out of Paris again, gutted the EPA, and chants “drill, baby, drill” at every opportunity. All, presumably, because the industry has shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars at him and his GOP colleagues, who’ve been 100% entirely captured by the oil, gas, and coal oligarchs. Vote!
The Hill, Norman’s son says he’s ‘leaning’ toward voting for Andrews for South Carolina Senate, Sarah Davis, Oct. 23, 2026. The son of GOP Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.), Warren Norman, said Friday he is “leaning” toward supporting the Democratic candidate in South Carolina’s Senate race, pediatrician Annie Andrews.
Ralph Norman, who was defeated by Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the GOP primary, said in a radio interview this week he would back the Republican nominee in the November election but indicated that his family would not vote for her.
The Republican’s son made it official in an op-ed published in South Carolina outlet FITSNews, titled “Why This Lifelong Conservative Won’t Vote for Darline Graham.”
Warren Norman noted in his piece that the decision was not “personal,” extending his sympathy to Graham following the loss of her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
However, he claimed that there was “no true conservative to vote for in this election.”
“If Senator Graham wins, the establishment that backed her will protect her in every primary to come,” Norman wrote. “This seat could be hers for 24 years or more.
“If Annie Andrews wins and doesn’t stand up to her party the way she has promised, South Carolina voters can hold her accountable and replace her with a strong conservative in six,” he continued. “Six years we can hold accountable, or 24 years we can’t. To me, that isn’t a hard call.”
The Republican lawmaker’s son indicated that he was considering a vote for the Democratic nominee in the race instead. Despite disagreeing with Andrews “a lot,” the real estate partner said they agree “on some important things,” like opposing corruption and insurance reform.
“She struck me as genuine, and she has said publicly that she’ll stand up to her own party,” Norman wrote. “That is the standard I’m asking of every candidate, and I intend to hold her to it.
“As of today, I’m leaning her way,” he continued. “It will be the first time in my life I’ve voted for a Democrat in a partisan election.”
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim refuted by other sources
Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t hide all the corruption forever, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Oct. 23-24, 2026. At 6:07 tonight, the president of the United States and the governor of Florida made a beeline straight to the press that were waiting beside Qatari Air Force One on the tarmac in Fort Myers, Florida.
As they got closer, Donald Trump fumbled with a coin in his hands just as DeSantis grabbed it and thrust it directly in front of the reporters and their cameras. With Donald Trump standing behind him, the right side of his mouth drooping downwards, DeSantis grinned from ear to ear as he showed the journalists the shiny gold-plated coin he had presented to the president, embossed with the words “YOU MISSED BITCHES” and a distorted image of Donald Trump holding up his middle finger.
What was apparently intended to exaggerate his “near-death experience” in Butler, PA, also made a perfect distraction from the news of the rampant corruption in Donald Trump’s administration.
On the eve of one of the most important elections of our lifetimes, Donald Trump is already trying to interfere with the election process before the votes are even counted. Yesterday, Trump’s Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Alaska seeking to delay certification of the Senate election if the results are close between incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and another candidate on the ballot, Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., in case there is confusion over their similar names. The DOJ argues in the lawsuit that if the margin is narrow enough for those potentially confused votes to change the outcome, the state should not certify the results until the issue is resolved.
The Alaska Supreme Court had already addressed this situation after state election officials tried to block Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the ballot, claiming his candidacy was intended to confuse voters. In June, after he challenged the decision in court, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling allowing him to stay in the race, with the state taking steps to prevent any such confusion by making sure the ballot clearly distinguished the two candidates with party designations and an incumbent label. The issue had already been settled by the state’s highest court, but the federal government still filed its lawsuit before a single vote had even been counted.
Derek Muller, a Notre Dame election law professor, described the case as “strange and unusual.” Former DOJ voting rights attorney Justin Levitt said he knew of no legal path for blocking certification simply because the government believed a candidate should not have been permitted to run. Democracy Docket identified this as the first Trump administration lawsuit seeking to block certification of a 2026 midterm result.
Earlier today, reporters had a chance to ask Donald Trump about the case, and he didn’t play his usual game of ignorance. Instead, he admitted he was the one who personally ordered it, saying, “I’m the one who said, ‘do it.’” That is the president of the United States of America admitting to meddling in our elections by personally ordering his DOJ to file a federal lawsuit against a state. All to potentially block the certification of a Senate election his party might lose, simply because he wants them to win instead. It is an insult and an attack on the very foundation of our democratic republic.
This was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the corruption coming out of the White House. We also learned about a different type, this time coming from inside the Trump family. Vanity Fair published an article with details from investigative journalist Matthew Cole’s new book, Princes and Thieves. His investigation details how Russian military intelligence allegedly hacked the personal iPhone of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, while he was serving as a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term. It also shares a disturbing account of how Dutch intelligence supposedly discovered the breach after flipping a Russian hacker who gave them access to screenshots taken directly from Kushner’s phone. What they reportedly found went far beyond the regular messages that many of us might have on our own phones and allegedly exposed Kushner’s access to at least two foreign bank accounts containing roughly two billion dollars in funds linked to the leaders of Middle Eastern countries and showed that he transferred approximately 700 million dollars, some of which went to a mercenary, a warlord, and a hit man.
Beyond the enormous question of what the president’s son-in-law was doing paying these people and what the payments were for, Cole’s investigation featured four former senior Trump administration officials who told him that they knew of no presidential authorization that would have allowed Kushner to access a foreign government’s bank account. What this investigation alleged was that the president’s son-in-law, who held a security clearance he initially could not even obtain on his own, had access to billions of dollars in foreign government money while his White House position involved helping shape American policy in the Middle East.
Kushner called the allegations “completely insane and never happened.” Trump called it “a totally false story.” Kushner’s lawyers stated that he “does not know if his iPhone was hacked or monitored while serving in the White House.” They threatened legal action, but did not deny the possibility of a hack, which raises an urgent national security question: What did Russia collect, and could it give them leverage over a man who has played such a significant role in Donald Trump’s foreign policy while we are embroiled in a war in the Middle East and supposedly working hard to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine?
That is where we are right now, but we do not have to keep living like this. We do not have to wake up every morning wondering what fresh hell this president has unleashed or what we are going to learn about him trying to interfere in our elections or how much someone in his family or inner circle has profited at our expense.
It’s not just us in the United States being rocked by everything Donald Trump is doing. He continues to cause havoc and mayhem across the entire planet. His increasing instability is making nations rethink so many things, including their own protection, their very survival, not to mention their economies and financial stability. My heart hurts just thinking about the impact this is having outside our borders. I think back to a conversation I had in Hungary with a taxi driver back in 2019 and how he felt like they were just starting to fully recover from the Great Recession all those years later, long after our economy had recovered. And here we are again, causing economic hardship and uncertainty for people who are stuck living through the consequences of our failure in voting this corrupt man back into office.
When I learned that the United Kingdom had launched a nationwide emergency preparedness campaign this week called “Be Ready,” urging every household to stockpile at least three days of supplies, my stomach dropped. The government cited increasing hostile Russian activity, conflict in the Middle East, and major cyberattacks as part of a changed security environment. Without explicitly saying so, the United States is not innocent in its role in creating the very instability these countries are now scrambling to protect themselves against.
Of course, the UK is not the only one doing this. The European Union issued similar guidance last year, and Sweden has also begun building national reserves of food, fuel, and power. CNN reported that the EU’s renewed push for emergency preparedness was driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and also by “the Trump administration’s confrontational approach towards Europe, particularly on contributions to NATO and on the war in Ukraine, which has sparked a race on the continent to shore up its own military readiness.”
Most Americans care about their fellow human beings. They want people to be fed and housed, and they want peace for all people. They do not want wars, and they don’t want our allies suffering. They want to have good relations with our friends around the world. They simply don’t know how this is impacting people around the world. Our news organizations rarely cover news outside the US, especially during the Trump years when there are nonstop scandals coming from inside the White House. That is why it is on those of us who think as globalists to continue speaking out and make sure more Americans know how far Donald Trump’s destruction actually reaches.
We are not just voting for ourselves and the future survival of our country in eleven days. We are also voting for every person on this planet who has been caught in the crossfire of Donald Trump’s reckless decisions. I still believe in our country and the people in it to do the right thing. Donald Trump and his enablers have put us through hell, forcing us to live in a constant state of chaos and uncertainty, but that is going to change very soon. We are going to show up and vote in numbers never seen before and start the slow and painful process of building our country back into one that doesn’t cause fear and instability across the planet. One that stands by our allies, treats other nations with respect, and understands that our actions have consequences for people far beyond our own borders. We are going to vote like our lives and the lives of people everywhere depend on it, because they do. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
More News Updates
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump’s Election Takeover Fails in Court, Orders Lawsuit to Block Alaska Results, Berates Female Reporter, and More Major Corruption, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. This morning [Friday], I published my investigation into Donald Trump’s nearly 50-year relationship with Russia, laying out the documented record in one place, from Soviet bloc surveillance files to waived sanctions and delayed air defense missiles for Ukraine. The response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of you read it, shared it, and sent it to people who needed to see it.
It has also made some people very angry. Since this morning, the attacks on our work have increased significantly. I want you to know that I’m safe, I’m taking the necessary precautions, and none of it will change what we do here. If anything, the pushback tells me the reporting landed exactly where it needed to.
And today’s news only reinforces why this work matters. The Justice Department is suing to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race if the Republican loses, and Trump says he personally ordered it. The White House is taking credit for a ceasefire in Ukraine that Pope Leo was publicly pushing for a week ago. And yet, there’s real reason for hope: Trump’s campaign to take over our elections is failing in the courts and with voters, with at least 34 federal rulings against him and a new poll showing most Americans reject his fraud narrative. You’ll find all of it below.
I’m able to do this work because I’m fully independent. No advertiser dictates my coverage. No corporation can pressure me into pulling a story. No political office shapes my reporting. I answer only to you. With the midterms just 11 days away, this is the moment that matters most. If you believe in independent journalism that holds power accountable no matter the pushback, become a paid subscriber today. It’s the single most powerful way to make sure this work keeps reaching the people who need it.
Here’s what you need to know tonight.
Trump’s Campaign to Take Over Elections Is Failing in the Courts and With Voters
Trump’s attempts to seize control of how Americans vote are collapsing in court, with at least 34 federal rulings blocking his efforts. Judges across the political spectrum have ruled against him, including 22 appointed by Democrats and 12 appointed by Republicans, eight of them appointed by Trump himself. His March 2025 executive order requiring documents like a passport to register to vote has been largely blocked, with one judge writing that when it comes to running elections, “the President does not feature at all.” His second order, directing the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots to voters left off a new federal list, was also struck down, with a judge warning it could have disenfranchised millions of citizens. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand, guaranteeing voters can cast mail ballots in the midterms without interference. Ruling after ruling has delivered the same message: the Constitution gives the president no power over who votes or how.
Trump’s Justice Department has lost every single one of its 26 decided lawsuits demanding states hand over Americans’ private voter data. Since May 2025, the department has tried to force nearly every state to turn over complete voter rolls, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, and election officials from both parties have refused. Judges have called the demands baseless, and an Oregon court described as “chilling” the department’s plans to build a nationwide voter database for uses including immigration enforcement. Even a Trump-appointed judge in Maine rejected the department’s attempt to twist a Jim Crow-era civil rights law to justify the grab, saying it would “take a sledgehammer” to the balance Congress created. The administration’s one notable win came when the Supreme Court allowed it to keep using an expanded citizenship-checking program that a lower court had ruled illegal, but even that ruling is not expected to affect the midterms. Taken together, Trump’s legal push to control elections has been rejected at nearly every turn.
Trump’s effort to convince Americans the midterms will be rigged is failing too, with voters overwhelmingly rejecting his fraud narrative. A new YouGov poll for Protect Democracy found Trump hasn’t persuaded most voters, or even a plurality of Republicans, that the election will be fraudulent or that federal intervention is justified. A majority, 56 percent, believe he’s trying to control election rules to ensure Republicans win whether or not elections are fair, while only 37 percent think he wants fair elections regardless of the outcome. Nine in ten voters, including 88 percent of Republicans, say officials have a duty to certify results even when the other party wins. Election denial is also backfiring politically, with 58 percent saying they’d be less likely to support an official who tries to block or delay certification, compared with just 13 percent who’d be more likely. Election denialism remains stuck at roughly one in five voters, and the pollsters called its failure to spread a very positive sign for democracy.
Trump Says He Ordered DOJ Lawsuit to Block Certification of Alaska Senate Race if Sen. Dan Sullivan Loses
The Justice Department has sued to block Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, and Trump says he ordered it. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Anchorage, targets a second candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., whom the DOJ accuses of running to mislead the senator’s supporters into voting for him by mistake. It asks a judge to halt certification if the senator loses and would have won had all of Sullivan Jr.’s votes gone to him instead, pending an investigation into voter confusion. “I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters Friday, calling the second Sullivan’s candidacy “a disgrace.” The suit was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who represented Trump allies and Jan. 6 defendants before joining the department. It was filed 11 days before the Nov. 3 election, the same day Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters the DOJ never intends to improperly interfere with elections or certification.
The race could decide control of the Senate, and the second Sullivan’s place on the ballot has already been settled by Alaska’s courts. Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, led the August all-party primary with 49.5 percent, followed by Sen. Sullivan at 41.4 percent and Sullivan Jr. at 2.5 percent. Polls show Peltola tied or slightly ahead in a state Trump carried by about 14 points in 2024, with his approval hurt by high fuel prices and an unpopular conflict in the Middle East. Alaska’s Republican election officials tried to remove Sullivan Jr. from the ballot in June, but a state court and the Alaska Supreme Court kept him on. On the November ballot, the senator is listed as the Republican incumbent, while Sullivan Jr. appears with no party label. Sullivan Jr., a former teacher and Forest Service worker, denies any scheme and says he’s exercising his right to run, while Peltola’s campaign says it has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign.
Election law experts say the lawsuit has little legal basis and is unlikely to survive. Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said federal law doesn’t let the DOJ block certification, called it one of the worst legal arguments he’s ever seen, and said it seems designed to win a press release rather than the case. David Becker of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research called it an unprecedented federal intervention, noting the Constitution leaves it to states to run and certify their own elections. Democrats warn it signals a broader willingness to contest midterm results, echoing Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee called it a “sham lawsuit” to steal an election. The DOJ says it is acting under the National Voter Registration Act to stop a “frivolous candidacy” from undermining the election’s integrity. The senator’s campaign wouldn’t say whether it supports the suit, saying only that it will let the complaint run its course.
Trump Lashes Out at Reporter Over Ramaswamy Ad Featuring Amy Acton’s Estranged Mother
Trump called an NBC reporter a “horrible little reporter” after she pressed him on his support for Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother. The ad, from Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ramaswamy, features Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar and urging voters not to elect her. NBC’s Monica Alba asked Trump Friday whether the sexual abuse allegations against Acton’s stepfather “mean nothing” to him, noting the mother had stayed with the man accused of raping Acton as a child. Trump asked which outlet she worked for, called NBC “one of the worst” networks, told her to be quiet, and said he didn’t know anything about “stepfathers from many many years ago.” He insisted the ad had “nothing to do with a stepfather,” called the mother “fair game,” and said he would be lucky to have an ad like it. At a rally in Iowa the night before, Trump said Ramaswamy had called him for advice and that he told him, “You’ve got to ride with it.”
Acton’s stepfather was charged with raping her when she was 12, and her mother lost custody of her and her brother. According to police and court records obtained by the Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested in July 1978 after Acton’s biological father reported him, accused of abusing her from December 1976 to April 1978. He pleaded not guilty and was indicted by a grand jury, then skipped a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981; he has since died. Acton, Ohio’s former public health director during the COVID-19 pandemic, has spoken openly about the neglect, abuse, and homelessness she experienced as a child, saying she shares her story to give others hope that they can escape similar circumstances. She told Spectrum News she won’t normalize someone who treats her childhood as “something I’m complaining about.” At a campaign stop this week, a supporter asked if she could give Acton a hug, one sign of the outpouring Acton says she has received since the ad aired.
Ramaswamy is doubling down, while some prominent Republicans have broken with him. Speaking in northeast Ohio Friday, Ramaswamy said the ad was about lying, not childhood abuse, and accused critics of “lying about an ad that is about lying.” He has argued Acton has spread defamatory claims about him and his family, pointing to a Democratic ad in which a man accuses him of promoting an Alzheimer’s drug that didn’t work. But Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed Acton as health director and has endorsed Ramaswamy, said “it’s wrong to run this ad” and called for it to be taken down. The race is one of the most competitive governor’s contests in the country, with Acton vying to become Ohio’s first elected female governor and its first Democratic governor elected in two decades. An election forecaster has already shifted its rating of the race amid the backlash.
Melania Trump Credited With Oleshky Ceasefire as Starshield Confusion and Russian Strikes Continue
The White House is now crediting Melania Trump with brokering a ceasefire in Ukraine, just one week after Pope Leo personally called Vladimir Putin to push for the exact same thing. On October 16, Pope Leo called Putin from his hospital bed to request a ceasefire in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky so desperately needed food and medical aid could reach civilians and those who want to leave could be evacuated. The Kremlin said afterward that Putin supported the Vatican’s effort and would cooperate. Fast-forward to Friday, and the White House announced that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire in Oleshky, claiming she initiated discussions with Russian and Ukrainian leadership to make it happen. The Associated Press reported the White House’s account without any mention of the Pope’s intervention a week earlier. So why is the White House taking credit for an initiative Pope Leo was publicly pursuing days ago?
The situation in Oleshky is dire, and key details of the deal remain unclear. Once home to about 24,000 people, the city has been occupied since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion and now has no electricity, heat, or running water, with mined roads and drones overhead. Around 2,000 residents remain trapped amid severe shortages of food and medicine. Under the plan, a ceasefire would be followed by aid deliveries and then the option for civilians to leave, which Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman called extremely challenging to carry out. Peskov would not say whether evacuees will be taken to Russian- or Ukrainian-held territory, or how long the evacuation will last. The first lady said an impartial American media organization would document the process, and the outlet chosen is Newsmax, founded by longtime Trump friend Christopher Ruddy.
Trump says Elon Musk has restored Ukraine’s military satellite access, but Ukraine says the restrictions are still in place. Ukrainian drones began dropping from the sky in mid-October when Starshield, the military version of Starlink, suddenly cut connections for drones flying faster than 100 miles per hour, disrupting frontline operations and Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian jet-powered drones. The New York Times reported that Trump called Musk last week asking him to restore access, and Trump said Musk “put it back,” though on Friday he said he had not spoken to Musk. Ukraine’s top diplomat in Washington said Friday that nothing had changed and the speed limits remain, while a Ukrainian drone commander described constant interruptions. Who ordered the limits is still disputed: Musk says the U.S. military and ultimately the president decide, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says no one in the administration requested changes, and The Wall Street Journal reported Musk ordered the slowdown himself. Sen. Richard Blumenthal has opened an inquiry, and a bipartisan group led by Sens. Mark Kelly and Thom Tillis urged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to expand Ukraine’s Starshield contract so service can’t be cut again.
Russia launched a major attack on Ukraine’s power grid just as peace talks were said to be moving forward. Overnight strikes on energy facilities across six regions knocked out electricity for more than 500,000 people, and the private energy company DTEK said one of its thermal power plants stopped generating power. The attack came days after Trump envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin in St. Petersburg, after which Putin said Russia was ready to resume U.S.-mediated talks with Ukraine in November, with the Kremlin now pointing to Abu Dhabi in the first half of the month. Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” announced October 11, has produced no meaningful results, with Ukraine resuming strikes on Russian refineries after Russia kept hitting its infrastructure. Even U.S. diplomats in Kyiv are uneasy: the embassy’s deputy chief of mission sent staff a memo acknowledging public commentary had left many wondering where the U.S.-Ukraine relationship stands. Zelenskyy says he is ready for a ceasefire but that Ukraine needs strong security guarantees.
Kushner Threatens to Sue Over Report Alleging He Had Access to $2 Billion in Secret Middle East Accounts
A new book excerpt alleges Jared Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in secret bank accounts funded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia during Trump’s first term. The claims come from journalist Matthew Cole’s forthcoming book, “Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East,” excerpted by Vanity Fair. According to the report, Dutch intelligence found screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone on a server run by Russia’s military intelligence agency after flipping a Russian operative in 2017, then monitored his phone activity. The report alleges that in 2018, Dutch officials saw Kushner log into an account at First Abu Dhabi Bank that had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. That account, held by a UAE government-funded charity, allegedly took in about $750 million, with Kushner listed as a signatory but not the owner. At the time, Kushner was serving as a senior White House adviser.
The report also alleges a second account in Israel received about $1 billion intended for Kushner’s personal benefit. According to the excerpt, the two accounts grew out of an idea by Gulf royals to create a slush fund to help advance the Trump administration’s foreign policy goals, an idea that eventually fizzled. A source quoted in the book says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged Kushner to have the money deposited in Israel. The report says Kushner communicated with Netanyahu about the transactions through then-Ambassador David Friedman, who called the allegations about him “100% false.” As a White House employee, Kushner would have been required to disclose accounts he could access, which is why the allegations carry potential legal weight if proven. The allegations have not been established as findings of wrongdoing.
Kushner, his lawyers, the White House, and Trump have all forcefully denied the report. Kushner called the claims “completely insane,” said they “never happened,” and noted the report included no bank statements, wire records, account numbers, or transaction dates. His attorney Chad Mizelle said the team sent the publisher a 13-page letter denying the allegations before publication and now intends to pursue legal action against those responsible. White House officials called the story “baseless smears” and fiction, and said it relied on anonymous sources who never saw the alleged events firsthand. Trump told reporters Friday it was “a totally false story” and “fake news.” House Oversight Committee Democrats, meanwhile, said Kushner must answer the questions publicly, calling it the latest in a series of allegations that he has been selling foreign policy to the highest bidder.
Other news:
The Trump administration has dropped some Canada tariffs, according to Sen. Susan Collins, in a move seen as an implicit acknowledgment that the trade war could be hurting Republicans before the midterms. Collins, who faces a tough re-election fight in Maine, announced she secured exemptions from 50 percent duties on certain agricultural and forestry products, including items crucial to Maine’s blueberry, potato, apple, and seaweed growers. The exemptions also cover packing materials, refrigeration equipment, labeling machinery, and other supplies that she said farmers can’t easily get from American suppliers. Her announcement credited Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick but did not mention Trump, who has repeatedly claimed the U.S. needs nothing from Canada. The 50 percent tariffs were imposed after Canada walked away from trade talks in August, and other Republicans, including Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, have said they want the trade war “wrapped up.” Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has turned to other partners and is set to sign a historic deal making Canada the European Union’s first-ever “associate member.”
A personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine is being hailed as a “game changer” after cutting the risk of the cancer returning or causing death by 42 percent. In the late-stage trial of 1,137 Stage 3 melanoma patients who had their tumors removed, 82 percent of those who got the vaccine plus the immunotherapy drug Keytruda had no recurrence after two years, compared with 70 percent who got Keytruda alone. The vaccine, developed by Moderna and Merck, is built from each patient’s own tumor genome to train the immune system to hunt down remaining cancer cells, and patients received their custom doses in a little over nine weeks on average. Side effects were mild, similar to those of COVID vaccines, which experts called a major advantage over past combination treatments that caused serious immune reactions. Some experts urged caution, noting the benefit over Keytruda alone is modest, the data hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and 17 percent of screened patients didn’t have large enough tumor samples to make a vaccine. Researchers are already testing the approach in advanced melanoma and in bladder, kidney, and lung cancers.
An Ohio father was found guilty of murdering a retired sheriff’s deputy hours after watching police body camera video of his son being fatally shot. Rodney Hinton was convicted Friday of charges including murder for striking and killing Hamilton County Special Deputy Larry Henderson with his car in May 2025. Earlier that day, Hinton had been called to a police station to view footage of a Cincinnati officer shooting his 18-year-old son, Ryan Hinton, who police said was armed and fleeing from a reportedly stolen car. Hinton’s defense sought a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, citing his mental health history, while prosecutors said he accelerated to over 43 miles per hour and steered toward Henderson as the deputy tried to step out of the way. Henderson had retired about five months earlier and was directing traffic near the University of Cincinnati during graduation. Hinton is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 16.
U.S. consumer sentiment has fallen to near its lowest point on record as Iran war-driven prices sour Americans’ view of the economy days before the midterms. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index slipped to 48.0 in October, the second-lowest reading since the survey began and just above the all-time low of 44.8 set in May, shortly after the war with Iran started. Sentiment is now 10 percent lower than a year ago and 15 percent lower than in February, before the conflict began, with the survey’s director saying purchasing power continues to dominate how consumers see the economy. The decline was driven largely by independents, a key swing-voter group, whose sentiment plunged from 47.7 to 42.4, while Democrats and Republicans saw slight improvements. Since January, the share of Republicans saying high prices are hurting their finances has jumped 52 percent, compared with 27 percent for independents and 15 percent for Democrats. Americans now expect inflation of 4.7 percent over the next year, up from 3.4 percent in February, as Trump’s approval hits a record low in Reuters/Ipsos polling and Republicans risk losing control of Congress.
The Justice Department has charged two former top FBI officials, frequent targets of Trump allies, with lying to Congress about the Hunter Biden investigations. Nikki Floris, former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, and Bradley Benavides, who worked on election security and foreign influence, each face one count of a rarely charged crime that can be difficult to prosecute. U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said the two surrendered Friday and alleged they lied about their roles in the Foreign Influence Task Force and the Hunter Biden probes. The case was brought by criminal complaint, not grand jury indictment, in a city where grand jurors have rejected several Trump-era cases, including an attempt to indict six Democratic members of Congress. Floris, the FBI’s security lead for the 2020 election, has been criticized by Republicans who allege FBI officials buried a report on Chinese election interference, which her lawyers and intelligence officials say was a standard administrative decision. Her attorneys called the charges “nonsense,” saying they were filed on “the say-so of politicians” just before an election.
Trump’s border chief is defending plans to build a wall in Texas’ Big Bend region despite a court-ordered pause and bipartisan opposition. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told the Associated Press that fortifying the border is “non-negotiable” and warned Big Bend would be “completely overrun” if left without barriers while other areas are walled off. Landowners, local businesses, environmentalists, and some Republican lawmakers argue the $46 billion project is wasteful and destructive in a region with historically low migrant crossings. A judge ordered construction in the region halted this month, and the administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift that order. Scott said plans for Big Bend National Park won’t include tall steel walls, after bulldozers seen tearing up ground there in August sparked an outcry. He says the overall wall is ahead of schedule, with about 12 miles built per week and the primary wall set to be finished by the end of 2027.
The Mississippi police officer who fatally shot 1-year-old Kohen Wiley has resigned, days after the state ruled the shooting justified. Hunter Foster left the Senatobia Police Department shortly after Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office called the June 14 shooting a “justified” use of force. State investigators say officers responding to a shoplifting report at a Walmart tried to stop a fleeing car, the driver nearly hit an officer, and an officer fired, killing Kohen, who was in the vehicle. Kohen’s mother, represented by Ben Crump, disputes that account, saying they had gone to buy diapers and that she held her baby up to show officers he was in the car. Newly released body camera footage shows officers approaching with guns drawn and an officer firing into the front passenger window as the car pulled away from him. Foster’s lawyer says he resigned to help the community heal and insists he didn’t know a child was in the car.
U.S. airlines are choosing higher fares over fuller planes as soaring fuel costs squeeze profits. Jet fuel prices have jumped roughly 90 percent since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began in February, rising from $2.43 to $4.63 a gallon on the Gulf Coast. Across Delta, United, American, Southwest, and Alaska, passenger revenue rose 18 percent in the third quarter even though passenger traffic grew less than 1 percent. U.S. airfares climbed nearly 23 percent year over year through September, far outpacing overall inflation of 3.6 percent, and airlines are still pushing new fare hikes. Airport security screenings fell nearly 3 percent in the quarter, raising questions about whether high prices are starting to keep travelers home, though executives insist demand remains strong. Despite record revenue, Delta and Southwest have cut their earnings forecasts and American expects a full-year loss.
The Oregon father who stopped a school shooter says he’s haunted that he couldn’t save everyone. Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter in Bend, ended up near Silver Rail Elementary on Oct. 15 only because he changed his lunch plans to go home for leftover tacos with his wife. He saw a gunman opening fire on a motorist and a woman mowing the school lawn, grabbed the handgun from his truck, called 911, and crawled into the school through a shot-out window, believing it would be the last thing he ever did. He found the 16-year-old shooter struggling with a teacher for his gun and fatally shot him, after the attacker had already killed a teacher and three young children. Police have credited his quick action with stopping the attack, but Giamanco, whose two daughters attend the school, says he can’t sleep and keeps reliving the screams. He says he wants to apologize to the families of the children who died for not saving them.
Israel has launched what critics call a campaign of collective punishment in Hebron after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a shooting near a checkpoint. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a siege on Hebron and nearby Halhul, promised mass home demolitions, and said residents of the gunmen’s neighborhoods would be forced out. Defense Minister Israel Katz explicitly compared the plan to Gaza and to Jenin refugee camp, where nearly 20,000 people have been displaced, and Netanyahu said the largest West Bank military operation since 1967 is “on the way.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich posted a video in front of a bulldozer demolishing a Palestinian home, saying it was meant to “exact a price,” though no link was claimed between its owners and the attackers. Israel’s high court issued a temporary order halting the demolitions after human rights lawyers argued they violate international law. The escalation comes days before Israeli elections on Tuesday, with polls suggesting the governing far-right coalition could lose its majority.
Tech leaders are warning of a “vulnerability tsunami” after AI helped uncover a massive security flaw that may have left most of the internet exposed for years. Researchers used AI to find severe bugs in PHP, a programming language so widely used that some experts estimate 70 percent of all websites were at risk. Government and private websites across the U.S. and U.K. went offline temporarily to patch the flaws, and the NSA urged every site running PHP to update immediately. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said hacking attempts exploded from thousands before the announcement to millions afterward, and warned the next two years will be “incredibly fraught.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he no longer thinks every bug can be patched, and Anthropic’s deputy chief information security officer warned there won’t be enough time to fix critical infrastructure. Security researchers called it among the most severe vulnerabilities in software history, saying the flaws had existed for decades but were nearly impossible for humans alone to prove exploitable.
Epstein-linked billionaire Glenn Dubin has stepped down from the board of New York’s Mount Sinai hospital, which features heavily in the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Dubin, a hedge fund founder who once called Epstein a friend, had served on the board since 2007, and his wife, who dated Epstein before their marriage, also left the medical school’s board this year. Mount Sinai says their terms simply ended and they didn’t seek re-election, and won’t say whether its internal review of Epstein ties played any role. The files show Epstein’s donations gave him “VIP” status at the hospital, including an incident in which a Mount Sinai surgeon appears to have stitched up a young Russian woman’s forehead inside Epstein’s townhouse after she was injured on his island. Rep. Thomas Massie recently named Dubin on the House floor as one of 14 Epstein “co-conspirators” who should be investigated. A spokesperson for the Dubins says that had they known of Epstein’s conduct, they would have cut ties long ago.
Severe flooding in the Four Corners region has triggered rooftop rescues and mass evacuations across Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. In New Mexico’s San Juan County, National Guard boats, helicopters, and amphibious vehicles pulled people from rooftops and homes with three to four feet of water, as rivers kept rising past forecast levels. About 600 households were ordered to evacuate in Farmington, the region’s largest city, and a county spokesperson said even the local sheriff was close to losing his home. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis declared a disaster emergency in 11 counties, with mandatory evacuations along four rivers, while in Hurricane, Utah, floodwaters swamped about 80 homes and 50 RVs. The flooding follows two months of heavy rain that ended a summer of drought, leaving the ground too saturated to absorb more. At least one person has been injured, including from tornadoes that tore through Arizona earlier in the week.
More On Russian War Against Ukraine
The Geo Network, News and Opinion: Japan Just Stepped Into Ukraine… And Putin’s Drone War COLLAPSED , Staff Report, Oct. 24, 2026. Moscow is fuming after Japanese tech giant Terra Drone officially delivered its first state-backed batch of interceptor drones to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency on October 14, prompting Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova to threaten Tokyo with severe countermeasures.
Built via underground mobile workshops across Ukraine and powered by Japanese Terra DFC flight controllers, the $3,000 vertical-takeoff Terra A1, fixed-wing Terra A2, and instant-launch KT-1/KT-2 interceptors are now wiping out nearly 70% of propeller-driven Russian Shahed swarms—saving Ukraine’s $4 million Patriot missiles.
Even worse for the Kremlin, after Putin visited the disputed Kuril island of Iturup and deployed Bastion missiles, Tokyo signed mass-production deals for the Terra B1 and Ukrainian SkyFall P1-SUN "JetKiller" interceptors, building an 80,000-drone SHIELD network that threatens both Russia’s Pacific stronghold and Beijing’s Taiwan strategy. Subscribe to The Geo Network for heavy, no-nonsense OSINT and tactical geopolitical analysis.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 23, 2026 [Musk, Trump Helping Russia], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 24, 2026. Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.
Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”
U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.
Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.
Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.
It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.
On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.
A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.
In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.
The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.
The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
The Contrarian, Weekly Pro-Democracy News Roundup and Comment: Headed to California to Fight Trump’s Election Desperation, Norman Eisen, right, Oct. 24, 2026. As I write this, I’m packing my bags and my briefs (the legal kind). Next week, I’ll be in federal court in California to help argue against Donald Trump’s latest effort to sabotage our elections: his efforts to disrupt California voting using a demonstrably junky list of 20,000 supposed unauthorized voters.
What rubbish! My pro-democracy litigation colleagues and I defeated Trump’s prior election-denial initiatives, and we will vanquish this one as well. Indeed, I think he knows he’s going to lose here and in his other crazy lawsuits, including the one he just filed in Alaska. He is doing all this for one reason alone: to lay the foundation for his post-election sour grapes.
Let’s begin with California before we head up north to Alaska. Last week, while voting was already underway, Trump’s Department of Justice demanded that Los Angeles County set aside and refuse to count the ballots of more than 20,000 people it claimed were ineligible to vote. The evidence? A thumb drive full of names, assembled using opaque methods and unreliable citizenship data that the administration has refused to explain. The county tested a sampling of the data on the list and proved it was unreliable.
When California declined to play along, the DOJ sued the state — and now we’re fighting back. We at Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF), alongside our wonderful partners at the Campaign Legal Center, are intervening on behalf of LULAC and the NAACP to ensure eligible voters aren’t disenfranchised based on bogus allegations. In our filings in the case, we explain why Trump will lose, including because the law does not allow you to sit on these issues and then come swooping in weeks before an election. There is a hearing in the case on Tuesday, but that is not fast enough for the DOJ, which is asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule before then.
Either way, the DOJ is going to lose. But the case is about a whole lot more than just those 20,000-plus voters or the applicable law. It’s about a rogue administration trying to manufacture suspicion around legitimate votes, sow chaos in the run-up to an election, and lay the groundwork to challenge results it doesn’t like. That’s why we and the other lawyers in the case are waging the fight to stop this in court. And that is why we, with many others, are working around the clock to protect Americans’ right to vote from coast to coast.
My election-protection work in this and so many other cases is enabled by the generous and enduring support of our paid Contrarian subscribers. If you already are one, thank you for helping sustain what we do. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please consider doing so to support our efforts as the election fast approaches.Subscribed
In other California news, Trump’s DOJ has gone beyond the initial letter to Los Angeles County and reportedly sent letters to counties across the state, making the same unfounded claims and threatening criminal prosecution if its baseless demands are not met. To prove it means it, the DOJ has also charged 28 California residents with alleged election-related crimes. Note that this is a small fraction of the over 20,000 claimed in the civil lawsuit and it appears to have swept in some innocent voters. That and the timing of the charges makes clear that, like the civil case, the motive is to intimidate voters.
All of that is atrocious, but Trump’s new Alaska lawsuit is even less meritorious, if you can believe it. His favored GOP senatorial candidate, Dan Sullivan, is on the ballot with somebody else named Daniel Sullivan. The administration has sued, seeking to block the certification if GOP Dan Sullivan loses, and Trump is proudly taking credit for the idea. The lawsuit is utterly meritless because there is no law that allows Trump to file this kind of a case. On the contrary, these kinds of election issues are the province of the state, and the Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled that both candidates can be on the ballot. Certification is also a state issue. The case is a dead loser.
What is causing this freakout in the courts? Perhaps it’s early-voting numbers.
Despite the ongoing attempts at election sabotage and voter intimidation by Trump and his cronies, voters are already turning out in dramatic fashion for this midterm. As of this morning, the early vote was more than 25 million people and counting — setting records across the country. In Texas, for example, early voting is up 74 percent from 2022; in Kansas, it’s more than doubled. Early-voting data from key states also points to strong Democratic enthusiasm, building on a wave of increased Democratic participation in primaries across the country earlier this year. Of course, there is still a ways to go until Election Day, but these early signs are encouraging and should motivate us all to vote and to urge our family, friends, and neighbors to do the same. Every vote counts.
Whatever the cause of the Trump DOJ’s panicked meddling, we’re not going to let it happen. Last week, I shared a Washington Post column talking about the success of our legal resistance pushing back against Trump’s sweeping campaign to change the rules of the 2026 midterms. This week, the Financial Times detailed how hundreds of lawyers across the country are gearing up for the election. The article highlighted that DDF has enlisted more than a dozen national law firms to support our election-protection strategy, with draft legal complaints prepared and ready to file at a moment’s notice.Subscribed
Of course it’s not just my colleagues at DDF and DDA. Many others around the country are launching their most ambitious efforts yet. LULAC launched its largest-ever in-house voter-protection initiative. The ACLU also launched a historic election-safeguarding effort and has poured millions into voter education initiatives across the country. Common Cause launched its 2026 Election Protection program, mobilizing thousands of volunteers and legal experts. The list of extraordinary initiatives underway across our pro-democracy ecosystem goes on.
Above all, this coalition includes our state attorneys general. As I told the Guardian in an article about their efforts, I had the privilege of attending two state AG tabletop exercises and some of their online meetings. In all of my years working with the state AGs, I have never seen such preparedness, particularly for midterm elections. Trump is up against all of that — and all of you. That’s because your paid Contrarian subscriptions help make possible all of my legal work as well as the amazing journalism every week. Here’s my weekly roundup, so you can see for yourself.SubscribedMidterm watch (and beyond)
They Want Us to Fear the Ballot. We Can’t Give Them That Victory.
Diamond Brown and Jonathan Barry-Blocker wrote on the Trump regime’s desperate lengths to make Americans question whether they can safely cast a ballot — and how not to let them fool us. “The people trying to make voting harder are counting on confusion to do some of their work for them. Let’s give them something else to worry about.”
Words & Phrases: ‘Independent’?
Jennifer Rubin wrote on Sen. Susan Collins’s long-held “Independent Mainer” brand, under which is a far more apt label: coward. “Pick a topic — the Iran war, ICE funding, Kash Patel’s nomination, etc. — and Collins was never ‘independent’ enough to thwart Trump’s agenda.”
Elect Candidates Who Will Ban Presidents from Profiting in Office
Virginia Kase Solomón and Abigail Bellows wrote on a candidate pledge to support the banning of presidential profiteering — like, you know, the fact that Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025 alone. “We need a collective movement of voters to demand accountability from every candidate seeking to represent us.”
Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad Must Not Be Minimized
Shalise Manza Young wrote on the damning shame of Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s line-crossing attack ad against his Democrat opponent, Amy Acton, which involved a shocking dismissal of her account of childhood sexual assault. “In nearly any other timeline … this attack would end Ramaswamy’s bid for governor.”
Did Jon Ossoff Take 2028 off the Table?
Jill Lawrence considered the near-future paths for one of the Democrats’ fastest rising stars. “Ossoff is not trying to be anyone’s nice guy, and he keeps landing lines that get at truths that Democrats are desperate to hear.”The global view
What Do the Israeli Elections and Houthi Attacks on Saudi Arabia Mean for the U.S.?
Council on Foreign Relations expert Steven Cook joined Jennifer Rubin to break down the recent headlines coming out of the Middle East, including Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia, Israeli elections, and the latest on Iran. “I think that successive administrations, both Democrats and Republicans, haven’t asked the hard questions about what it is that’s important to the United States in the Middle East.”
Rep. Adam Smith: Trump Should Face Impeachment
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) joined Jennifer Rubin to discuss what he says is clearly ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Trump’s dangerous relationship with Vladimir Putin, and oversight of the Pentagon’s actions in Iran and Venezuela. “It’s all part of Trump being a fascist dictator instead of democratically elected president.”
Brazil’s Election Is About More Than Brazil
Roberto Valadéz wrote on Brazil’s upcoming election, which will either be the greatest coup of a far-right wave across the Americas or see Brazil remain a democratic holdout and key hindrance to the “Donroe Doctrine.” “Security does not require surrendering freedom and prosperity should not depend on a political savior.”Fighting back
Meta Tried to Censor No Kings. They Only Made Democracy Forces Stronger.
In the wake of Meta suspending the No Kings instagram account without warning and with no feasible explanation, Jennifer Rubin spoke with Indivisible’s Ezra Levin about Meta’s history of cozying up to Trump — and how it makes this year’s push for early voting more important than ever.
This week, we featured last Saturday’s No Kings Vote Early rallies from coast to coast.
Party at the Polls; Become an Election Protector
In this week’s Calls to Actions: ways to turn Election Day into a party for turnout, how we can guard against post-election turmoil, how to join a union day of action, fighting for reproductive freedom, keeping gun control central, and more!Culture, Cartoons, & Fun Stuff
This week, our cartoonists looked at overlording (The Deep State, Michael de Adder; Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling); overstepping (Don’t Tread on Us, Nick Anderson; Clearing the Track, Michael de Adder); and overselling (To the Highest Bidder, Nick Anderson).
A Film over Fifty Years in the Making Has Never Felt More Urgent
Meredith Blake wrote on “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a filmed chronicle of a 1972 gathering of luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance that is as historically essential as it is engaging. “It’s a reminder that no movement is a monolith — nor should it aim to be.”
New York Times, She Planned to Protest Trump. She Didn’t Plan on Getting Punched, Jessica Contrera, Oct. 24, 2026. Blake Miley yelled “fascist” as President Trump spoke at a midterm campaign rally. The violence that followed “was not right,” she said.
The night before President Trump spoke in Youngstown, Ohio, this month, Blake Miley stayed up past 4 a.m., cutting out felt letters for a T-shirt that would say “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”
The next evening, she went to the rally and stood up halfway through, revealing her shirt and yelling, “Fascist, fascist!” Almost immediately, Ms. Miley, 29, was tackled, held down and punched by male rally-goers as the president mocked her from the stage, calling her “scum,” “low-class,” and “a fat guy.”
As Mr. Trump barnstorms the country hoping to revive his base ahead of the midterm election, he is returning to an old habit: heckling protesters and encouraging violence against them.
In Georgia last week, he expressed his love for a supporter who had responded to a protester by “slapping the guy around,” and promised to bring the slapper to Washington. In South Carolina on Wednesday, he praised an “incredible” punch that a rally-goer landed on another protester, saying, “He got whacked, man!”
VideoTrump Supporters Tackle Protester at Ohio Rally0:52Blake Miley was tackled by several Trump supporters at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, after she yelled “fascist” and revealed a shirt that read “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”CreditCredit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Ten years after Mr. Trump shocked some voters by saying he would personally like to punch a protester in the face at one of his rallies, these skirmishes are now met by many with a shrug. Ms. Miley, who is identifying herself publicly for the first time, said she suspects that no one in power much cares that she got beaten up.
“I knew there was a really good possibility that this would happen,” she said. “But I don’t blame myself. It is not right what they did to me.”
Ms. Miley attended the rally alone, and had intentionally seated herself among people who seemed older, she said. She hoped it would keep her safe. But as soon as she started yelling, a man grabbed for her neck and then shoved her backward, video of the episode shows. When she stood back up, another man appeared to pull her to the ground, put her in a headlock, yank her hair and punch her in the face.
She remembers being hit twice, unable to get up until Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies intervened about 30 seconds into the brawl.
“What he doesn’t know is that his mother and father voted for me,” Mr. Trump continued about Ms. Miley, who is a woman. “Oh, he looks so terrible. And he’s going to get home and he’s going to get smacked.”
The deputies escorted Ms. Miley out of the arena. The men who attacked her were left alone. One raised his fists and high-fived those around him.
In the arena’s parking lot, Ms. Miley was shaking so severely that onlookers called her an ambulance. She said she spent a few hours at the hospital, was discharged, and drove in a daze to her mobile home north of Columbus. She threw her Epstein shirt in her closet and collapsed onto her bed.
Back in Youngstown, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Department was getting flooded with angry calls from people who had seen video of the incident, demanding to know why no one had been arrested. The sheriff, Jerry Greene, said he had as many 800 phone messages, many of them containing raw abuse.
Video footage, Sheriff Greene said, clearly showed a woman being punched in the face. “I know what people saw, and if I saw that video, too, I’d be like, ‘My God, why didn’t the police do anything?’”ImageDonald Trump does his dance.Donald Trump has encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Sheriff Greene, who had changed parties to become a Republican in 2023, said that he is, in fact, doing something. He reviewed body camera footage, which he said shows that his deputies were pushing through the crowd to reach Ms. Miley and did not witness the punch.Get updates when new midterm election polls are added to our poll trackers. When new polling data drops we’ll send an update straight to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.
He has identified three men who he said took part in the assault, including a New Jersey resident who said in a now-deleted Facebook post that he and two friends had “subdued her and threw her to the concrete.” Investigators believe the other two men, including the one who threw the punch, are local; none could be reached by The Times.
The sheriff said that all three would be interviewed in coming days. He is waiting for medical records from Ms. Miley’s trip to the emergency room, he added, to determine whether her injuries were severe enough to warrant felony charges instead of misdemeanors.
Three days after the rally, one of the sheriff’s investigators tracked down Ms. Miley through her mother, who, contrary to Mr. Trump’s presumption, does not vote.
She had not told her parents she was going to the Trump rally. Though she had been to a few local protests before, facing down the president and his most fervent supporters directly was out of character for Ms. Miley, who spends most of her days at home.
She frequently has seizures, she said, and after years of passing out while working at warehouses, nursing homes and retail stores, she has not held a job since April. Lately, she relies on financial help from her boyfriend, who works in an auto-parts store, and her mother, who is a nurse.
“Most days are quite monotonous for me,” she said. “I get up. I might wash dishes or do laundry. I work on my art.”
When she scrolls, her feeds seem to constantly be filled with news about Mr. Trump and how he is changing the country.
She is worried about the prospect of losing Medicaid, which is likely to happen next year unless she starts working, volunteering or going to school 80 hours per month under a new law that Mr. Trump championed. She is worried about the cost of gas and groceries for her grandparents, who are still working at ages 79 and 82. But Ms. Miley is particularly bothered about the millions of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, she said, because of her own experiences with abuse in a past relationship.
She has watched every documentary she can find on Mr. Epstein, who before his arrest and subsequent suicide routinely communicated with politicians, celebrities and business executives — including Mr. Trump. Many of their names appear in the files of documents, some of which the Justice Department started releasing, with redactions, last year after months of resistance from the president.
Most days this year, as she waited for her boyfriend to come home for dinner, Ms. Miley felt as though she could do little about the actions of Mr. Trump. But this month, a video came across her TikTok feed of a protester interrupting a Trump rally in Vandalia, Ohio, and being escorted out.
It was something simple, something doable.
The president, she realized, would be back in her state just a few days later.
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Crimes Davey Hearn Claims Jeanine Pirro May Have Committed, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 24, 2026. Weaponized DOJ. As a number of outlets have reported, Davey Hearn’s attorney, Michael Bromwich, has requested the DOJ and DOI Inspector Generals investigate how Hearn got charged for damaging the reflecting pool that Trump’s no-bid contractors damaged.
The existing coverage focused on the response DOJ IG Don Berthiaume (DOI IG’s Director of external affairs basically said, sure, we’ll read your letter) sent to Bromwich, stating that Office of Professional Responsibility, not DOJ IG, would have jurisdiction, a dumb jurisdictional that Inspectors General (including Bromwich when he was DOJ IG) have attempted to address going back decades.
But I want to look at something else Bromwich did: Lay out the crimes that Jeanine Pirro and her attorneys may have committed.
It starts in the first letter, where Bromwich not only lays out Pirro’s highly inappropriate press conference and the lies DOJ told in their motion to dismiss, but also described something I was not aware had occurred: when Hearn’s defense expert showed up to inspect the reflecting pool, Pirro mobbed him and pressured him to provide her with his assessment.
Beyond these instances of improper conduct, additional misconduct was committed at the highest levels of the USAO-DC. While the government’s own motion to dismiss places U.S. Attorney Pirro, right, at the Reflecting Pool on July 17, 2026, the motion does not describe what else occurred there. Accompanied by a group of armed government agents who positioned themselves around defense counsel’s expert, the U.S. Attorney personally approached the expert while he was conducting his inspection and questioned him about his conclusions, the results of his work, and why he was present. Even after the defense’s expert advised the U.S. Attorney that he could not speak to her about the matter—and members of her own staff cautioned her not to ask him such questions—the U.S. Attorney repeatedly pressured the defense expert to provide her with information. Defense counsel was given no notice that the encounter would take place and was not present for it, and the government has never produced any report, note, or record of the exchange. A U.S. Attorney who personally interrogates a represented defendant’s testifying expert, surrounded by her own staff and without notice to counsel, is not gathering evidence—she is testing how the defense intends to prove its case, and doing so in a setting that essentially held the expert captive. The DOJ OIG should determine who was present at this encounter; what was said by Ms. Pirro, the defense expert and others; whether the encounter was recorded or reported, and whether anyone in the USAO-DC office considered the propriety of it before or after the fact.
That first letter also reveals there was some kind of discussion between the FBI case agent and the National Park Service witness that, Hearn asserts, lied about what happened, but Hearn got no record of that meeting.
In the second letter, as part of an argument that DOJ IG can investigate if a crime is suspected, Bromwich lists out three DC and two Federal crimes that may have been committed. It describes that Pirro herself may have obstructed the case or made false statements.
Third, U.S. Attorney Pirro’s conduct prior to and at the time of the indictment constitutes evidence of obstruction that must be further explored by an independent investigation. As discussed in our October 6 letter, U.S. Attorney Pirro violated multiple ethical rules governing her conduct during the press conference in which she announced the charge against Mr. Hearn, including falsely characterizing the evidence against Mr. Hearn. Then, on July 17, 2026, Pirro engaged in inappropriate conduct toward the defense’s expert.17 DOJ OIG must explore whether the U.S. Attorney took these actions corruptly with the intent to influence the jury pool and/or witnesses, or otherwise obstruct the due administration of justice.
Finally, in addition to the specific evidence of obstruction described above, the OIG should investigate false statements in the government’s July 31 Motion to Dismiss, in which it represented that its personnel first learned of widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool on July 17, a representation flatly contradicted by the government’s own document production, which indicates that they knew of this information well before July 17, and even before seeking the indictment on July 2.
Then after laying out how this might be a conspiracy, Browmich suggests that DOJ personnel conspired to deprive Hearn of his civil rights, 18 USC 241, a law that has a civil counterpart (albeit its application to things other than race is uncertain).
Moreover, the DOJ OIG should investigate whether DOJ personnel engaged in a conspiracy to deprive Mr. Hearn of his civil rights. Under 18 U.S.C. § 241, it is a crime for two or more persons to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person…in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States or because of his having so exercised the same.”
The evidence developed in the litigation warrants investigation into whether multiple prosecutors, and potentially supervisory and political-level officials, participated in conduct that deprived Mr. Hearn of his due process rights, including through abuse of the grand jury process and in connection with his June 19 arrest. The investigation can and should determine whether DOJ personnel had any role in authorizing his June 19 arrest, and it should fully explore the apparent violations of his right to due process under the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution in connection with the actions of DOJ personnel in securing the indictment. It is now undisputed—by everyone except President Trump—that Mr. Hearn should never have been arrested and certainly should not have been indicted. The OIG must now investigate whether the DOJ personnel responsible for this travesty engaged in misconduct that violated Mr. Hearn’s civil rights.
At the very least, all this is a bowtied package for Congress to untie in January (another of Hearn’s attorneys, Norm Eisen, was one of the House impeachment lawyers on Trump’s first impeachment).
There have been a number of attempts to try to fight back after Trump’s DOJ targets Trump critics. This may turn into a test of possible methods to do so.
Oct. 23
Special Report
President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
Oct. 23, 2026. How five decades of business deals, intelligence contacts, and political favors led to a president who now sides with the Kremlin in a war killing Ukrainian civilians.The news cycle slowed down, so I felt like it was time to drop this investigation that I’ve been working on. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. This week, as they sheltered through another night of missile and drone attacks, the president of the United States stood in front of reporters and said, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller in a park in the Kharkiv region.
That is not a slip of the tongue. It is the latest chapter in a story that stretches back nearly 50 years.
Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia began long before he entered politics. It runs through Soviet bloc surveillance files, Manhattan condo sales, a Moscow beauty pageant, a secret tower deal, a campaign riddled with Russian contacts, a first term defined by investigations, and now a second term in which his administration is waiving sanctions, holding up air defense missiles, and pressuring Ukraine to stop fighting back.
More Top Headlines
It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Donald Trump 2.0 — younger and brainier but just as brash — has managed it.More News Roundups
Oct. 23, 2026. Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.
More On Musk Influence On U.S. Foreign Affairs, Elections
Oct. 23, 2026. Squeals of “socialism!” aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it’s about saving the world…More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Cathy Young and Andrew Egger, Oct. 23, 2026. Pete is no Ike.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Top Stories
Special Report
The Parnas Perspective, Major Deep Dive: How Russia Spent 50 Years Getting Close to Donald Trump — Trump’s Ties Exposed, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 23, 2026. How five decades of business deals, intelligence contacts, and political favors led to a president who now sides with the Kremlin in a war killing Ukrainian civilians
The news cycle slowed down, so I felt like it was time to drop this investigation that I’ve been working on. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. This week, as they sheltered through another night of missile and drone attacks, the president of the United States stood in front of reporters and said, “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller in a park in the Kharkiv region.
That is not a slip of the tongue. It is the latest chapter in a story that stretches back nearly 50 years.
Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia began long before he entered politics. It runs through Soviet bloc surveillance files, Manhattan condo sales, a Moscow beauty pageant, a secret tower deal, a campaign riddled with Russian contacts, a first term defined by investigations, and now a second term in which his administration is waiving sanctions, holding up air defense missiles, and pressuring Ukraine to stop fighting back.
Investigations like this take time, resources, and a willingness to put on the record what powerful people would rather keep buried. There is no corporate owner or billionaire backer behind this work. There is you. Paid subscribers are the reason I can keep digging, keep documenting, and keep getting this record in front of the people who need to see it. If this work matters to you, please become a paid subscriber today.
PART ONE: BEFORE POLITICS (1977 to 2015)
A Soviet bloc intelligence service opens a file
In April 1977, Trump married Ivana Zelníčková, a model from communist Czechoslovakia. Because she had left a Soviet bloc country and married a wealthy American, she drew the attention of Czechoslovakia’s secret police, the StB, an intelligence service that worked closely with the KGB.
According to files declassified in 2016, Czech agents kept watch on the couple in Manhattan and opened letters Ivana sent home to her father, Miloš. Her father had a working relationship with the secret police, who would ask him about his daughter’s life abroad in exchange for permitting her visits home. When Ivana brought Donald Trump Jr. to visit, the StB monitored those trips as well.
Later reporting by The Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt, based on newly obtained archive records, found that the StB carried out a long-term spying mission on Trump and stepped up its interest after the 1988 U.S. presidential election, hoping to gain information about the “upper echelons of the US government.” One StB agent reported on a 1989 meeting at Trump Tower. The files also show that Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics, and that the agency took a particular interest after Trump began talking publicly about running for president.
It is important to note what the files do not show. They do not say whether the Soviet Union ordered or shaped the StB’s operation, and most StB records were destroyed after the Cold War. But they establish that, from the late 1970s on, a Soviet bloc intelligence service was building a file on Donald Trump.The televisions and the émigrés
In the early 1980s, as Trump redeveloped the Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, the project bought hundreds of televisions from a store run by Soviet émigrés Semyon Kislin and Tamir Sapir.
This is where documented history gives way to allegation. Former KGB officer Yuri Shvets, a key source for journalist Craig Unger’s books House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, has claimed that the store had ties to Soviet intelligence and that Kislin helped identify Trump as a potential target. Kislin later provided mortgages to buyers of apartments in Trump World Tower, and the Sapir family would remain in Trump’s orbit for decades, including during his 2013 trip to Moscow.
Shvets’s claims about Soviet intelligence cultivating Trump have never been independently proven, and Trump has always denied any relationship with Russian intelligence. Unger himself distinguishes between an intelligence “agent,” who knowingly works for a foreign service, and an “asset,” whose relationship can be far less formal and even unwitting.The 1987 trip to Moscow
In July 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump traveled to Moscow and Leningrad. According to The Guardian, the visit followed a personal invitation from the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Yuri Dubinin, and was arranged through the Soviet state tourism agency, which operated under KGB oversight. Trump said he was scouting locations for a luxury hotel.
Shortly after returning, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page ads in major newspapers attacking America’s alliances and arguing that the United States should stop paying to defend other countries. The ads stunned observers at the time and prompted speculation about a presidential run.
The timing of the trip, the invitation, and the ads has fueled questions for decades.Russian money becomes central to the Trump empire
Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, money from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump properties. As Trump’s casinos and businesses went through multiple bankruptcies and major American banks grew wary of lending to him, that money became increasingly important.
According to Unger’s reporting, in 1984 a man named David Bogatin, whom FBI files linked to the Russian mob, bought five Trump Tower condominiums for $6 million in cash, a transaction a New York State investigation later tied to money laundering. Unger has identified 13 people with alleged Russian organized crime connections who lived in or owned property in Trump Tower, and estimates that more than $1 billion in Russian money passed through Trump-branded properties over the years. Those broader figures are Unger’s own estimates and are disputed.
More concrete numbers come from a 2017 Reuters investigation, which found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded towers in South Florida alone. Reuters found no evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or his company, and noted that the nationality of many buyers couldn’t be determined, meaning the true figure may be higher.
Trump also repeatedly tried to build in Russia itself. He returned to Moscow in 1996 to explore a luxury residential project. In the mid-2000s, he partnered with the Bayrock Group, a development firm with offices in Trump Tower, where Russian-born businessman Felix Sater worked. Sater reportedly carried business cards identifying him as a senior adviser to Trump, though Trump later testified under oath that he barely knew him. Donald Trump Jr. traveled to Russia six times in 18 months starting around 2006 looking for deals, and in 2008 told a real estate conference that Russians made up “a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”Miss Universe in Moscow
In 2013, Trump finally pulled off a major deal in Russia. He brought the Miss Universe pageant, which he then owned, to Moscow in partnership with Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer with close ties to the Kremlin.
Agalarov paid $20 million to bring the pageant to his Crocus City Hall. That same month, Putin awarded Agalarov the Russian Order of Honor. The New York Times later found that the 2013 pageant was the most profitable year of Trump’s Miss Universe ownership, with Trump and NBC splitting $4.7 million.
Trump was eager to impress Moscow. Months before the event, he tweeted asking whether Putin would attend and whether he would become his “new best friend.” In video recorded in Las Vegas, Trump called the Agalarovs “the most powerful people in all of Russia.” After the pageant, he boasted that “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” Among the VIP guests was an alleged Russian mobster who had been charged months earlier in connection with an illegal gambling ring run out of Trump Tower.
The Agalarov relationship would become central to the 2016 investigation three years later.
PART TWO: THE 2016 CAMPAIGN
The secret Moscow tower
As Trump campaigned for president, he repeatedly told voters he had nothing to do with Russia. In reality, his company was pursuing a Trump Tower in Moscow deep into the campaign.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, later pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project. Cohen had claimed the talks ended in January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses. In fact, they continued until June 2016, after Trump had become the presumptive Republican nominee.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office wrote that if the project had been completed, Trump’s company could have received “hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.” Prosecutors said the deal likely required “the assistance of the Russian government,” and that Cohen discussed it with Trump at a time of “sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere” in the election. Cohen and Sater had even discussed a trip to Russia to meet top Kremlin officials, and a Russian national repeatedly proposed a meeting between Trump and Putin that he said could have a “phenomenal” impact on politics and business.
In other words, while Russia was working to help elect Trump, Trump was secretly seeking a deal that would have required Kremlin approval.The Trump Tower meeting
In June 2016, a publicist for the Agalarovs emailed Donald Trump Jr. offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s support for his father. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” On June 9, he met at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, along with campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.
Mueller found that the meeting did not produce useful information for the campaign, and he declined to charge Trump Jr. because prosecutors didn’t believe they could prove he acted “willfully” in potentially violating campaign finance law. But the meeting showed the campaign’s senior leadership was willing to accept help from a foreign government.
Days later, Agalarov sent Trump an expensive painting for his birthday. Trump wrote back thanking him for the “sensational gift.”Manafort and a Russian intelligence officer
Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman in the summer of 2016, had spent more than a decade working for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine, including ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republicans, concluded in its final report that Manafort’s longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. It found that Manafort shared internal Trump campaign polling data and strategy with Kilimnik during the campaign, and that it obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to Russia’s hacking of Democratic emails.
The committee’s conclusion was stark: Manafort’s access and his willingness to share information with individuals closely tied to Russian intelligence “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” The committee also found that Deripaska has acted as a proxy for the Russian state and Russian intelligence services since at least 2004.Michael Flynn and the RT gala
In December 2015, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn traveled to Moscow for the 10th anniversary gala of RT, the Kremlin’s state-run television network. RT paid more than $45,000 for his appearance, plus flights and a luxury hotel stay for him and his son. At dinner, Flynn was seated at Putin’s table. Within two months, he was advising the Trump campaign.
Flynn also told security clearance investigators that he had been paid by “U.S. companies” for the trip and had only “insubstantial contacts” with foreign officials, according to House Oversight Committee Democrats.“Russia, if you’re listening”
In July 2016, Trump stood at a press conference and said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” According to Mueller’s later findings, Russian military intelligence officers attempted to hack into Clinton’s personal office for the first time within hours of that statement.
The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Putin personally ordered Russia’s hack-and-leak operation against Democrats, and that WikiLeaks very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort.What investigators concluded, and what they didn’t
Fairness requires being clear about the limits of what was proven. Mueller did not establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its interference efforts. The Senate committee’s Republican chair at the time, Marco Rubio, said the committee found no evidence of collusion.
But the same bipartisan report described what its top Democrat, Mark Warner, called “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives” that posed “a very real counterintelligence threat.” The absence of a proven criminal conspiracy is not the same as the absence of a troubling relationship.Following the money
A 2018 Center for American Progress report traced a web of Russia-linked financial transactions around the campaign and inauguration. Among them:
Days after the Trump Tower meeting, Agalarov moved nearly $20 million from Russia to a U.S. bank account through a Swiss account and an offshore shell company, a transaction bank officials flagged as suspicious.
Russian state media network RT’s parent and a Kremlin-backed troll farm spent heavily on pro-Trump influence operations, with the Internet Research Agency running a budget of more than $1 million a month.
A Russian-American oil executive who boasted to a Kremlin official of being “actively involved” in Trump’s campaign donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s committees and inaugural fund.
None of the individuals involved in those transactions have been charged in connection with them, and some may have legitimate explanations. But the report argues they raise serious questions that Congress has never fully answered.
PART THREE: THE FIRST TERM (2017 to 2021)
Trump’s first term was dominated by the Russia investigation. But it was also defined by a striking gap between Trump’s personal behavior toward Putin and the policies his administration sometimes carried out.Flynn’s 24 days
Trump named Flynn his national security adviser. He lasted just 24 days before being forced out after it emerged that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which they discussed U.S. sanctions during the transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in 2020.Firing Comey, then hosting the Russians
On May 9, 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the investigation into Russia’s interference and possible links to Trump’s campaign. The next day, Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office, with American press barred and only Russian state media allowed to photograph the meeting.
During that meeting, Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence about an ISIS threat that had been provided by a U.S. ally, potentially jeopardizing a critical intelligence source, The Washington Post reported. He also reportedly told the Russians that firing Comey, whom he called a “nut job,” had taken “great pressure” off him. CNN later reported that U.S. officials were so alarmed by Trump’s handling of classified information that they extracted a top-secret source from inside Russia.Helsinki
On July 16, 2018, standing beside Putin in Helsinki, Trump was asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or the Russian president about election interference. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
The statement came just three days after the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for hacking Democrats. Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, publicly contradicted him. Republican Sen. John McCain called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” adding, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”Lifting sanctions on Deripaska’s companies
In December 2018, Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would lift sanctions on three companies tied to Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch whom the Senate committee described as a proxy for Russian intelligence and who had employed Manafort for years. The companies included aluminum giant Rusal.
Eleven Republican senators joined Democrats in trying to block the move, but the effort fell three votes short, 57-42. Treasury argued Deripaska had agreed to give up control of the companies. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer questioned whether the administration was “doing Russia’s bidding.”The first Ukraine pressure campaign
In 2019, Trump turned his attention to Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
By July 2019, Trump had placed a hold on nearly $400 million in military aid that Congress had approved for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. On July 25, he spoke with Zelenskyy by phone. When Zelenskyy raised the need for more Javelin anti-tank missiles, Trump replied: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” He then pressed Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden and his son, and to look into a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election.
That theory, the Senate Intelligence Committee later found, was one that Russian intelligence officer Kilimnik had almost certainly helped start.
The call led to Trump’s first impeachment. The aid was eventually released after a whistleblower complaint became public.The guardrails of the first term
To be fair, Trump’s first-term administration also took some significant actions against Russia, often driven by Congress and senior officials. It approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, which the Obama administration had declined to do. It expelled 60 Russian diplomats after the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain in 2018. Congress passed, and Trump reluctantly signed, a major Russia sanctions law in 2017.
But many of those actions came over Trump’s objections or with little public enthusiasm from him. Officials like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats served as guardrails. By the end of the term, Trump had pardoned Manafort, Flynn, and longtime adviser Roger Stone, all of whom had been convicted or pleaded guilty in cases stemming from the Russia investigation.
PART FOUR: THE SECOND TERM (2025 to Present)
If the first term was defined by investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia, the second term has been defined by policy. The guardrails are gone, and Trump’s personal sympathies have increasingly become official U.S. policy.February 2025: Turning on Ukraine
Within weeks of returning to office, Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator”, a label he has never applied to Putin. On February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the United States voted alongside Russia against a United Nations resolution condemning the war, joining countries like Belarus and North Korea. The U.S. pushed its own resolution that did not identify Russia as the aggressor. Russia’s UN ambassador praised it as “a constructive step.”
Four days later, Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in front of the cameras. Vance accused him of being “disrespectful” and demanded to know whether he had said “thank you.” Trump told him, “You’re gambling with World War III.” Zelenskyy was asked to leave the White House. Days later, the administration briefly paused military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.August 2025: The red carpet in Alaska
On August 15, 2025, Trump welcomed Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, the first time Putin had set foot on American soil in a decade and despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him over the deportation of Ukrainian children. Trump rolled out a red carpet and applauded as Putin approached, and the two rode together in the presidential limousine.
The summit produced no ceasefire. Putin called Trump a “dear neighbor” and suggested their next meeting be in Moscow. Trump again postponed stronger sanctions on Russia despite Putin’s refusal to commit to a ceasefire, and increasingly put the burden on Zelenskyy to “make a deal.”The president’s son and a Putin ally
In May 2026, Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in the Bahamas. ProPublica later revealed that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to Putin who received a Kremlin honor this year and has been sanctioned by Ukraine, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the celebrations, including about $100,000 a night to rent a private island and roughly $70,000 for fireworks.
Trump Jr. and his wife acknowledged the payments and called them a gift from a friend. President Trump said he had “no idea who Umar is” and called it “not a big deal.” A retired FBI counterintelligence official told ProPublica that such a gift should be “unthinkable” for the son of a sitting president. Trump Jr., notably, was also the family member who took the 2016 Trump Tower meeting.Trump’s political team works for a pro-Russian government
In early October 2026, as Trump campaigned for Republicans in the midterms, his top political advisers James Blair and Chris LaCivita were in the Balkans. The two men, who lead the Trump-backed super PAC MAGA Inc., were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to advise the government of Republika Srpska, a pro-Russian territory in Bosnia, ahead of its elections, according to The New York Times.
The party that controls that government, led by Milorad Dodik, has aligned itself with Putin. Dodik thanked Putin in his victory speech. Trump-connected lobbyists have been paid more than $4 million by the Srpska government since early 2025, and the Trump administration lifted U.S. sanctions on Dodik, his family, and aides late last year. Even Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called Blair and LaCivita “grifters.” Trump responded by saying he would fire them if there was a conflict, then concluded there wasn’t one.Signing sanctions, then gutting them
On September 19, 2026, Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, named for the late senator, after it passed the Senate with 86 votes. The law gave the administration powerful tools to punish Russia and the countries buying its energy.
Within three weeks, the administration began unwinding it. On October 9, the Treasury Department issued a license allowing Russian diesel sales as part of a deal Trump struck with Putin to bring down fuel prices before the midterms. A bipartisan group of 12 senators called the diesel deal a “betrayal of the people of Ukraine.” On October 16, Trump waived key sanctions under the law he had just signed. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he had warned the White House of “unintended consequences.”Cutting off Ukraine’s defenses
At the same time, Ukraine says its access to U.S. intelligence and to Starshield, the military satellite network its forces rely on to fly drones and defend against attacks, has been degraded. Kyiv reports it has repeatedly received no early warning from the United States before Russian ballistic missile strikes on the capital. Rolling Stone reported that, according to multiple officials, the White House delivered an ultimatum that Ukraine stop striking Russian oil refineries or lose U.S. intelligence. The White House and Elon Musk deny responsibility for the satellite restrictions, and the administration insists nothing is being withheld.
The Washington Post reported this week that the administration is holding up the transfer of Patriot interceptor missiles that allies want to send Ukraine, because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not signed off. A Ukrainian official told the Post that “only a couple” of interceptors remain. Secretary of State Rubio called suggestions that Ukrainians are dying because of reduced U.S. support “scandalous.”“Russia has been fine”
And this week, Trump said it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” suggesting the country’s elected president should be sidelined. He said “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” as Russian strikes killed at least 16 people in a single day, including a baby in her stroller. He also said he is ready to meet Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping next month, with Ukraine’s future potentially on the table, a meeting Ukraine’s foreign minister warned would “only encourage Putin to continue this war.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, asked three times on national television whether the United States considers Ukraine an ally, would not say yes.
PART FIVE: FIRST TERM VS. SECOND TERM
Comparing the two terms reveals a clear evolution: from a president whose admiration for Putin was restrained by his own government, to one whose instincts now shape policy.
On Ukraine aid: In the first term, Trump secretly froze aid to Ukraine for political leverage, was impeached for it, and ultimately released it. In the second term, his administration has paused aid and intelligence openly, and is now reportedly slow-walking air defense missiles in the middle of a full-scale war.
On sanctions: In the first term, Congress forced sanctions on Trump, and his Treasury lifted penalties on Deripaska’s companies over bipartisan objections. In the second term, Trump signed a sanctions law and then waived it within weeks, while cutting a separate diesel deal directly with Putin.
On Putin: In the first term, Trump sided with Putin at a press conference in Helsinki and faced a bipartisan backlash. In the second term, he rolled out a red carpet for Putin on U.S. soil, voted with Russia at the UN, and now says Russia “has been fine.”
On Zelenskyy: In the first term, Trump pressured Zelenskyy privately for political favors. In the second term, he has called him a dictator, berated him in the Oval Office, and suggested he should be replaced as Ukraine’s negotiator.
On accountability: In the first term, a special counsel, the FBI, and a bipartisan Senate committee investigated Trump’s Russia ties, and several associates were convicted. In the second term, those associates have been pardoned, the officials who investigated them have been targeted, and the Justice Department is led by Trump’s former personal lawyer.
On the people around him: In the first term, figures like Mattis, McMaster, and Coats publicly pushed back on Trump’s approach to Russia. In the second term, his inner circle includes officials who echo his criticism of Zelenskyy, advisers paid by a pro-Russian government, and a son whose wedding was funded in part by a Putin ally.
PART SIX: THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN
After nearly 50 years, many critical questions remain unanswered:
Does Russia hold any leverage over Trump? There is no public proof of kompromat, and Trump has always denied it. But his own lawyer lied to Congress to conceal a Moscow deal that required Kremlin approval, and the Senate found his campaign chairman was sharing data with a Russian intelligence officer.
What do Trump’s tax returns and financial records show about Russian money? Despite years of litigation, the full picture of Russian investment in Trump’s businesses has never been made public.
Why did a Putin-aligned oligarch pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations, and what, if anything, was expected in return?
Who decided to restrict Ukraine’s satellite access and intelligence sharing, and why does the administration’s account keep contradicting Ukraine’s?
Why is the Pentagon holding up Patriot missiles that allies have already paid for?
What did Trump and Putin discuss privately in Helsinki, Anchorage, and their phone calls, where no full readouts have ever been released?
House Democrats have signaled that they plan to investigate if they win control of Congress next month. Whatever happens, these questions deserve answers.
CONCLUSION
You do not need to believe any unproven theory to be alarmed by the documented record. A Soviet bloc intelligence service watched Trump’s family for more than a decade. Russian money flowed into his properties for years. He secretly pursued a Kremlin-dependent deal while Russia worked to elect him. His campaign chairman shared data with a Russian intelligence officer. As president, he sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, handed classified information to Russian officials the day after firing the FBI director investigating him, and withheld aid from Ukraine to pressure its president.
Now, in his second term, the pattern has become policy. Sanctions are waived. Air defenses are delayed. Ukraine’s president is attacked while Russia’s is welcomed on a red carpet. And as a baby is killed in her stroller in a Ukrainian park, the president of the United States says Russia “has been fine.”
For my family in Ukraine, and for millions of Ukrainians who go to sleep each night not knowing whether a missile will hit their home, this is not an abstract political debate. It is life and death.
Americans deserve to know why their president keeps siding with Vladimir Putin. And they deserve to know before it’s too late.
New York Times, Opinion: The Meaning of the Republican War Over Ramaswamy’s Vile Ad, Michelle Goldberg, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It’s quite a feat, in this numb and debased era, to create a political advertisement so shocking and indecent that people from across the political spectrum feel the need to denounce it. The Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has long fashioned himself as a kind of Donald Trump 2.0 — younger and brainier but just as brash — has managed it.
By releasing what may be the most disgusting ad in American political history, he’s done more than just reveal his own low character. He’s opened a kind of proxy debate on the right about whether a post-Trump conservatism should try to reclaim some base-line morality or continue along its current smashmouth course.
As you might know by now, the story behind Ramaswamy’s ad involves child sexual abuse. His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, was 12 when her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, known as Bud, was arrested and indicted on charges of raping her, though he skipped town before he could be tried. Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, stood by him and lost custody of her children; she never saw her daughter again. (Bud Arthur died in 2004.)
In 2020, when Acton was serving as Ohio’s health director, Donna Arthur, fashioning herself as a concerned Christian, gave an interview to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue attacking her estranged daughter. It was deeply if unintentionally self-incriminating. Arthur speculated that Acton got the idea to say Bud Arthur raped her from his daughter from a previous marriage, who’d made a similar claim. By Donna Arthur’s own account, then, she brought a man accused of sexually abusing his child into her children’s home.
Now Ramaswamy’s campaign has dug up this elderly woman to make a video calling her daughter a liar who can’t be trusted to lead the state. At first, the ad featuring Arthur circulated online, without attribution. As outrage about it grew, Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted that it created the spot, and then, in Trumpian style, doubled down, saying it would spend millions to air it on television and promote it online.
By tacitly siding with a man indicted on charges of child rape, Ramaswamy has shown us all who he is. But he’s also given conservatives space to reckon with the ethical degradation of Trumpism, though without quite admitting that that’s what they’re doing.
Take, for example, the conservative magazine National Review. Early in 2016, it put out an issue with the words “Against Trump” emblazoned in gold on its cover. “Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot on behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself,” said the lead editorial.
Over the following decade, some of the issue’s contributors remained anti-Trump stalwarts, but several — along with the magazine as a whole — turned into apologists and bootlickers for the president. As long as Trump offered the right new peaks of political power, many of his onetime conservative critics were happy to swallow their qualms. Now, as the whole gaudy edifice of MAGA crumbles — with Trump so unpopular that Republicans risk losing states like Texas and Kansas — at least some of his enablers may be feeling ashamed.
Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter. National Review, tellingly, has helped lead the charge. It ran a sober article backing up Acton’s story, and then several columns lambasting Ramaswamy, including one titled, “When Character Was Obliterated.”
The conservative broadcaster Erick Erickson has taken a similar line. He was one of the contributors to “Against Trump” who then turned around and endorsed Trump for re-election. “I still struggle on the character issue,” he wrote in 2019, but argued, “We cannot have the Trump administration policies without President Trump, and there is much to like.” Now Erickson is back to believing that character is crucial. “We keep being told we must surrender our decency to win and then we lament how indecent the country is becoming,” he wrote about Ramaswamy, as if he had not been one of the ones counseling such surrender.
If conservatives were to suddenly decide that moral depravity is disqualifying, it would be bad news for Trump and those closest to him. It’s not surprising, then, that on Wednesday, JD Vance praised Ramaswamy’s “audacity” in running the spot, declaring himself “disgusted” by Republicans who are “whining” about it. Trump, on Thursday, celebrated the ad on Truth Social, writing, “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse.” Both men seem to understand that Republicans who criticize Ramaswamy are also implicitly criticizing them.
That’s particularly true of Vance, because he and Ramaswamy are such similar figures. The two men were friends at Yale Law School. Both worked in venture capital and developed ties to the tech right before positioning themselves as inheritors of the MAGA movement. Both have to contend with anti-Indian bigotry — Vance’s wife is Indian American — which has cost Ramaswamy some far-right support. And both are charmless, awkwardly imitating the president’s cruel provocations without his dark charisma or comic timing. If Ramaswamy loses a state as red as Ohio despite Trump’s imprimatur, Vance might start to look like a bad bet in 2028.
Seventy-two years ago, Joseph Welch, the attorney representing the U.S. Army, rebuked Joseph McCarthy with the immortal line, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Despairing observers have been asking the same thing of the Republican Party for the last 10 years. Both Ramaswamy and Vance better hope that the answer is still no.
More News Roundups
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 22, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Alexander Ward and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump called Elon Musk yesterday to ask him to stop throttling Starlink’s military-grade communications system, Starshield, in Ukraine. Slowing down the system degrades Ukraine’s defenses as well as its offensive drones, leaving it even more vulnerable to Russian attacks. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of this vulnerability by increasing strikes against Ukraine’s civilians.
The whole question of who ordered the slowdown in the first place remains a blame game between Trump and Musk, both of whom support Russia in its war on Ukraine. Members of the administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker, have tried to sell the slowdown as a business decision that Musk has the authority to make.
Whitaker told the Fox News Channel yesterday: “They are a private company. Obviously they have terms of use that are applied to all of their customers, including the Ukrainians, and I think it’s more of a dispute along those lines…than anybody in this administration trying to change the way that Starshield or Starlink is used.”
Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”
But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy.
This afternoon, asked about the call, Trump told reporters: “[I]t was a very interesting situation. So I don’t want to comment one way or the other, but, uh, my re—, my relationship with Elon is a very good one.” He reiterated: “I don’t want to comment on it. You know, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference. I guess the bottom line, he put it back.”
It remains unclear if the Ukrainians do, in fact, have full use of the networks again. Siobhán O’Grady, Carlotta Gall, and Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported yesterday that a senior Ukrainian commander told them he had lost more than a million dollars worth of drones when Starshield went fuzzy from the slowdown. For the next three days, he had to stop almost all operations, endangering his troops by hampering their ability to stop Russian advances by striking Russian command posts and fuel hubs.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported today that officials from Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, say sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes that are pushing deeper and deeper into Russia threaten the company’s survival. Profits for the company, which produces about a third of Russia’s oil, are falling and its debt is rising as the strikes cause fuel shortages.
Ukrainians are repeatedly hitting the refineries, one as far as 2,500 kilometers (about 1,553 miles) from the border, first damaging the structures and then destroying repairs after workers have rebuilt the structures, forcing the company to take on more and more debt as it shovels money into repairs that don’t survive. Even when it can find the money, sanctions limit its ability to replace equipment. The officials say even a few more months of war could destroy Rosneft.
The crisis explains why Putin and Trump are so desperate to stop Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil refineries and to lift sanctions on Russia. Rosneft’s loans from the Credit Bank of Moscow are becoming problematic, straining the bank.
In a sign this year’s writers are straining to make things as obvious as possible, Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post broke the story today that in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth apparently decided he wanted to display in his office one of the two floor globes General Dwight D. Eisenhower used during World War II.
Eisenhower was the erudite five-star general who oversaw the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily before directing the Allied invasion of France and Germany as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. He is widely credited with defeating the Nazis.
After the war, Eisenhower went on to the presidency of Columbia University, where he devoted his energies to founding the American Assembly, a think tank to gather the world’s greatest minds to bring the understanding of history, foreign affairs, and philosophy to address the problems of the post–World War II world.
In 1952, when the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination vowed to cut U.S. support for the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Eisenhower ran for president to protect the new postwar institutions that he believed were vital to global security in the face of an aggressive Soviet Union. He won the Republican nomination and then the presidency with almost 55% of the vote, retaking the White House from Democrats for the first time since 1933.
During the war, Eisenhower had visited Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, a week after soldiers liberated it. He was shocked to the core. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote to his wife. Determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again, he urged reporters and congressmen to visit the camp to ensure there were witnesses, pictures, and films to contradict anyone who might, in the future, try to deny the horrors that had taken place.
After the war, Eisenhower embraced the work of San Francisco philosopher Eric Hoffer, who explained in his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that economically or culturally dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated to back a demagogue who promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance. Such a leader was dangerous enough during the Nazi era, Eisenhower thought, but with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, such a strongman could destroy humanity.
Eisenhower believed that it was crucial for the U.S. to build alliances and to help increase standards of living around the globe in order to prevent such a scenario. He built NATO and began the Food for Peace initiative, a program that later was absorbed into the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the same agency that Musk and Trump shredded in 2025.
In their story about Eisenhower’s globe, Horton and Lamothe reported that Hegseth was so eager to get the historic object in place that rather than waiting for trained curators to move it, as is expected for any such priceless historic artifact, Hegseth’s staff decided to retrieve it on their own.
They dropped it.
The artifact smashed into its base, and the stand impaled it, ripping a gash through the fragile globe.
It never did end up in Hegseth’s office.
It is currently undergoing repairs.
More On Musk Influence On U.S. Foreign Affairs, Elections
New York Times, Trump Asked Musk to Reverse Limits on Ukraine’s Military Internet Use, Michael Crowley, Maggie Haberman and Siobhán O’Grady, Updated Oct. 23, 2026. The call from the president about the Starshield network came after officials in Ukraine reported that they found new limits on the use of military drones in their war against Russia.
President Trump called Elon Musk last week and asked him to restore Ukraine’s full access to the Starshield satellite communications network, according to a senior administration official and a person briefed on the exchange.
Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Musk, who owns the Starshield network, came after Ukrainian officials reported that they were encountering new limits on their ability to operate the military drones that have become essential to their war against Russia. The development raised alarms in Ukraine that Mr. Trump, who has demanded that Ukraine stop its drone attacks on Russian diesel refineries, might have instructed Mr. Musk to impose the limits.
Asked on Thursday whether he had made such a call to Mr. Musk, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump declined to say. “I don’t want to comment on it, you know, whether I called or whether somebody else called — doesn’t make any difference, I guess. The bottom line — he put it back,” the president told reporters.
When asked for comment, the White House pointed to Mr. Trump’s remarks.
It remained unclear on Thursday whether access to the Starshield network had been fully restored. Some Ukrainian officials said that was not yet the case.
But supporters of Ukraine were cautiously optimistic.
“If these reports are true, this is a welcome development,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, posted on X. Mr. Tillis said it remained unclear who, if anyone, had made the initial decision to throttle Ukraine’s Starshield access. But he said that anyone who objects to its restoration should “have the courage to raise your hand, and explain your justification for allowing Putin to continue to mow down toddlers in strollers in Ukrainian parks.”
The issue emerged when Ukrainian drones began dropping from the sky in mid-October. Ukrainian commanders discovered that drones flown against Russian targets at high speeds were suddenly losing their connection to Starshield, a military version of the Starlink satellite communications network owned by Mr. Musk. Ukraine relies heavily on Starshield to operate its drones and for other military purposes as it battles Russia.
The restrictions came without warning or explanation. But Mr. Trump recently demanded that Kyiv halt its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have helped cause diesel prices to surge ahead of the midterm elections. That has led Ukrainian officials and backers of the country to suspect that Mr. Trump might have been looking to constrain or even punish Kyiv for continuing those attacks.
The episode has confused Ukrainian officials and supporters of the country in Washington, and much uncertainty remains. Here is a look at some of the key questions involved.
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Is It Time to Nationalize Starlink or Even SpaceX? Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 23, 2026. Squeals of “socialism!” aside, we know how to do this and have done it before, repeatedly. This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war: this time, it’s about saving the world…
In response to reports in The Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk personally ordered the deadly slowdown of internet access to Ukraine and that Trump then called and begged him to get it restored, Nobel Prize winning economist and all-around genius Paul Krugman called yesterday for the United States to nationalize Musk’s Starlink/Starsheild array of thousands of satellites providing internet service around the world.
On MS NOW, former Bush speechwriter and columnist (and guest on my show) David Frum echoed the sentiment in an interview with former Bush White House Communications Director Nicole Wallace. And Matt Stoller — often brilliantly on the monopoly beat — is also writing thoughtfully about what to do about this terrible situation.
Senator Adam Schiff framed the issue when he wrote on Musk’s Nazi-infested social media site:
“Either the President was lying or Musk was lying, but the decision to slow down satellite speed and access has life or death consequences for Ukraine. This deserves a full investigation by the Senate. Elon Musk should be compelled to testify before Congress and under oath. National security decisions should be made in our national security interests, and not based on the personal whim of an unstable executive.”
Politico then followed up with an article titled “Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk” citing both Republican and Democratic members of Congress calling for Musk to be called before Congress under oath. That simple call for a normal political process provoked an imperious and apparently furious Musk to reply with an implied threat:
“Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”
If ever there was a business that merited nationalization, Starlink is it. It only exists because it’s been heavily subsidized by US government contracts and facilities, uses the internet that the US government invented, and — those in favor of nationalization argue — shouldn’t be subject to the whims of an eccentric, ketamine-addled, Nazi-saluting, election-buying CEO whose apparent decision just cost Ukrainian lives.
There’s even an argument to be made for nationalizing the rocket ship part of SpaceX (which owns Starlink/Starshield) and, like during the years when we first put men on the moon, handing it over to be owned and run by NASA.
But is it even possible? Turns out that American history says an emphatic, “Yes!”
During the crisis of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the country’s railroads, phone companies, and telegraph operators. He did the same with the nation’s radio networks and radio stations. All were returned to private ownership after the war, but that temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did the same during World War II, nationalizing airplane manufacturers, gun manufacturers, over 3,300 mines, the nation’s railroads, dozens of oil companies, Western Electric Co., Hughes Tool Co., Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and even one of the nation’s largest retail outlets, Montgomery Ward (as Krugman brilliantly details). He also nationalized 17 foreign companies doing business in the US.
After FDR died, President Harry Truman continued seizing companies that were using the war as an excuse to jack up profits to the detriment of our nation. He nationalized meatpacking facilities across the country, the Monongahela Railroad Company, the nation’s steel mills, and hundreds of railroad companies.
Like with Wilson’s nationalizations, nearly all were returned to the private sector after the war was over, although it took until 1965 before all were privatized. Many had had their boards of directors and senior management replaced with people who’d put the interests of the nation ahead of their greed for profits.
In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.
In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.
In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.
Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation. Reagan investigated over 1000 CEOs, dragged some before Congress, and threw many of those bankers into prison.
When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize all 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.
When George W. Bush was handed the White House by 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline’s security system was entirely in private hands.
They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.
President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock. We (through our government) ended up holding 7.64 million shares in US Airways, 18.7 million shares of America West Airlines, 3.45 million shares in Frontier Airlines, 1.47 million shares in American TransAir, and 2.38 million shares in World Airways.
Congress had deregulated the nation’s banks in 1999 when Republicans pushed through an end to the Glass-Steagall Act and Bill Clinton signed it into law. The resulting banking system crash in 2008 forced the Bush administration to nationalize the country’s two largest mortgage lenders (they held about 40% of all US mortgages), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The Bush administration then additionally nationalized a 77.9% share in AIG, a 36% share of Citigroup, and a 73.5% share of GMAC, forcing out GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner, who’d been a particularly terrible manager of that company and was actively lobbying against what Bush thought were America’s interests.
As President Barack Obama came into office in 2009, GM and Chrysler were on the brink of collapse. His administration created a new company, NGMCO, Inc., that nationalized the assets of GM and was 60.8% owned by the federal government.
GM was finally fully re-privatized by the Obama administration in 2013. Chrysler went through a similar process, although both the UAW and the Canadian government were part owners when it was temporarily nationalized.
Thomas M. Hanna, Director of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, compiled most of the data above in a brilliant paper titled “A History of Nationalization in the United States 1917-2009.”
Toward its end, he summarizes the case for nationalizing — perhaps only temporarily — what could reasonably include America’s space-based infrastructure :
“In such times of political and economic crisis, policymakers of all ideological persuasions in the United States have never been hesitant to use one of the most powerful tools at their disposal: nationalization of private enterprises and assets.
“This included the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who nationalized railroads, and the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries (among others), and the Republican Ronald Reagan, who nationalized a major national bank; the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who nationalized dozens of mining and manufacturing facilities, and the Republican George W. Bush, who nationalized airport security and various major financial institutions; the Democrat Barack Obama, who nationalized auto manufacturers, and the Republican Richard Nixon, who nationalized all passenger rail service.”
So, if America were to decide that Musk’s satellite and/or rocket business really should be the property of the taxpayers instead of the world’s richest man and his investors, how would that be done?
Instead of trying to regulate or engage in a protracted and expensive PR battle with him, why don’t we just buy them now?
The entire market capitalization of SpaceX is a mere $2.16 trillion if we were to simply force a purchase of all it’s stock, and that includes things that we don’t need to buy like his AI and social media company that have all been rolled in together. Just the satellite business could cost about half of that, depending on whose valuations you’re using.
While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s less than the budget deficit Trump has run up so far just this year alone. And remember, we poured fully $6 trillion into keeping our economy afloat during the Covid pandemic year of 2020.
Today’s crisis — with Trump sucking up to Putin and Starlink/Starshield being used to kneecap Ukraine — could easily lead to World War III, something that could dwarf the threat of Covid, Nazism in the 1940s, Bin Laden’s 9/11 attack, or the massive bank robberies that took place during the Reagan and Bush administrations. A nuclear war between major powers literally threatens all life on Earth.
Squeals of “socialism!” and “Venezuela!” aside, we know how to nationalize industries that are working against our nation’s interests and have done it before, repeatedly.
This time it’s not just about saving our banks or fighting a war. This time, it’s about saving both America and the world.
Congress needs to have a serious discussion about the merits and dangers of nationalizing Starlink/Starshield and SpaceX the way we have so may other renegade but vital companies in the past.
Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Musk Sucks, Sam Osterhout, Oct. 23, 2026. He’s gotta go. We can have democracy, or we can have Elon Musk, but we can’t have both. His wealth and his impact on our social fabric, on our democracy, are obscene to the point of total abstraction.
When I was a kid, my family went through a rough patch. It’s not an unusual story. It happens. I was able to get an off-the-books job at a bottling plant when I was 12. I made $4 an hour putting labels on bottles of engine oil additive at the end of the line, and got my checks made to cash. Sometimes, the man who owned the operation would accidentally forget to sign my checks.
At 20 hours a week, the checks I couldn’t cash were for $80.
As of this writing, Elon Musk’s net worth is around $1,000,000,000,000, give or take a few billion or a few tens of billions of dollars. So far, he’s reportedly given around $366,000,000 to federal committees supporting Republican candidates for national office. Most of it — about $275,000,000 — landed between July and September of this year.
$366,000,000 is the floor of his giving. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that he’s giving to groups that don’t disclose donors.
We can look at these numbers and shake our heads and say something like One guy shouldn’t have that much power. But it’s important to sit with it a second. We have to at least try to wrap our heads around what this kind of wealth means for us, personally. It’s almost impossible.
When I got to high school, I found an above-board job in a restaurant making $4.25 an hour — minimum wage in Kansas at that time. Twenty hours’ worth of pay was just a little over $60. I was lucky because home life had settled down. I had food and friends and a place to live, so $60 was a bonus. It didn’t go towards rent, in other words. I was lucky.
In college, restaurants wouldn’t schedule anyone for more than 30 hours a week because they didn’t want to risk hitting 40+ hours and having to pay overtime. And why not do it that way? They didn’t have any trouble staffing. For me, that meant two minimum wage jobs. I could work 60 hours a week without overtime because I only worked 30 hours at each job.
This story isn’t unique. Again, I was and continue to be incredibly lucky. But I have a chip on my shoulder. You should, too.
Money is speech, and speech is power. That’s not my arithmetic. That’s the prevailing theory according to Citizens United. But it means that the essential gauge of your power within our system is based on your ability to fund campaigns. And I hate to break it to you, folks, but you might be a millionaire right now, reading this piece while sitting on a chaise lounge overlooking the sea (what I imagine millionaires do all day), but you still ain’t sh*t.
Some reports suggest that canvassers funded by Musk’s money are making around $3 per door knocked. Musk’s wealth grows $3 every .0002 seconds. Every four seconds, Musk’s wealth grows roughly the equivalent of a typical American worker’s ANNUAL income — around $65,000.
In thirteen seconds, he has amassed the equivalent value of everything a typical American family owns.
That $366,000,000 he’s given to Republicans this cycle? Over the past year, his wealth grew that much every 6 hours. That’s about 0.037 percent of his wealth. If he were a member of a median family and gave the same proportion of his wealth, he’d have written a check for around $79.Subscribed
I think about that kid taking an unsigned check from his illegal job at a bottling plant to the bank and not being able to cash it. I think about the stink of a restaurant on my clothes and the $60 checks on payday. I think about my mom who scraped by at Casual Corner, going into student loan debt in her 40s to save the family, and the women she worked with who didn’t take out the debt and ended up restocking at Walmart.
These are the Americans with a true stake in our politics. These are the Americans most of us know, who we have been or who we might someday become. Or who we are at this very moment. We populate the cities and towns. We ride our bikes in the cul-de-sacs and hand out candy at Halloween. We worry about our kids’ schools and spend too much time thinking about co-pays. We wave at each other as we pass.
In our world, my power does not diminish your power. Together we become more powerful.
In Elon’s world, we are ants.
But we do not live in Elon’s world, as much as the oligarchs would like to persuade you otherwise. This is our world. By all accounts, his third-of-a-billion in spending won’t convince Texans that Ken Paxton isn’t a piece of shit. The doors his money is paying to be knocked won’t persuade every farmer that they are somehow doing great, or people with cars that gas is cheaper than it used to be.
His money should be repugnant to every voter who watches a political ad it paid for. Elon’s money should be untouchable, unspendable. It’s tough times, but anyone who takes it should be similarly made repugnant, untouchable.
Thing is, we have skin in the game, and we have power. Our vote counts the same as his. His money is an unsigned check made out to cash, dangling over our election. In the end, the story of Elon Musk will be the story of one isolated citizen. The story of America will be written by us.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, When a Candidate Is Wealthy, and Many of the Voters Are Not, Emma Schartz, Oct. 23, 2026 (print ed.). In a year when the wealth of the rich soared while workers lost ground to inflation, class has become political, especially in the Nebraska Senate race.
With a fortune estimated at more than $200 million, Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska is among the richest members of Congress. His independent challenger, Dan Osborn, reported an income last year of $108,089.91 from the heating and air conditioning company where he works as a mechanic.
That yawning gap, between a middle-class salary that is falling behind inflation and generational wealth that has soared over the past two years, is at the heart not just of Nebraska’s competitive Senate contest but House, Senate and governor’s races across the country. It’s not just the price of gas and groceries. It’s about those who struggle watching in wonder at those who don’t.
“The perspective has changed from left versus right,” said Jim Begley, director of the William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “Now it’s top versus bottom. And people on the bottom are wondering what the hell is going on.”
Democrats from Western Montana to Northeastern Pennsylvania are running against what they say is a “billionaire class” that has supposedly rigged the political and economic system. In Ohio, Amy Acton, the Democrat seeking the governor’s mansion, is airing an ad using her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy’s own words — “I’m like dirty, dirty rich, not quite filthy rich” — to portray him as out of touch.
In a House district around Palm Beach, Fla., Democrats are running against Republican Casey Askar’s wealth. In Maine, a new attack ad on Senator Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican, pits “working class people” against the “very rich.”
But perhaps nowhere are such class attacks more stark than in the Nebraska Senate race where Mr. Ricketts, the Republican scion of the TD Ameritrade finance fortune, faces Mr. Osborn, a mechanic who made his name leading a strike at a Kellogg plant in Omaha.
Two years ago, Mr. Osborn ran and lost against another Republican incumbent, Senator Deb Fischer, figuring that he couldn’t beat the vast personal fortune of Mr. Ricketts, who was also on the ballot in a special election to complete the term of retired Senator Ben Sasse.
This year, Mr. Osborn is running against that personal fortune. In advertisements and social media posts, he has portrayed Mr. Ricketts as a spoiled rich kid, whose father, Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade, bought him a Senate seat.
“The system’s working exactly like it’s designed to work — for them,” Mr. Osborn said after a town hall in Tekamah, Neb. this month. He added, “Nebraska has to make this decision and tell the rest of the country we’re not for sale.”
The portrait ignores Pete Ricketts’s tenure as governor and deep connections to Nebraska.
“Senator Ricketts delivers for Nebraskans; Dan Osborn lies to them,” said Max Oberg, a spokesman for the Ricketts campaign.
And Democrats and their allies have run class-conscious campaigns for years, often to no avail. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont failed to win the Democratic nomination for president twice on crusades against oligarchs and billionaires.
But in a year of economic struggles, class differences may be striking a nerve.
More On U.S. Military, Foreign Affairs Leadership
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Everything Hegseth Touches Breaks, Bill Kristol, Cathy Young and Andrew Egger, Oct. 23, 2026. Pete is no Ike.
Much of the political world was horrified this week by Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad that enlists his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother to attack her character. Donald Trump, however, loved it. “Who wouldn’t use such an ad?” he wondered in a lengthy Truth Social post yesterday. “I only wish the mothers of my opponents would be so brave as to come forward and explain that their son or daughter is a liar, and much worse.”
Later, a reporter asked Trump: “Amy Acton’s mother has not cared for her in about fifty years after her stepdad was indicted for raping her. Why should anyone listen to what the mother has to say?”
“Well, I know nothing about it. All I know is the mother said very bad things about Acton, who I guess is running for governor against Vivek,” Trump replied. “The mother said very bad things about the one who’s running for governor, and I think you have to take that seriously.” Happy Friday.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos Getty, Shutterstock)
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Hegseth Drops the Globe, William Kristol, right, Oct. 23, 2026. It was February 3, 2026. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was riding high. He’d survived his rocky start in the job, and early staff turmoil, and Signalgate. He’d started firing generals who might have stood in his way—and there’d been surprisingly little pushback. He’d kicked the media out of the Pentagon.
He liked to call himself the “secretary of war,” and it was clear why. He’d blown up small boats in the Caribbean, and Congress was doing nothing to stop it. The one-day expedition in Venezuela in January had gone well. He was looking forward to trumpeting a similar success in Iran.
His mind apparently turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s true that there’s no evidence that Hegseth has ever been a particular fan of Ike. And in fact, Hegseth’s temperament, his bearing, and his character couldn’t be more different from Ike’s. Still, Pete likely thought of Eisenhower for one reason: Ike didn’t rest on his military laurels. He made it all the way to the Oval Office. That’s what Pete’s always aimed for. So, Pete thought, 2026 could be the year he became like Ike, a lauded military commander. And then in 2027 he’d leave, enjoy the accolades, and respond to a groundswell demanding he run for the presidency in 2028.
In any case, in the midst of his daydreams Pete apparently recalled seeing Second World War–era photos of Ike standing next to a big floor globe. Someone had told Pete that the Army kept a couple of those around the Pentagon. He ordered his staff to get one for his office.
It didn’t go as planned.
As Alex Horton and Dan Lamothe reported in the Washington Post,
Two floor globes said to be used by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II are housed in the Pentagon, where subsequent generations of Army leaders became custodians of the artifacts . . . The historical significance was attractive to Hegseth . . . and his staff requested that the secretary’s office become the new home to one of the 30-inch globes.
There was a process for moving historical items within the Pentagon, involving professional movers and trained curators. But the boss didn’t want to wait. And Hegseth’s staff wanted to make the boss happy:
Hegseth’s staff dispatched its own team to relocate an Eisenhower globe. They lost control of the artifact and dropped it, sending the globe crashing onto its base and impaling the fragile shell . . . The resulting gash appears to be several inches wide.
So, moved by vanity and vainglory, and acting arrogantly and impatiently, Pete broke Ike’s globe.
As David Simon, head writer and producer of The Wire, remarked, “This metaphor is ridiculously obvious and unsubtle. Fire the writers. They’re hacks.”
Fair enough! But perhaps it’s appropriate that a hack metaphor conveys the truth about a hack like Hegseth. After all, he is, to say the least, no Dwight Eisenhower. He’s more like Tom Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .” Hegseth has smashed up things and creatures. He’s made a mess that will be difficult to clean up. He’s damaged a U.S. military of great value and worth. He’s broken a world order that will be difficult to repair.
One of the first orders of business of the next Congress will be the impeachment of Hegseth and his removal from office. I don’t suppose breaking Ike’s globe will actually make it into one of the articles of impeachment. But if you’re engaged in the drama of politics, being handed an apt if obvious metaphor never hurts.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
New York Times, Does Congress Need to Approve the Arch? Trump Says It Did 100 Years Ago, Emily Badger, Oct. 23, 2026. Over the past year, President Trump and his allies have offered a series of explanations for why the nation needs a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch: It will mark 250 years of American independence. It will befit Washington’s place among Western capitals. It will honor the nation’s veterans. It will serve the military, the president added last month, as a platform for snipers.
But as the mega project planned for Memorial Circle heads to a final vote by the National Capital Planning Commission Nov. 5, the Trump administration has circled around one argument crucial to the project’s legal defense: The arch will at long last bring to life, officials say, a proposal that has languished on hallowed land for a century.
“It is a national embarrassment that policymakers have neglected for more than 100 years to build a congressionally authorized monument on this circle,” Mark Paoletta, an administration lawyer and the new chair of the planning commission, wrote this month in an essay in The Federalist that offers a kind of closing argument for the project. Construction could start as soon as Nov. 5, once the commission votes, the government has said in court.
This framing ties the legal rationale for the arch to a historical one. And it rebuts critics who say the monument is a vanity project of the president; on the contrary, this history implies, the whole thing isn’t even his idea. Expanding on his essay, Mr. Paoletta told The New York Times it was a “betrayal” of historical plans for Memorial Circle that the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery today is a “pathetic empty grass traffic circle.”ImageMemorial Circle, with the bridge and the Lincoln Memorial in the background.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The fight over the project isn’t just about whether something should go there; even some of the president’s critics agree the grass is underwhelming. The issue is whether a law passed in 1925 empowers Mr. Trump to make his arch the answer when Congress has since said only it can authorize new monuments in the capital.
The administration argues that Congress effectively authorized the arch a century ago. That’s because it says the project fulfills the “historic design intent” of a never-built proposal from the 1920s by the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission.
That proposal: a pair of slender and widely spaced columns at the western end of a new bridge spanning the Potomac River.
New York Times, Military Boards Are Defying Orders and Letting Trans Troops Serve, Dave Philipps, Oct. 23, 2026. The service members at Navy and Marine Corps hearings are finding ways to keep trans troops in uniform.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a slur to proudly announce to an auditorium of Marines in September that he was ridding the military of all transgender troops.
The Pentagon had set up review boards at bases around the globe, manned by everyday uniformed service members with narrow orders that all but ensured that the trans troops appearing before them would be voted out.
But just steps from the auditorium where Mr. Hegseth spoke, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, boards assigned to carry out those orders were doing the opposite. Instead of firing trans Marines, the boards were voting to keep them.
The same was happening in the Navy: Boards given strict rules instructing them to force out sailors were rebelling and voting to let them stay.
It is not just a few outlying individuals. Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases.
The Pentagon keeps the proceedings secret. Outsiders — even spouses — are not allowed to attend. Officials won’t release numbers. Leaders won’t discuss the outcomes. The New York Times compiled the figures through interviews with service members and lawyers involved in the hearings.
The number of Navy and Marine cases is small and could easily change as more hearings are conducted. The same pattern has not been seen so far in the Army or Air Force, which have overwhelmingly voted to discharge trans service members.
Still, the votes are a stunning rebuke from the armed forces, where following orders is bedrock. And they suggest the military’s transgender ban is being rejected by the very troops the administration says the ban is meant to serve.
“These boards are being told to do something that they know is wrong — to rubber-stamp a non-choice given to them by the administration,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force lawyer and a professor at Southwestern Law School who has been tracking the cases. “We are seeing them say they’re not going to play that game. We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”
The board decisions are only recommendations, and could be reversed by the politically appointed secretaries overseeing each service branch. There are also pending legal challenges that could pause the ban or rescind it entirely.
The Trump administration claims that trans troops, who account for about 4,250 people or about 0.1 percent of the military, are a costly burden on military effectiveness — a position that military findings contradict. President Trump signed an executive order barring trans troops during his first week in office, saying the action was needed to weed out dishonorable radicals who poison morale and waste resources.
“For the sake of our Nation and the patriotic Americans who volunteer to serve it, military service must be reserved for those mentally and physically fit for duty,” the order read.
The Pentagon designed a policy that paid transgender troops to leave voluntarily. Hundreds of highly qualified people left, including doctors, lawyers, pilots and nuclear technicians. The troops who stayed to challenge their dismissal waited in limbo, sometimes for more than a year.
While they waited, the administration set up a system of three-member separation boards to process the remaining cases using a narrow set of instructions. Under the rules, any evidence of transgender feelings or tendencies — even if there is no formal transition — requires dismissal.
The three-person boards are made up of everyday officers and enlisted personnel plucked temporarily from their normal jobs to hear one case, like civilian jurors. They are not allowed to consider whether a person is a top performer, a specialist in a critical career field or a decorated combat veteran.
The members are given a one-page findings sheet and instructed to circle a few words to find that a service member exhibits evidence of being transgender and therefore is not qualified to serve and should be discharged.
At least, that was the plan.
Trans Marines and sailors who went before boards said in interviews that after months of being vilified by top government officials, they expected a quick dismissal, but instead encountered thoughtful respect from fellow service members who voted to keep them.
Ms. VanLandingham, the former military lawyer, said the votes might be influenced by growing concern in the ranks that the current Pentagon is preoccupied with wedge issues and gives little thought to the welfare of the force.
Mr. Hegseth in his speech to the Marines, she noted, said the force should have “No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals," but did not mention those killed or wounded in the war with Iran.
“There’s been a chipping away at any kind of confidence that Hegseth actually cares about service members,” she said. “I think that’s given the boards license.”
There may be cultural factors, too, she said. The board instructions in all the branches are nearly identical. But each branch has different values. The Army is often seen as the most bureaucratic and least likely to buck orders. The Navy is the most diverse. The Marine Corps prides itself on a culture of loyalty.
The Navy has nearly twice as many people who identify as gay, bisexual or transgender — 9 percent — compared to other branches, according to a 2015 report by the RAND Corporation.
That was clear to a Navy paramedic who was retained by a board in July. The paramedic, who asked to not be named because he feared retribution, said he was stunned when his lawyer asked a chief, a lieutenant commander and a commander sitting on his board if they knew any trans sailors.
“They all said yes,” the paramedic recalled in an interview. “The chief said his liberty buddy in Thailand was transgender and was a phenomenal sailor. The lieutenant commander said her first work center supervisor was transgender, and she learned a lot from her. The commander said he’d worked with several transgender sailors, and he barbecues with his next-door neighbor, who’s trans.”
There were other factors working in his favor. He had been meritoriously promoted twice for superior performance; remained able to deploy his entire five years in the Navy; and had saved several lives working in emergency rooms.
For his last assignment he was attached to Marines deployed to the southern border. “I never ran into people who cared if I was trans,” he said. “They just cared that I did my job well.”
More On Middle East, Wars
New York Times, Gadi Eisenkot Couldn’t Be More Unlike Netanyahu. Can He Beat Him? David M. Halbfinger, Natan Odenheimer and Johnatan Reiss, Oct. 23, 2026. Mr. Eisenkot, an ex-military chief leading in the polls, calls the Israeli prime minister an “anti-leader.” But his low-key campaigning style is worrying supporters.
Gadi Eisenkot doesn’t speak like a politician. He runs through his plans matter-of-factly, like a commander spelling out a mission to his troops.
It’s an unusual style of campaigning, and scarcely electrifying; he doesn’t so much appeal to voters as state what he sees as the obvious.
But for Mr. Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief and the leading candidate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday’s election, it reflects who he is, how he approaches leadership and how serious he believes Israel’s problems have become.
It also reflects the grief he felt as father to a son killed two months into Israel’s war in Gaza — grief that was on vivid display when he delivered a eulogy on national television.
Mr. Eisenkot, 66, says he is running to “save Israel.” In his view, Mr. Netanyahu has embroiled Israel in forever wars, destroyed its international standing and decimated its support in the United States. He’s pushed the country toward authoritarianism, Mr. Eisenkot argues, and turned segments of society against one another. Extremist Jews are marauding through Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Organized criminals are killing Arab citizens. Army reservists are called up again and again because ultra-Orthodox Israelis dodge the draft.
And Mr. Netanyahu has not accepted responsibility for the security failures that led to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack.
More Global News
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Yellow (Vest) Journalism, Cathy Young, Oct. 23, 2026. Much of the American right, from Donald Trump downward, has seized on the violence in France as a dire warning about “mass immigration” — from Muslim countries and generally from the “Third World” — whose ravages supposedly threaten America if the Democrats win the midterms. Aside from the absurd hyperbole of cries that “France has fallen,” more level-headed observers, including our own Mona Charen, have also noted that the riots have little if anything to do with migrants or Muslims.
Yes, young men from the low-income suburbs or banlieues, where the population is disproportionately of North African descent, have been caught on camera stealing from vandalized shops. But much of the violence appears to have been at the hands of activists from far-left extremist movements. The man arrested for burning down the Limoges City Hall, for example, had previously been under surveillance for ties to a radical environmental group (and is the son of a Spanish anarchist). That’s exactly the kind of detail the American right of just a few years ago would have savored — but now, it’s not enough.
Another group that has played a prominent role in the disturbances is the populist Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests)! — which brings us to a curious twist. When the Gilets Jaunes—named for the visibility vests French drivers are required to wear in emergencies — first burst onto the political scene eight years ago, most American rightists reacted very differently. They glossed over the violent turn of the Gilets’ protests to focus instead on their grievances against the carbon tax, environmental regulations, and “globalism.”
Take this December 8, 2018 Twitter post: “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money much to third world countries (that are questionably run) in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”
Yes, that was one Donald Trump. Yes, there’s always a tweet. No, the protestors in this case weren’t chanting for Trump to take over the Élysée Palace.
Trump had a lot of company back in 2018. The Federalist praised the Gilets’ “carbon tax riots” as a libertarian uprising that might begin the undoing of “European socialism”; now, it invokes the riots in France as a nightmare that awaits us “if we don’t put an end to Muslim immigration.” Breitbart blasted Emmanuel Macron for calling the Gilets Jaunes “hate-filled”; now, it approvingly quotes Trump’s comments blaming Macron for the unrest because he didn’t close the borders. National Review softballed the Gilets’ as MAGA’s Euro-cousins, put-upon “deplorables” with French accents; now, it excoriates the media for soft-pedaling the French student protests as they descended into mayhem.
But maybe the Gilets Jaunes protests that erupted in late November 2018 were much nicer than the current unrest? Hardly. On December 1, rioters in Paris torched about a hundred cars as well as numerous storefronts; they also pillaged dozens of restaurants and shops. In the first month, nearly 3,000 people—a third of them police officers—were injured in clashes between the Gilets and the police. By May 2019, there were eleven dead. And while those riots did not have a shattering iconic moment like the blaze that gutted the Limoges city hall on Sunday, the Gilets certainly didn’t show much reverence for France’s cultural heritage. Among other things, the rioters defaced the Arc de Triomphe with graffiti and vandalized its interior, smashing statues and trashing the gift shop.
One could debate whether the Gilets were ever really right-wing; their populism was mostly of the far-left kind. But that doesn’t change the basic point: When large portions of the MAGA-friendly American right decided that the Gilets Jaunes were rebels against the hated globalist elites, they were more than willing to overlook lawlessness, vandalism, and violence. Now that it suits their political purpose of demonizing migrants and Muslims, they regard such acts as civilization-ending barbarism.
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QUICK HITS
LACKEYS ONLY: When it comes to hiring, firing, and promoting career civil servants, it’s against the law for a president’s political appointees to make decisions based on those employees’ party affiliation. But the Washington Sun reports that the State Department appears to be violating that law, asking foreign service officers up for promotion whom they voted for in the three elections where Trump was on the ballot:
Top officials in the State Department made clear that only candidates who voted for President Donald Trump would be eligible for the mid-to-upper level foreign service roles. They also told candidates that their campaign donation history would be examined and any donation to Democrats would be disqualifying. . . .
A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the voting history questions but emphasized the importance of “fidelity” in a statement.
“Fidelity means upholding the Constitution and the law and executing policy with loyalty to the American people and their interests,” the spokesperson said. “It emphasizes the critical importance of service, integrity, and policy alignment across the Foreign Service. It is not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.”
Trump believes that the only way to be loyal to America is to be loyal to him personally. Marco Rubio’s State Department seems to find following that belief more important than following the law. Read the whole thing.
MAHA DISILLUSIONMENT: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have made his peace with the Trump administration’s cuddliness with agribusiness. But some of his true-believer MAHA lieutenants seem less tolerant of the status quo. Calley Means, the health influencer and top Kennedy ally, resigned from his government post yesterday, amid reporting he was frustrated by the glacial pace of Trump’s supposed food-policy agenda. (Means minded his manners in his resignation statement, talking of his “tremendous respect” for Trump and RFK Jr. and saying that the MAHA movement is “in the first inning and just getting started.”)
The Wall Street Journal has more:
Means was greatly frustrated by White House delays of some of Kennedy’s most popular policy ideas and blamed others in the administration for allowing food companies and special interests to have too much sway, people familiar with the matter said. One of them described Means as “disillusioned.” . . .
Means’ exit comes after administration officials deferred announcements of two of Kennedy’s food priorities: a definition of ultraprocessed foods aimed at eventually labeling them as such, as well as a regulation mandating less added sugar and more protein in school meals.
In recent months, Means clashed with other White House officials, sometimes raising his voice and growing visibly frustrated, the Journal previously reported. Some found him difficult to work with and unwilling to make practical concessions to ensure policies were feasible, the Journal previously reported.
Kennedy had originally intended to bring both Calley Means and his sister,Casey Means—a fellow influencer—into government with him. On Kennedy’s recommendation, Trump nominated Casey Means for Surgeon General, before ultimately withdrawing that nomination a few months later.
SEIZING (EQUITY IN) THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION: Donald Trump may style himself America’s last, best defense against socialism—even while insisting the government take greater ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. The White House has taken more than forty equity stakes in companies, with more on the way—and as Semafor reports, Democrats seem more interested in using this precedent than undoing it:
“The Trump administration’s approach to government equity stakes has completely lacked transparency and accountability,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told Semafor. “While this is something future administrations may want to consider, it’s clear that to actually serve Americans, it would require a totally different approach.”
Thanks to the precedent Trump has set, a future Democratic president could reap multiple benefits from equity stakes in private companies. Among them, as former Biden administration officials suggested: reining in the AI industry, shrinking defense spending, boxing China out of critical sectors, and pressuring gun and oil companies.
Even demanding an equity stake as a condition for government assistance—whether it’s a loan, grant, or other federal permit—is a powerful tool that’s now more readily at the White House’s disposal, no matter which party controls it.
On the one hand, you can hardly blame them. On the other hand: How bad do things have to get before lawmakers learn the lesson that presidents have far too much discretionary power and they should probably do something about it?
Oct. 22
Top Headlines
President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
Valerie Hopkins, Oct. 22, 2026. Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.There is a morbid phenomenon in our politics, apparent both domestically and abroad. "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."News Roundups
Oct. 22, 2026. We just published something the Pentagon has spent eight months trying to keep from you. I obtained never-before-seen photos and videos from U.S. bases across the Middle East, along with accounts from troops and families who describe barracks burning with service members trapped inside, troops digging their own foxholes, and families left behind in Bahrain because an evacuation would “look bad at home.”Oct. 22, 2026. Last night, an 80-year-old President of the United States stood on stage in South Carolina and asked his own crowd to help him remember the name of the Nobel Peace Prize. He shrank his favorite investment number by a factor of 1,000, wondered how Europe would feel about renaming the Pacific Ocean, and cheered as one of his supporters appeared to hit a protester.Special Report: Accountability For Big Tech Moguls?
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute -- a gesture at a Trump Inauguration event that Musk described as innocent.
Montgomery Ward leader Sewell Avery Carried Out of His Office By Two Soldiers during World War II (Bettmann Archive photo).
Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy. Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. We now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, Just How Much Are Young Voters Backing Democrats Now? See the Shift, Claire Cain Miller, Oct. 22, 2026. In the new Times/Siena poll, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way — a jump from just two years ago.Oct. 22, 2026. To make the big blue wave that is emerging bigger we need to keep driving the early vote. For as Anderson Clayton told us a few weeks ago: "Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October."Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races. More On U.S. Economy -- And Election Interference
(a senior counselor to Centerview Partners and was the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999), Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). Many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections.More On Ohio Candidate's Despicable Child Rape Ad
Vice President JD Vance (Image by Sarah D. Rogers for The Bulwark).
Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 22, 2026. At 12 years old, Amy Acton was the victim of sexual abuse. After her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping Acton, her estranged mother, Donna Arthur, took her stepfather’s side and left the state with him as he fled justice. Oct. 22, 2026. Amy Action called Vivek Ramaswamy’s sick ad exploitive. It’s also backfiring according to a top election forecaster.More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Oct. 22, 2026. Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump, who has actively suppressed his transcripts from his schooling and falsely implied repeatedly that he graduated college with high honors, insulted CNN's Caitlin Collins and another female reporter at the White House on Oct. 22, 2026.
Oct. 22, 2026. Everything feels out of whack in the United States. First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.
Oct. 22, 2026. I spent the fall quietly filming a documentary about what Donald Trump has turned Washington into. One week before the election, you’re going to see all of it. The government ejected our film crew from the Washington Monument. It tells you everything about why we made this documentary.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
Oct. 22, 2026. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America.More Global News
Oct. 22, 2026. Yesterday, Russia released a wrongfully detained American: Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired schoolteacher who was imprisoned in 2022 after being accused of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine.Future U.S. Politics
right, Oct. 22, 2026. Like many authoritarian cults, the MAGA crowd does not believe their reign will ever end or that their opponents will ever gather their wits to respond to assaults on their rights, liberties, and physical safety. But some savvier Republicans (including White House staffers who are already lawyering up) are getting a wake-up call. In the run-up to the midterms, it seems to be slowly dawning on some of them that their abusive conduct has lit a fire under the Resistance, and that a reckoning is coming.Oct. 22, 2026. There’s a remark by the early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, that’s been much quoted in recent years: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."More On U.S Media, High Tech
Oct. 22, 2026. Trump tried to shake down the BBC with a defamation lawsuit, but the broadcaster has fought back at every turn, and now Trump must testify by December 11.Top Stories
President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
New York Times, News Analysis: Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing, Valerie Hopkins, Oct. 22, 2026. Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working.
Last October, President Trump imposed significant sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies, complaining that negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin over ending the war in Ukraine “just don’t go anywhere.”
A red-carpet welcome for the Russian leader in Alaska had done nothing to bring peace. A planned summit in Budapest had fallen apart. Mr. Trump had started to acknowledge that Mr. Putin might just be playing him, with no intention of making peace. Faint Ukrainian hopes glimmered of a Trump-Putin break.
But the Russian president was playing a longer game.
Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.
On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would buy Russian diesel, asking for no concessions from Mr. Putin in return. The Trump administration went on to pressure Ukraine to stop striking oil refineries — Kyiv’s most powerful lever — and suspended Russia sanctions that Mr. Trump had just signed into law. Mr. Trump declared that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”
The diesel deal was in part a political calculation by Mr. Trump before the midterm elections, as he tries to lower fuel prices. But that action and others that followed also reflect the president’s long-evident affinity for Mr. Putin, which the Russian leader has assiduously cultivated even while continuing the war and denying Mr. Trump a coveted prize.
Ever since Mr. Trump returned to office, Russia has sought to separate the conflict in Ukraine from potential business agreements and closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The Trump administration held back, even as it slashed aid to Ukraine, largely continuing a Biden administration policy of refraining from economic deals with Russia until Mr. Putin stopped the war.
The White House now says such deals will help Russia see the benefits of peace. The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Mr. Putin, meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, had agreed to talks with Ukraine and the United States next month. But they would involve relatively low-level representatives, and a Russian official played down the Kremlin’s openness to forging a comprehensive agreement now.
Newly emboldened, Moscow is moving to assert itself as a global power equal to the United States and China, promoting a trilateral summit among them in November.
President Trump frequently portrays himself on his Truth Social or via White House as an all-powerful king (as at top) or emporer annointed by God and backed by security forces and the military, as in this portrayal above by former Repubicans who organized the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. The political, military and economic chaos extends to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, selective tariffs helping insiders and Trump's transformation of U.S. longstanding alliances with Canada, Europe and NATO into adversaries whom he disdains while courting profitable deals from Russia, as newly documented this week, benefiting his family and allies.
New York Times, Judge Restricts D.H.S. Field Operations Aimed at Unearthing Voter Fraud, Zach Montague and Shawn Hubler, Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The ruling largely blocked homeland security agents from carrying out field interviews in nine states, including California, as part of a sprawling effort to find noncitizens registered to vote.
A federal judge in California on Wednesday blocked the Homeland Security Department from carrying out most field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters.
The ruling came less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The Trump administration has launched a blitz of operations focused on finding evidence of noncitizen voting or tying up election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote.
The ruling covered stops and field interviews being carried out by hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents assigned to fan out across the country in search of instances of voter fraud, under what the administration has referred to as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”
In a concise 19-page ruling, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote that the stops appeared likely to hamper voter engagement and registration by a coalition of local governments and nonprofit groups. As with other initiatives in which the Trump administration has used federal immigration data to infer the citizenship status of people on state voter rolls, she wrote there were already signs that the “target lists” the government had generated contained errors and included naturalized citizens.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended its methods, saying federal officials had used multiple data sources in addition to the public voter data they pulled to further verify the identity of registrants and eliminate false positives.
Judge Martínez-Olguin stopped short of halting field operations. But she barred agents from carrying out interviews that “involve or are likely to involve persons” who agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.” Given the unreliability of federal citizenship data at issue in the case, it was unclear how significantly that would hamper the department’s activities.
The interests of the entities suing, “and the public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation,” she wrote, “far exceed defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens.”
Internal documents introduced in the case indicated that agents were directed to focus on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.
Judge Martínez-Olguin, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that the scope of the operations also raised concerns about voter intimidation. She noted that according to agency memos, the Homeland Security Department “surveils, covertly infiltrates and interrogates the staff of nonprofits and churches conducting voter engagement” and had targeted nearly 150 such nonprofit groupsas of July.
The government had indicated it could target naturalized citizens in instances where data suggested an individual had voted before they were naturalized.
The case arose as the Trump administration has mounted a series of legal fights with election officials across the country, aiming to show a pattern of large-scale illegal voting in U.S. elections. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part because many of the state and local authorities that administer and supervise elections have refused to comply with demands for access to sensitive voter rolls.
As a result, the federal authorities have compiled their own databases, underpinned by public, commercially available information that they have compared with federal records. The process has led to mistakes in some states, in part because public voter rolls do not include unique identifiers like Social Security numbers. Federal immigration records also sometimes fail to capture changes in citizenship status.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Monsters Among Us, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Oct. 22, 2026. There is a morbid phenomenon in our politics, apparent both domestically and abroad.
What’s driving the coming blue wave? More than anything else, the latest New York Times/Siena poll finds, it’s a sharp reversal among young voters, who got Trump-curious in 2024 but have snapped back hard ever since.
Voters 65 and older have crept back toward Democrats by two points, voters 45 to 64 have stayed put, and voters 30 to 44 have slid five points left. But voters aged 18 to 29 have jumped back toward Democrats by fifteen points—55 percent to 70 percent. Happy Thursday.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Exposing What the Pentagon is Hiding, DOJ Refuses to Rule Out Blocking Election Certification, Trump Order Under Oath, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. We just published something the Pentagon has spent eight months trying to keep from you. I obtained never-before-seen photos and videos from U.S. bases across the Middle East, along with accounts from troops and families who describe barracks burning with service members trapped inside, troops digging their own foxholes, and families left behind in Bahrain because an evacuation would “look bad at home.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Todd Blanche said it was possible DOJ could try to block states from certifying the midterm results, a judge halted Trump’s noncitizen voter hunt in nine states over bad data, and another judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his BBC lawsuit after his “matter of national importance” turned out to be a rally and a fundraiser.
Not everyone is happy with today’s reporting, and the reaction has been intense. We’re going to keep pushing. I’ve also moved my Trump-Russia investigation to this weekend for more vetting, because with my family in Ukraine under Russian missiles, I want every claim in it to hold up.
Here’s what you need to know today:
EXCLUSIVE: Never-Before-Seen Images Show Damage to U.S. Bases in the Iran War as Troops and Families Say They Were Left to Fend for Themselves
I worked with VALOR Media Network and MeidasTouch on a bombshell exclusive that shows what the Iran war has done to American troops, which the Pentagon has kept from the public. We obtained dozens of never-before-published photos and videos showing damage to U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the UAE, and Bahrain, along with firsthand accounts from people who were there. Since the war began in late February, there have been no embedded journalists, casualty details have come out slowly, and images of damaged American bases have been almost nonexistent. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they say they’ve been repeatedly threatened with discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for speaking out or sharing images. “It’s so much worse than people realize,” one source said.
Images from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia show destroyed dining halls, damaged dorms, and aircraft burning on the tarmac. One photo shows a U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS surveillance plane that sources say was damaged in an attack that injured 10 to 12 service members and also damaged two KC-135 refueling tankers. Another image shows bunkers built to protect troops from missiles and drones, but their doors had never been mounted. A source also provided an image they say shows a fully destroyed C-17 cargo plane that was piled up to speed cleanup and limit knowledge of the loss, though the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed it and we couldn’t independently verify it. Video we obtained shows U.S. interceptors failing to stop a ballistic missile that then hit the base. “We had no defense against the drones,” one service member said.
At Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, sources say three service members were killed when Iranian missiles and drones hit their barracks, and others could hear them calling for help from inside the flames. Service members described about three months of near-constant fire starting in March, coming so often that “the alarms couldn’t keep up.” Sources say F-15s, F-35s, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and helicopters were damaged, and the July 17-18 attack on the barracks left three dead and four more evacuated. Sources say inadequate emergency response and a lack of preparation kept them from reaching the trapped troops, and that people on the ground were surprised more weren’t killed in the overcrowded base. Troops repeatedly ran out of basic hygiene supplies, housing areas were blown up twice, and a hangar holding everything they were preparing to ship home took a direct hit. In July they were told they were going home, then ordered to stay while sitting in the terminal, after many had already thrown away their bedding.
In Kuwait and the UAE, troops say they had no warning the war was starting and were left to protect themselves. In Kuwait, sources say some service members scattered into the desert after the first attacks and lived out of a van for three months until they could be sent home. Photos from September show Camp Buehring almost completely abandoned by the U.S. military, and sources say no one is allowed in parts of it at night. In the UAE, service members said they learned about the war from the news and had no shelters, and only small security teams were armed. Some went into hotels and had to find their own food, including by ordering takeout, while others dug their own foxholes. They described their leadership as “rudderless.”
In Bahrain, military families say the Pentagon refused to evacuate them because it would “make the situation look bad at home.” Sources say local commanders had evacuation plans ready, with planes waiting at the Bahrain airport, but the Pentagon wouldn’t allow it, and then the airport was hit and closed. Some families paid tens of thousands of dollars to get out on their own, and sources say some senior leaders were evacuated under what was presented as a training exercise while other families were left behind for more than a week. During the first wave, some families hid in a mall parking garage for hours, and sources say some children were so traumatized they couldn’t eat for days. “We were used as pawns in the war,” one military spouse said, blaming leaders in Washington and saying “Pete Hegseth thinks he’s a version of Call of Duty where the consequences aren’t real.” A contractor’s wife who escaped through Saudi Arabia at her own expense said, “As an American citizen, I felt completely abandoned by my own government.”
State Department Asked Diplomats Up for Promotion Whether They Voted for Trump, and Privately Tells Asylum Officers Latin America Is Safer Than U.S. Cities
The State Department asked some foreign service officers up for promotion who they voted for in the last three presidential elections, the Washington Sun reports. Six current and former State Department officials told the outlet that top officials made clear only candidates who voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 would be eligible for certain mid-to-upper level roles. Candidates were also told their campaign donation history would be checked, and that any donation to Democrats would disqualify them. Federal law clearly prohibits making personnel decisions for career civil servants based on political affiliation. The State Department declined to comment on the voting questions, saying only that the department values “fidelity” and that this is “not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “These are critical national security positions and individuals should be chosen for their experience and ability, not their political loyalty,” and that Democrats are working with House committees to investigate.
The loyalty questions are part of a broader push by Trump and Rubio to remake the diplomatic corps in their image. Last year the State Department added a “fidelity” section to performance reviews, requiring managers to judge employees on “completely aligning oneself and one’s team” with the administration’s goals. It also redesigned the Foreign Service Officer Test, and one recent test taker said it included questions about Reagan’s tax policies and Mike Pompeo’s accomplishments, adding that it seemed they were looking for “people who answered a certain way.” The department has cut nearly a quarter of its workforce and gave a $1 million no-bid recruiting contract to a firm whose CEO has said hiring had become too “woke.” Veteran diplomats have been pushed out of senior roles, and the administration previously had to drop job application questions asking about applicants’ favorite Trump policies after a court order. “This is yet another shocking example of the Trump administration hurtling our government back in time to the spoils system of the 19th century,” said Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service.
The State Department publicly warns Americans about violent crime in Latin America, but internal documents tell asylum officers those countries are no more dangerous than some U.S. cities, CNN reports. The new assessments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador compare their violent crime rates favorably with Baltimore, Houston, and Memphis, and claim many areas of Mexico and El Salvador have crime rates “at least one order of magnitude lower” than major U.S. cities. That’s despite the department’s own public travel warning against going to Honduras because of violent crime and terrorism. Because asylum seekers have to prove a “well-founded fear” of persecution, the documents will likely make it harder for migrants to win their cases, at a time when 94% of asylum cases were already being denied as of June, up from about 50% two years ago. The documents also claim Honduran police are “willing to and able to respond” and that people can safely relocate within their countries. “That clearly understates the degree to which police forces are in collusion with organized crime groups,” said Andrew Selee of the Migration Policy Institute, who called it “a wholesale shift” that raises “red flags.”
Judge Halts Trump’s Noncitizen Voter Hunt in Nine States, Orders Trump to Sit for BBC Deposition, and Arch Construction Could Start Days After the Midterms
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop investigating whether noncitizens are registered to vote in nine states, ruling that it relies on bad data and is intimidating voters. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in Oakland halted the probes in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin until polls close on November 3, though she put the ruling on hold until Friday so the administration can appeal. Court filings showed investigators were told to target naturalized citizens to check whether they had voted before becoming citizens, using lists the judge called “voluminous and unreliable.” During a “surge” that started in late August, agents had no more than 12 minutes per person to decide whether someone was legally allowed to vote. “Even under the best conditions, there is a high likelihood of error in review because there is no federal database containing citizenship status of U.S. residents,” she wrote, adding that citizens’ fears of being wrongly targeted “are well understood as intimidation.” Noncitizen voting is rare, as even the administration’s own investigations have shown, and the Justice Department has lost every one of its lawsuits against the 30 states that refused to hand over voter roll data.
A federal judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC by December 11 or risk having the case thrown out. Trump was supposed to be deposed on October 16 but canceled for what his team called a “matter of national importance.” The BBC’s lawyer told the judge that matter was actually a political rally and a fundraiser. “He was participating in party politics and prioritized that over sitting for the deposition,” attorney Charles Tobin said. Trump’s lawyers had asked to push the deposition to late January, after the December 18 deadline for discovery, but Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett refused and ruled the deposition can be videotaped over their objections. She also ruled the BBC can subpoena records from Mar-a-Lago, since Trump claims the documentary, which spliced together parts of his January 6 speech, hurt him “in his profession, occupation and trade.”
Construction on Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington could begin as soon as November 5, two days after the midterms. The Justice Department told a judge in one of the lawsuits trying to stop the project that a federal planning commission could approve final plans that day. Trump has said the arch would store drones and serve as a post for military snipers with a large stockpile of ammunition, but the final plans released last week leave all of that out and describe it as a “ceremonial gateway.” The arch would sit directly across from Arlington National Cemetery, where nearly 430,000 service members, veterans, and family members are buried. Veterans suing to stop it say it would disrupt the solemnity of funerals, and preservationists say it would block views of national landmarks including the Lincoln Memorial. “What better way to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary than to shut down the legally required review process, ignore some 100,000 negative public comments, and fast track the construction of a bloated and deeply unpopular monument,” said Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
A shareholder of the crypto company Circle is suing Trump, alleging he illegally profited from more than $2 billion in deals tied to a top UAE government official, in violation of the Constitution’s ban on foreign emoluments. Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin, directly competes with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, and the suit argues that money from a foreign government seeking Trump’s favor steered business away from Circle. According to the complaint, four days before the inauguration an entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, agreed to buy 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500 million, and Trump’s own financial disclosures show he received at least $75.5 million of it after taking office. Weeks later, a UAE government fund chaired by Tahnoon paid for a $2 billion investment in Binance using World Liberty’s brand-new USD1 stablecoin. The suit notes that Trump then pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the Commerce Department approved advanced Nvidia chip exports to a Tahnoon-chaired AI company, and regulators gave conditional approval to a World Liberty trust bank now co-owned by the Trump family and the UAE government. “President Trump has turned his office into a source of private profit on a scale without precedent in American history,” said Matt Pelikan of Evergreen Legal, which filed the case in federal court in Washington and is also seeking to bar Steve Witkoff from soliciting emoluments on Trump’s behalf.
U.S. and Israel Reportedly Plan Major New Strikes on Iran After the Midterms as Tehran Threatens “Zero Red Lines”
The U.S. and Israel are reportedly planning major new strikes on Iran for after the November 3 midterms, according to the New York Times. Pete Hegseth met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss the timing and goals of a joint attack, and possible targets include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenals. The Guardian reports that Netanyahu told Hegseth he would prefer Iran attack first, and that the two also discussed what a strike could mean for Netanyahu’s re-election chances ahead of Israel’s October 27 vote. Trump plans to have three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter jets, and special operations forces in the region by early November, before a possibly Democratic Congress takes office in January. Trump hasn’t approved the strikes yet, and he has backed away from hitting Iran again seven times in the past four months. Still, last month he said, “I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” and he has openly floated using the “mother of all bombs” on an underground nuclear site.
Iran is threatening to hit oil facilities, undersea internet cables, data centers, and AI facilities in as many as seven Gulf countries if the U.S. and Israel attack again. Mohsen Rezaei, who leads Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said there can be no deal in which Iran’s economy comes under attack while “the economic architecture enabling those attacks” stays untouched. “We see the next conflict as an existential threat,” said Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iran’s top negotiator. “Our strategy is ‘zero red lines,’” he said, adding that the war “will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates.” Fars, a news agency close to the Revolutionary Guard, reported that Iran has told its military units that if Iranian officials are assassinated or civilians are killed in a new war, the response “will also include political targets.” A lawyer close to Iran’s foreign ministry warned that power grids, desalination plants, and ports across the region “would burn,” leaving tens of millions without water or electricity.
Trump accused Iran of making up attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz to drive up oil prices before the midterms. “They are even making up fake hits, mines, and everything else,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, claiming more oil is now moving through Hormuz than before the war. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it struck four ships transferring oil and that three more hit mines, all along the southern route near Oman that the U.S. uses to escort tankers out of the Gulf. Neither claim has been independently verified, but Brent crude hit $112 to $113 a barrel, its highest level since May, driven partly by reports of new U.S.-Israeli strikes. Middle East oil exports did top prewar levels last week as shippers use alternate routes, but escorting tankers is costly and instability is keeping prices high. The U.S. naval blockade has cost Iran at least $25 billion in oil revenue, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Iran’s offshore oil stockpile, which it had been selling to China, ran dry in mid-October.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels say they hit four targets inside Saudi Arabia in 48 hours, including the Defense Ministry in Riyadh, as the war spreads across the region. The Houthis claimed strikes on the Defense Ministry, the airport in Dammam, an Aramco facility in Yanbu, and the airport in Abha, though CBS News hasn’t verified the claims. A Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted four more drones over Riyadh and the holy city of Medina on Thursday, and the Houthis have denied targeting Mecca or Medina. Saudi Aramco has reportedly told staff to evacuate its Dhahran headquarters, and the State Department has ordered non-emergency U.S. employees and their families out of the country. The IMF expects Saudi Arabia’s economy to shrink 3.3% this year and the region’s economy to contract 4.8% because of the war. Foreign ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt meet in Istanbul on Friday to try to coordinate a response, amid growing alarm that a new war is now the working assumption in both Tehran and Washington.
Trump Tells Ramaswamy to “Keep It Up” With Ad Featuring Acton’s Estranged Mother, Attacks GOP Governor Who Condemned It
Trump defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother and said he “should keep it up,” attacking Ohio’s Republican governor for asking him to pull it. In a long Truth Social post, Trump called Gov. Mike DeWine a “RINO” who was “as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party” and said DeWine “probably wants a Dumocrat to win.” He praised Acton’s mother for taking “a lot of courage” to appear in the ad, which suggests her daughter has mental health issues. “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt,’” Trump wrote. He also called the Democratic nominee “Lyin’ Amy Acton,” while admitting he had “never even heard of” her before. Hours earlier, DeWine had called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and urged Ramaswamy to take it down.
Trump’s defense of the ad puts him on the opposite side from a growing number of Ohio Republicans who have condemned it. Acton’s brother has said he and his sister have been estranged from their mother since Acton was 12 because their mother stayed married to the man who sexually abused Acton as a child. Sen. Jon Husted, who faces a tough reelection fight in Ohio, said he “would not have run the ad.” JD Vance has sided with Trump, saying he’s “a little bit disgusted” to see Republicans “whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats... want to do.” The fight comes less than two weeks before Election Day in one of the country’s most closely watched governor’s races. The Hill also reports that Acton’s fundraising has surged since the ad aired.
Other news:
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department could try to block states from certifying the results of the midterm elections. Blanche made the comment in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday, where he and FBI Director Kash Patel announced racketeering charges against Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas. Asked whether DOJ might move to stop states from certifying the 2026 results, he said it was possible, though he insisted the department did not intend to improperly interfere. States certify their own election results under state law, so any federal attempt to block certification would be a major and likely legally contested escalation. The comment comes less than two weeks before Election Day, as the administration pushes a hunt for noncitizen voters that a federal judge just halted in nine states for relying on error-filled data. Democrats have urged Blanche to recommit to longstanding DOJ policies against interfering in elections.
House Democrats are already reaching out to Pentagon whistleblowers who are ready to “spill their guts” about Pete Hegseth if Democrats win the House, according to the Daily Telegraph. Democrats are reportedly preparing subpoenas for Hegseth and his closest advisers, including his top aide Ricky Buria and his wife Jen Hegseth. “There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to very quietly go to the chair of the Armed Services Committee and are going to spill their guts,” one source told the Telegraph. “It’ll be horrendous. It’ll be consistent embarrassment.” An unnamed Democratic member of Congress said impeachment is the ultimate goal, but only after “a thorough investigation.” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie already filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth last month, and a former senior administration official said Hegseth’s “arrogance” has made former allies willing to work with Democrats, adding, “I hope he and his inner circle have some very strong legal insurance.”
The Justice Department charged Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful Democrats and a frequent Trump critic, with racketeering just 12 days before the midterms. The 82-year-old surrendered Thursday on charges including money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute marijuana, connected to a cannabis business she co-owns, and half a dozen others, including her daughters, were also charged. Prosecutors allege she used her Senate seat to shield the business from scrutiny and quote an intercepted call in which she allegedly said, “I’ve gotten too old to not be greedy.” The investigation began before Trump took office, but DOJ typically avoids overt steps against political figures within 60 days of an election, and Attorney General Todd Blanche brushed that off, saying, “It’s not even a rule, it’s a practice.”
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam said his own communications with Lucas were monitored and accused the DOJ of becoming Trump’s “own personal law firm.” “Today, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the full weight of the federal government have been wielded against an 82-year-old great-grandmother,” Lucas said. “I grew up under Jim Crow... I’m not stopping now.”
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, called on Vivek Ramaswamy to pull an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother, calling it “deeply, deeply troubling.” The Ramaswamy campaign put $4 million behind the minute-long spot, in which Donna Arthur calls her daughter a “liar.” Acton has said she was sexually abused as a child by her mother’s husband, which her brother has corroborated, and she hasn’t spoken to her mother in nearly 50 years. DeWine, a former prosecutor, said the man was indicted and fled with the mother, and that knowing this “makes it just more wrong.” Sen. Jon Husted also said he “would not have run that ad,” but JD Vance told Republicans to “stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days.” DeWine still isn’t withdrawing his endorsement of Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy’s campaign says Acton was the first to bring up her opponent’s mother.
Russia hit Kyiv with ballistic missiles, including cluster warheads, hours after Putin agreed to resume talks and Steve Witkoff called him “a humanitarian.” The overnight strikes killed at least two people and wounded 22, including four children, hitting a bridge over the Dnipro River, homes, energy infrastructure, an ambulance station, and a clinic. “The choice of weapon was deliberate; the choice of target area was deliberate, and so was the intent to inflict as much loss and damage on civilians as possible,” Zelenskyy said. Downing Street said it did not recognize Witkoff’s description of Putin, and Ukraine’s foreign minister said “appeasement, servility and flattery” won’t stop Russia. The White House still hasn’t reversed the slowdown of Starshield, the military version of Musk’s Starlink, and the New York Times reported dozens of Ukrainian drones fell from the sky when it was cut. “Our drones can no longer reach the speeds needed to intercept enemy targets,” said a Kyiv air defense commander, who said he felt betrayed by Washington.
The CDC refused to approve a faster, high-volume measles test that West Coast states requested as the outbreak grows. California and Washington asked the CDC in May to validate a test that could run on machines labs already bought during COVID, which can process up to 500 tests in eight hours. After two months, the CDC said no, citing “other competing priorities.” Health officials from California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington have now written to CDC Director Erica Schwartz asking her to reconsider. “If a large outbreak were to occur in our region, without high-throughput capacity, it would be more difficult to scale up diagnostic testing appropriately,” they wrote. HHS said the CDC is “prioritizing emerging technologies” but wouldn’t say whether it plans to approve such a test.
Major U.S. banks are finding unauthorized AI agents operating inside customer accounts, and some appear to be acting on their own, Axios reports. Banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Citi are racing to contain the risk. In most cases, users gave AI assistants their login credentials, which breaks bank rules, but some banks have tracked agents calling customer service lines or taking actions that appear independent of what the user asked. Bank executives described the situation as horrifying, especially when agents can make purchases or move money. Many banks say they can’t even tell whether an agent was authorized by a user or has “gone rogue.” Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are now restricting third-party AI agents, and Chase reminded customers not to give their passwords to anyone.
French President Emmanuel Macron says “illegitimate” protests will be banned after some of the worst riots France has seen in years. Macron blamed “seditious” ultra-left groups “whose aim is to bring down the Republic” for last weekend’s looting and car burnings. Protests planned Thursday in Paris, Lyon, Lille, and Grenoble were banned, and night curfews are in place in parts of Paris and other cities, which critics say infringes on the right to protest. The demonstrations began last month at a high school near Paris over staff shortages and spread nationwide into broader anger over the soaring cost of living. A bigger protest is expected Saturday, when the “yellow vest” movement is set to join, and unions are planning another major day of action on November 5. The unrest comes just months before France picks Macron’s successor in next year’s presidential election.
“Looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular pleaded not guilty to rape charges in Massachusetts. The 20-year-old, whose real name is Braden Peters, is charged with rape, drugging someone for sexual intercourse, and supplying alcohol to someone under 21. The charges stem from allegations by 18-year-old influencer Aleksandra Mendoza, who says that in May 2025, when she was 17, Peters got her drunk during a livestream at his family’s Cape Cod home and assaulted her while she was asleep. Peters has denied wrongdoing, and his lawyers argue that Mendoza kept working with him afterward and only came forward after her brand deals dried up. A judge set bail at $10,000, which Peters paid in cash. He was previously sentenced to probation in Florida after pleading no contest to unlawfully firing a gun in public in an incident where shots were fired at an alligator.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Grows Confused at Rally Leaving Advisors Concerned, Trump Threatens Reporters, Russia Bombs Ukraine, Hegseth Breaks Globe, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Last night, an 80-year-old President of the United States stood on stage in South Carolina and asked his own crowd to help him remember the name of the Nobel Peace Prize. He shrank his favorite investment number by a factor of 1,000, wondered how Europe would feel about renaming the Pacific Ocean, and cheered as one of his supporters appeared to hit a protester.
Earlier in the day he called one reporter a “dummy” and another “stupid” for asking about his decision to waive sanctions on Russia. Hours after his envoy called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian,” Russia hit Kyiv with 21 missiles. Meanwhile, the war with Iran is spreading. Oil is above $110, Americans are being ordered out of Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. military is quietly pulling troops back from bases across the region.
This administration doesn’t want you to see a lot of what’s happening right now, so I’m about to release two investigations that I know will ruffle feathers.
The first lays out Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials, from his first term through today. The second is about the truth of the Iran war: what’s actually happening to American troops and their families overseas, and what the government has kept from you.
People will push back on both, and some will be angry. I’ve already seen what happens when I report on things powerful people want buried. Some of you unsubscribed over my Epstein work, and some may leave over this. However much pressure there is, I’m not going to stop, because you make it possible for me to keep going. I don’t answer to a corporate owner or a billionaire. I answer to you.
Here’s what you need to know today:
Trump, 80, Appears More Confused Than Usual at South Carolina Rally, Mixing Up Prizes, Numbers, and Oceans
Trump appeared noticeably more confused than usual during a roughly 90-minute rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, stumbling through a string of gaffes. The 80-year-old president was at Clemson University to campaign for Sen. Darline Graham, who is facing Democrat Annie Andrews. At one point, while complaining about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he couldn’t seem to remember its name. “They gave the wonderful peace prize, right, does anybody know the name of that peace prize? The peace prize?” he asked the crowd, before saying, “They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady.” He was referring to Navi Pillay, the 85-year-old former U.N. human rights chief who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, not the Pulitzer. “Something is off with Trump tonight,” many posted. “The gaffes, the glitches, the confusion are well beyond his usual.”
Trump also tripped over his own talking points, shrinking his signature investment claim by a factor of 1,000 and floating a plan to rename the Pacific Ocean. “We secured commitments for $22.2 trillion in new investments,” he said, then corrected himself: “$22.2 million. Uh, billion. Sorry. Billion with a B, not an M.” He ended by saying “$22 billion,” even though he usually claims $22 trillion, a figure the White House itself puts at about half that and economists say isn’t real. Later, after describing a conversation with Google’s CEO about renaming the Atlantic, he said, “Pacific Ocean, we were going to call it the ‘American Ocean.’ How do you think Europe would feel?” No part of Europe touches the Pacific. He also briefly forgot his own nickname for the superfans who follow him to rallies, calling them “front-row Jacks” before switching to “front-row Joes.”
The rally was also marked by protesters, and Trump cheered as one was apparently hit by a supporter. According to the White House press pool, one protester called Trump a “traitor,” and another shouted, “Release the Epstein files!” Trump reacted giddily when a supporter appeared to strike a heckler who was being removed from the arena. Protesters have become a regular feature at Trump’s midterm stops, including four interruptions at his Kansas rally earlier this week. Trump urged the crowd to pretend he was on the ballot himself. The rally came hours after he called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and an ABC News reporter “stupid” for asking about his Russia sanctions waiver.
Trump Calls Reporters “Dummies” and “Stupid,” Kicks The Independent Off Air Force One, and Truth Social Hits an All-Time Low
Trump lashed out at reporters again Wednesday, calling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and an ABC News reporter “stupid” for asking about his decision to waive sanctions on Russia. When Collins pressed him on waiving the sanctions in a law he signed just last month, Trump waved her off: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.” An ABC News reporter then asked, “How is waiving those sanctions on Russia to secure the release of Hubbard not giving something to Russia in exchange?” Trump replied, “Are you a stupid person? Who do you work for?” and added that ABC is “the worst of all.” Trump has insisted Stephen Hubbard’s release required “no swap,” but said that if sanctions had taken effect, the negotiations “would obviously come immediately to an end.” The reporters were asking the obvious question that Trump’s own words raised.
A day after his Oval Office tirade, the White House pulled The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg from the press pool on Air Force One. Feinberg was scheduled to be the print pooler on Trump’s trip to a campaign rally in Iowa, but the press office emailed him Wednesday night to say he would “not be the print pooler on tomorrow’s trip,” with no explanation. The move came after Trump told Feinberg in the Oval Office, “you better be careful,” asked if he was “a sick person,” and said, “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.” The White House’s official rapid response account then attacked him with an ableist slur, and JD Vance called him an “imbecile.” Feinberg’s offense was asking why Trump’s new fraud tip program pays whistleblowers 1%, when existing federal law already pays 10% to 25%. “That is retaliation,” said White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich, who works for Fox News.
The Independent is at least the third outlet barred from Air Force One in recent weeks, even after a federal judge ruled the White House’s press bans were likely illegal. Last week, Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the administration to restore press passes for journalists at CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, writing that Trump’s own statements showed he targeted them for their coverage. “Simply put, that is unlawful viewpoint discrimination,” the judge wrote. The administration appealed within 24 hours, and reporters from CNN and Politico are still being kept off Air Force One on days their outlets are scheduled to cover the president’s travel. The White House argues that restoring press passes is “different than allowing the pool” into the Oval Office or onto the plane, calling travel on Air Force One “a privilege not a right.” The Justice Department has claimed the bans were for national security reasons, though Trump himself never made that argument, and the White House raised it only after the outlets sued.
The White House counsel’s office has threatened Politico with unspecified “consequences” unless it retracts or corrects stories about turmoil involving Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, with the deadline expiring today. In a letter to Politico’s editor in chief, White House Counsel Will Scharf demanded the outlet retract three recent stories, publicly apologize to Trump and Wiles, and scrub the reporting from its archives, writing that “freedom of the press is not a professional exemption from accountability.” The stories reported that Trump was considering replacing Wiles, that he “blew up” over that report, and that Wiles helped set up former press secretary Katie Zacharia’s Fox News interview before her exit, claims the White House denies and says it provided text messages to disprove. If Politico doesn’t comply, Scharf warned of an “immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House” and “all other appropriate and available legal remedies,” and a White House official said “all options are on the table.” Politico, along with CNN and MS NOW, is already banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One, even after a judge restored the outlets’ access to White House grounds. Communications Director Steven Cheung has also called Politico, which is owned by the German company Axel Springer, “a foreign-op designed to interfere in American politics,” raising concerns the administration may try to target it as a foreign influence operation.
Shares of Trump Media, the company behind Truth Social, hit an all-time low as users leave the platform. The stock fell more than 7.5% on Monday to $6.40 before closing at $6.43, down 29% over the past month. Truth Social averaged about 260,000 daily users last month, down more than 30% from a year ago and well below its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to Similarweb. That’s a tiny fraction of Facebook’s more than 2 billion daily users and X’s roughly 130 million. The company has tried to turn things around with gambling and crypto ventures, a proposed merger with a nuclear fusion firm, and even an offer to give users early access to Trump’s posts for $100,000 a month, but none has paid off so far. Trump remains the platform’s dominant voice, at one point averaging 27 posts a day, including a string of posts around 1 a.m. this week attacking a federal judge who has received death threats.
Zelenskyy Mocks Russian “Humanitarians” as Missiles Hit Kyiv Hours After Witkoff’s Praise for Putin
Russia hit Kyiv with three waves of ballistic missiles just hours after Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a “humanitarian,” and Zelenskyy threw the word right back. Zelenskyy said the missiles were launched at Kyiv “by Russian ‘humanitarians’ since yesterday evening,” with Moscow firing 21 missiles in total. The strikes damaged homes, energy facilities, a railway station, the metro, shopping centers, and businesses. “Even a monastery is among the damaged sites,” he said. Across 12 regions under attack, at least two people were killed and 34 injured, including 15 in Kyiv, two of them 15-year-olds, and one person was killed in Kharkiv. Zelenskyy said the timing, “almost immediately after another round of talks,” showed “no real change” in Russia’s attitude.
Russia agreed to new talks with Ukraine and the U.S., but signaled it sees little to discuss. Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said Russia is ready to resume three-way talks at the technical level, not between leaders, starting around November 10, likely in Abu Dhabi. But he dismissed the “new approaches” Witkoff brought from his meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders in Oslo, saying, “there wasn’t much there that was useful.” The BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg wrote that Putin “doesn’t feel under pressure right now to end the war,” knowing that Ukraine’s air defenses are strained, winter is coming, and the U.S. president wants a “more profitable relationship with Moscow.” A Russian lawmaker told the BBC that Trump is “the only leader in the Western world who is doing something for peace,” and when asked if he meant peace on Russia’s terms, replied, “Of course!” Even Witkoff conceded that “there is still important work to do.”
Russian commentators are already calling a possible Trump-Putin-Xi meeting “The New Yalta,” a summit that would leave Ukraine out. The Kremlin has floated a three-way meeting with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in China, where Ukraine’s future would be discussed without Ukraine at the table. The nickname refers to the 1945 Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt carved up postwar Europe. A Kremlin spokesman later said no Trump-Putin talks are currently planned, though they could be arranged. Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev also said Wednesday that Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to Europe will “inevitably” resume operations. A former U.K. defense official said Russia “has given back very little of consequence” while “all the concessions have been on the American side,” adding that Hubbard’s release served Russia’s “purpose.”
Ukraine is hitting back, knocking out key Russian data centers and launching hundreds of drones toward Moscow. This month, Ukrainian drones struck three major data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, which the AP described as Russia’s version of “Uber and Amazon and Google” combined, plus centers serving Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, and VKontakte, its version of Facebook. The attacks disrupted banking, e-commerce, ride-hailing, and AI chatbots, and even forced some Russian courts to postpone hearings. Experts say the damage to Yandex’s supercomputers, one of which ranked 19th in the world, could take months or years to repair, and sanctions on high-end chips will make it worse. “This effectively sets Russia far behind in the AI race,” one analyst said. Overnight, Ukraine also launched 630 drones toward Moscow, most of which were shot down, according to the city’s mayor.
Musk Vows to “Come For” Democrats Who Investigate Him as They Plan a Wave of Probes Into His Empire
Democrats are preparing to investigate Elon Musk and his companies if they win back control of Congress in November, Politico reports. Senior Democrats are discussing how several committees could go after the world’s richest man, who is also the GOP’s top donor. One possible target is Musk’s possible role last week in slowing Starlink internet access for Ukraine’s military, at a time when Trump is pressuring Ukraine to make a peace deal with Russia. “What happens when one guy gets a giant contract from the government and then uses it to do something that shuts down communication in a war that has been extremely important to the United States to support Ukraine?” Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked. Democrats also want to look at DOGE’s role in cutting more than 250,000 federal jobs, withholding money Congress appropriated, accessing sensitive data like Social Security records, and dismantling USAID. “The sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, pointing to the billions in federal contracts and subsidies that go to SpaceX and Tesla.
Musk responded by threatening to retaliate against the Democrats who investigate him and the people he thinks are behind them. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Musk wrote on X in response to the Politico story. “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.” He didn’t say who he thinks is “pulling the strings” or what he would do. The threat is aimed at members of Congress carrying out oversight, one of their basic constitutional duties. Some Democrats aren’t waiting for the election: House Homeland Security Democrats have demanded that Musk testify under oath about a watchdog report finding DOGE overstated its savings, and Ways and Means Democrats have called for an investigation into DOGE’s alleged data theft from Social Security records. Musk’s spokespeople didn’t respond to Politico’s requests for comment.
As the threats of investigations grow, Musk is floating a merger between Tesla and SpaceX. On a call with SpaceX investors Tuesday, Musk said combining the two companies would be a “good idea” and that “there’s a lot of merit” to it, and both boards have set up special committees to explore a deal. On Tesla’s earnings call Wednesday he refused to say more, saying, “I feel like I’m tap dancing through a minefield.” Tesla beat Wall Street’s expectations with $28.05 billion in third-quarter revenue, but revenue was down slightly from last quarter, car sales revenue fell 3% from a year ago, and the stock is down more than 11% this year. Musk has also repeatedly missed his own big promises: he once said “probably half the population of the US” would be using Tesla’s Robotaxi by the end of 2025, but rollout has been slow. A merger would combine two companies that hold major federal contracts, which is exactly what Democrats say they want to investigate.
Iran Claims It Hit Seven Tankers Near the Strait of Hormuz as Oil Surges and the U.S. Quietly Pulls Back Troops
Iran says it attacked seven ships in and near the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, sending oil prices surging. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it “simultaneously” struck four vessels transferring oil ship-to-ship in the Persian Gulf, leaving them “burning,” and that three other ships hit sea mines and were forced to stop. Iran says the ships were using southern shipping routes near Oman that the Trump administration has encouraged vessels to take to avoid Iranian fees and controls, routes Tehran considers illegal. If confirmed, it would be the most vessels damaged in the Gulf in a single day since the war began on February 28. Brent crude jumped more than 3% to about $112 a barrel, U.S. crude rose to nearly $100, and stock futures fell. The Revolutionary Guard warned that if this continues, “the confrontation will extend to the bases of the aggressors in the region.”
The U.S. military is quietly reducing its presence at bases in the Middle East because of threats from Iran and the Houthis, CBS News reports. A U.S. official and a senior military official confirmed the drawdown, which NBC News first reported. U.S. Central Command wouldn’t discuss the moves, saying only that it “regularly” moves troops “to optimize mission readiness.” The State Department has also ordered all non-emergency government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, citing Houthi attacks on “civilian airports and other critical infrastructure.” Several other U.S. embassies in the region have cut staff under a “restricted operations” status created in August. The moves come as Trump insists “we’re doing very well with Iran” in a war he said in March would take only a few weeks.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels are pounding Saudi Arabia, hitting airports and oil facilities and killing more than 20 people in recent weeks. An attack on King Fahd International Airport in the eastern city of Dammam on Wednesday killed two people and injured eight. On the same day, debris from an intercepted drone aimed at the Shaybah oil field killed two more, and Saudi forces intercepted another drone over Riyadh on Thursday. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, has reportedly told staff to evacuate its headquarters in Dhahran and work from home, after a missile struck one of its buildings there last week. Riyadh’s main airport, where a strike killed 13 people including an American earlier this month, is only partly reopened. Despite spending $83 billion on defense last year, more than any other Middle Eastern country, Saudi Arabia has struggled to stop the attacks.
Iran says indirect talks with the U.S. over a ceasefire are still going, even as the fighting escalates. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the two sides are still negotiating through mediators like Pakistan and Qatar over a seven-day ceasefire proposal Iran offered in September, which Trump rejected. That proposal calls for ending the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, lifting oil sanctions, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and releasing frozen Iranian assets, and Araghchi says the U.S. is now trying to add new conditions. “Iran is prepared to give diplomacy another chance,” he wrote, but warned that if the U.S. “chooses war over diplomacy, it’ll certainly result in an even greater strategic failure.” Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that Trump blocked an Israeli plan for major new strikes on Iran to avoid escalating the war before the midterms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he ordered his military and intelligence services to topple Iran’s regime.
Other news:
Democratic leaders are suing the Trump administration to stop what they call an illegal attempt to take control of the midterm elections. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries filed the suit Tuesday in federal court in Washington, two weeks before the November 3 election. They are asking a judge to bar the administration from purging legally registered voters from state voter rolls or denying them ballots, and to rule that it has illegally threatened state election officials with prosecution. The suit points to the Justice Department’s case in California, where it is trying to stop officials from counting mail-in ballots from people the federal government has flagged as “likely” noncitizens. “For over a decade now, President Donald J. Trump has bombarded the American people with lies and misinformation about American elections and voter fraud,” the suit says. The case went to Chief Judge James Boasberg, whom the White House has repeatedly attacked, and the Justice Department says its actions are “grounded in law.”
Pete Hegseth’s staff broke a World War II-era globe used by Dwight Eisenhower while trying to move it into his office, the Washington Post reports. Hegseth’s team wanted one of two 30-inch Eisenhower globes kept at the Pentagon, which date to the 1930s, for the defense secretary’s office. Trained curators normally oversee moves like this, but the Army’s history experts were furloughed during a partial government shutdown, so Hegseth’s staff did it themselves. They dropped the globe, and it crashed onto its base, leaving a gash several inches wide near Antarctica and knocking the sphere off its mount. The Army confirmed the damage happened during an “attempted move” on February 3, the same day the shutdown ended, and one source blamed an “apparent lack of patience.” “Hegseth is no Ike. The globe won’t give him Ike’s attributes of humility, intellect and judgment,” said retired Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, a former West Point history professor.
A fake brochure telling trans kids how to leave home for gender surgery is being mailed to Republican voters across Texas, and the trans group it names says it had nothing to do with it. The mailers are addressed to “Students of” each household and went out to people on conservative mailing lists, including homes with no children. They’re branded with the name of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, which says it “did not author, approve, or distribute” them, doesn’t work on emancipations or gender surgeries, and has sent cease and desist letters to two companies that sent texts in its name. Right-wing accounts including Libs of TikTok used the mailers to stir up outrage just weeks before the midterms, and a Republican congressional candidate claimed “the radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children.” The brochures were produced by a newly created Wyoming LLC with a Houston P.O. box. The Texas Tribune traced a mailer ID on two of them to SnailWorks, a Maryland direct mail company the National Republican Congressional Committee has paid $57,300 over two years to rent mailing lists, though that link alone doesn’t show who paid for these mailers. Meanwhile, Republicans are furious that anti-trans ads are teaching their kids about what transgender means:
Rep. Ilhan Omar says federal agents pounded on her doors at 6 a.m. to “freak” her out, and she now has to move out of her home for safety reasons. Speaking to MS NOW, the Minnesota Democrat gave her first detailed account of the October 12 search of her Washington home by Homeland Security Investigations agents, which lasted four or five hours. She said agents surrounded the house and asked her to sign a paper waiving certain rights she has as a member of Congress, which she refused. They took 17 items, including old phones belonging to her and her daughter, and her husband’s notebooks, a camera passed down from his uncle, and a Somali phrase book. A person familiar with the investigation told NBC News the possible charges include conspiracy and making false statements on immigration paperwork, and the timing so close to the midterms has alarmed Justice Department veterans. “He’s got everything to do with it,” Omar said of Trump, who denies involvement, adding that “the people who knocked on my door, searching for papers, literally have his papers,” referring to her late father’s immigration file.
Michigan’s Senate candidates clashed in their final debate, with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed tying Republican Mike Rogers to Trump’s war with Iran. The two are in a neck-and-neck race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, and the debate in Detroit came less than two weeks before Election Day. El-Sayed blamed rising gas and grocery prices on the war and called for a war powers resolution “rather than a senator who is going to stand hip to hip with Donald Trump.” Rogers has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, cutting an ad calling for the war to wind down and saying Canadian tariffs “were not well thought-through.” Rogers again accused El-Sayed of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which El-Sayed has repeatedly denied, and El-Sayed fired back, “To bring into question my commitment to the Constitution is really beneath you.” Asked a yes-or-no question on universal background checks for guns, Rogers said it “depends” and then that he was “in the middle.”
Experts are alarmed that the CDC is hiding information about measles deaths as the outbreak keeps growing. The agency added a third measles death to its dashboard on Wednesday but refused to say which state it occurred in, citing privacy laws it wouldn’t name. Legal experts say there is no privacy reason for withholding a state, with UC Law San Francisco professor Dorit Reiss saying, “I don’t buy it.” The CDC dashboard lists only three deaths this year, even though Pennsylvania alone has confirmed five, with a sixth still under investigation. Cases jumped 8% in one week to 4,410 this year, nearly double last year’s total. Infectious disease expert Paul Offit wondered if the secrecy is “coming from the top,” noting reports that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CDC Director Erica Schwartz have ordered the death count lowered, and said state officials may now ask, “Can you trust them?”
A new United Nations report says the U.S. is a major reason the world is losing ground in the fight against climate change. The U.S. was the only major economy last year that failed to cut its carbon pollution or at least slow its growth, according to the UN Environment Programme. America’s emissions rose by 133 megatons, far more than any other country, driven by higher electricity demand and a rebound in coal power, and the U.S. accounted for 70% of the world’s emissions increase. The report says Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will likely add a tenth of a degree Celsius to global warming by 2100. One scientist said that extra warming would push another 140 million people into dangerously hot conditions, and another estimated it would cost the global economy about $1.2 trillion. “It is looking at the fire, denying there is a fire, and then pouring more petrol on it,” Australian climate scientist Bill Hare said of the U.S.
Mark Zuckerberg threatened to leave California over a proposed billionaire tax, and Meta gave him a deal to stay. Zuckerberg, whom Forbes ranks as the world’s sixth-richest person with about $240 billion, told Meta he was considering moving because of Proposition 40, a ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on California’s roughly 250 billionaires. Under the arrangement Meta announced Wednesday, Zuckerberg will get new non-voting shares to cover a potential multibillion-dollar tax bill, so he won’t have to sell shares that give him control of the company. In return, he committed to staying a resident of California, or wherever Meta is headquartered, for eight years. A special board committee called it “critically important” that he remain at the helm, citing AI competition. Political analysts say Proposition 40 is far from certain to pass, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has been rallying in support of it.
North Korea says it will restart propaganda broadcasts along its border with South Korea as tensions rise. Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister and top spokesperson, said loudspeakers for psychological warfare will be running “along the whole border” by the end of October. She made the announcement after touring front-line areas where North Korean troops are adding mines, barbed wire, and anti-tank barriers to one of the world’s most heavily armed borders. Tensions have spiked since land mine blasts injured three South Korean soldiers in September, which Seoul blames on North Korea and Pyongyang denies. Kim warned that if South Korean warning shots harm North Korean soldiers, border guards “will show no mercy for the armed gangsters bereft of reason.” South Korea’s top military officer called the threats “intolerable,” and the defense ministry said Seoul will take “proportionate measures.”
The U.S. military failed to tell British police about a drunk-driving allegation against an American airman stationed in England, the Guardian reports. Christopher Mooty, then a 21-year-old airman at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, allegedly drove two other airmen to a kebab shop around 4 a.m. in March 2023 after hours of drinking. A British woman he’d been in a relationship with reported him to his superiors, saying he was “the most drunk I’ve ever seen him.” Under an agreement in place since the 1950s, British police usually have primary responsibility for investigating off-duty crimes by U.S. personnel, but Suffolk police say they were never notified. The U.S. Air Force handled the case itself, though the verdict was later quashed, and Mooty was then arrested a year later for drunk driving again and convicted in a British court. The case is part of a Guardian investigation that has already prompted a UK government inquiry into whether U.S. troops based in Britain are being properly held accountable.
Nearly 100 students and staff at a Kansas elementary school came down with norovirus in an outbreak that spread unusually fast. The outbreak hit Bentwood Elementary School in Overland Park, outside Kansas City, with the first case reported October 5. Within a week, there were enough similar illnesses that county health officials were called in. Ninety-five people at the school and two family members got sick, though the county health director said the real number is likely higher given how contagious norovirus is. “It never usually balloons that fast or takes out that many kids at a time,” one parent said. Health officials declared the outbreak over Wednesday, since no new cases have been reported since October 13.
A huge shark that became a tourist attraction in a South Korean canal swam right back in just hours after workers finally got it out. The 9.8-foot female dusky shark, nicknamed Bukangi, was first spotted in a canal in the port city of Busan in mid-September. On Wednesday, after two failed attempts, dozens of workers used a floating platform to push her out to open water. But that night, she swam under a barrier net and back into the canal, where she is now stuck between two nets. Officials say there are no signs she has been eating regularly and that falling water temperatures could put her health at risk. Busan has made Bukangi a city mascot, and officials say she has drawn more than 1.7 million visitors.
Special Report: Accountability For Big Tech Moguls?
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute -- a gesture at a Trump Inauguration event that Musk described as innocent.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: It’s Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy.
Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”
Now, perhaps Donald Trump told him to do it, sotto voce, Mafia-style: (“This Zelenskyy guy is a problem. Someone should do something about it.”) And Trump could demand, but hasn’t, that Musk restore Ukraine’s access.
However, given that there is now finger-pointing going on and there are credible statements that Musk himself was the instigator, we now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict. It helped Russia, our long-time adversary, and hobbled Ukraine, during a very critical time in this war. It also helped Russia at a time when Putin is increasingly emboldened to menace Europe through acts of sabotage, intimidation and support of the extreme right such as the AfD in Germany. (Recall that Musk has openly supported the AfD.)
While Trump and Musk are now openly supporting Vladimir Putin, their actions are unpopular with the American public. Very few Americans agree that the U.S. should be supporting, not opposing, a brutal dictator’s attempt to conquer a democracy:
Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine’s access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, some U.S. officials state that Musk did indeed take it upon himself to pull the plug on Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is quoted as saying that the administration was blind-sided: “There was no foreknowledge.”
Now, perhaps Donald Trump told him to do it, sotto voce, Mafia-style: (“This Zelenskyy guy is a problem. Someone should do something about it.”) And Trump could demand, but hasn’t, that Musk restore Ukraine’s access.
However, given that there is now finger-pointing going on and there are credible statements that Musk himself was the instigator, we now need to seriously consider the implications. No private individual should, or indeed even have the capability to, make national security policy. Slowing down Starlink was, in effect, a U.S. intervention in a foreign conflict. It helped Russia, our long-time adversary, and hobbled Ukraine, during a very critical time in this war. It also helped Russia at a time when Putin is increasingly emboldened to menace Europe through acts of sabotage, intimidation and support of the extreme right such as the AfD in Germany. (Recall that Musk has openly supported the AfD.)
While Trump and Musk are now openly supporting Vladimir Putin, their actions are unpopular with the American public. Very few Americans agree that the U.S. should be supporting, not opposing, a brutal dictator’s attempt to conquer a democracy:Let’s be clear about the current state of the war between Russia and Ukraine. On the military battlefield, Ukraine has been gaining the upper hand. Hence Putin has turned to attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, electricity in particular. If Musk doesn’t restore that access quickly, the result will be the deaths of thousands of innocent Ukrainians. Moreover, he will embolden Putin to further menace and attack our Nato allies, as well as supporting neo-Nazis like the AfD.
Some may object as follows: Musk owns Starlink. Doesn’t he have the right to do what he wants with a business he owns?
No.
Yes, America has a market economy. And to make this economy work, we need to respect property rights. But we are, first and foremost, a democracy. And in a democracy, the rights of private property don’t and never have included the right to act against the nation’s interest — where democratically elected representatives of the people, not business owners, should decide what is in the nation’s interest. Capitalism is not an excuse for treason.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Taiwan’s air force flies F16s made by Lockheed Martin. Imagine that for some reason — perhaps as part of a business deal with China — Lockheed Martin suddenly moved to degrade Taiwan’s military capability by cutting off access to spare parts, upgrades, munitions, computer networks and more. Would anyone consider such action acceptable, a legitimate exercise of property rights? Surely not. There would be immediate demands that Lockheed Martin reverse its actions — and if it refused, the federal government would step in to temporarily take control of the company.
This has actually happened in the past.
U.S. mobilization during World War II relied overwhelmingly on private contractors. But these contractors weren’t free to do as they pleased. Among other things, the federal government was anxious to avoid labor conflict that might impede the war effort. So the National War Labor Board negotiated mandatory settlements between management and workers.
Some businessmen didn’t want to go along. In particular, Sewell Avery, the chairman of Montgomery Ward, simply refused to comply with the terms of collective bargaining agreements that had been hammered out with the United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
At the time, Montgomery Ward was both a major retailer and a major manufacturer, whose production of tractors, auto parts and more were important parts of the war effort. But Avery placed a higher priority on resisting unionization than on defeating the Nazis.
So in April 1944 FDR ordered the Army National Guard to seize Montgomery Ward’s main plant in Chicago. National Guard troops literally had to carry Avery out of his office:
Montgomery Ward leader Sewell Avery Carried Out of His Office By Two Soldiers during World War II (Bettmann Archive photo).
Later that year the federal government also seized a number of other Montgomery Ward facilities.
It’s important to realize that none of these actions were attempts to impose long-term government control of the economy. There was never an intent to permanently nationalize Montgomery Ward. But the principle was clear: private individuals do not have the right to undermine national security. And if temporary nationalization is the only way to stop them from doing so, so be it.
So, back to Elon Musk: In modern warfare, where communication and real-time information are as important as rockets and artillery, Starlink is as central to national security as Lockheed Martin. Decisions about which countries have full access to Starlink’s capacity are as much a matter of foreign policy and national security as decisions about which countries will be allowed to buy and operate U.S. high-tech weapons.
Such decisions cannot, must not, be left up to private individuals. This would be true even if these individuals were patriots who supported democracy and American values. They definitely shouldn’t be left in the hands of this guy.
Musk will surely, and rightly, be the focus of many investigations if Democrats win the midterms. But don’t expect this to chasten him: His response to the prospect has been to make menacing threats:
Which reinforces the point that control of Starlink must, one way or another, be taken away from Elon Musk. It’s a matter of national security: we cannot let private individuals make foreign and defense policy, and it would be totally irresponsible to leave a crucial military asset in the hands of a racist, authoritarian conspiracy theorist.
President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).
Politico, Elon Musk pours another $76 million into boosting Republicans, Jessica Piper, Oct. 22, 2026. The additional funds bring his total spending this cycle to $442 million.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave another $76 million to boost Republicans in the first two weeks of October, bringing his total giving this cycle to more than $442 million.
The additional funds, which Musk gave to his super PAC, America PAC, make the group one of the biggest super PACs this cycle. America PAC has already spent tens of millions of dollars on digital advertising, mailers and text messages as it targets competitive House and Senate races across the country.
Musk — the world’s wealthiest man — is by far the biggest single donor this cycle, with his political giving this year far exceeding even the roughly $290 million he spent in 2024. There is no precedent in modern American history for any donor spending as much as he has.
While the Tesla CEO and former DOGE leader has spent significantly to help Republicans, he has not been joining GOP candidates on the campaign trail this fall like he had in the past. Republicans privately acknowledged Musk could be politically toxic after the party lost a major Wisconsin judicial race in the spring of 2025 where Musk had become both the biggest funder and a campaign issue.
Still, Musk’s money has been instrumental for Republicans this fall. His earlier giving this cycle includes $158 million for Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, which was transferred to a super PAC boosting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a tight Senate race against Democrat James Talarico. Democrats have looked to make his money a campaign issue: Talarico recently responded to an attack from Musk on the Musk-owned X social media site by saying that there was “deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.”
Musk has also given to House Republicans’ super PAC arm, President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, and a group seeking to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, along with a smattering of GOP candidates.
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: Musk and Thiel are allied with Russia and China, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and formery Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Oct. 14, 2026. Trump supporting billionaire high-tech ultra-right data and election manipulators Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are every American’s enemies.
New York Times, How a Legal Backlash Against Big Tech Is Forcing Big Changes, Cecilia Kang, Oct. 22, 2026. A series of lawsuits has created a new de facto regulatory regime as courts order companies like Meta and Google to change their business practices — and pay up.
For decades, tech giants grew at breakneck speeds as Congress struggled to keep pace with the consequences of the companies’ rapidly booming businesses.
But a new de facto regulatory regime has emerged over the past year as courts clobber the biggest internet companies. And for the first time, their product designs and their advertising models — which critics say treat users like products — are costing the companies serious money.
The latest blow came on Wednesday, when a New Mexico judge ordered Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay a record $25 billion penalty for abusing consumer privacy. In a 20-page ruling, the judge scolded the company for deceiving consumers and allowing their data to be harvested by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
“Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” wrote Judge Francis J. Mathew of the State District Court in Santa Fe.
The decision, and others like it, amount to a comeuppance for tech behemoths, whose fortunes have been built on the business model of winning the attention — and data — of users. Now, trials and court decisions have laid bare many of the allegations over deceptive and harmful business practices that critics have said long propelled the companies’ growth.
New consumer guardrails are emerging through the courts’ record financial penalties and order of changes to designs of the companies’ technologies, legal experts said.
“We’re witnessing an inflection point in the regulation of social media,” said Nora Engstrom, a professor of law at Stanford. “Courts, not Congress, are promoting accountability and forcing concrete change.”
The changes stem from thousands of lawsuits filed against Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, TikTok and others by individuals, schools, and state and federal officials. Their claims include that the internet giants harmed consumers by creating addictive platforms, abusing their power through their collection of valuable data and deceiving users.
For years, the tech industry successfully fought off many threats by invoking a legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The law protects the companies from liability for the content posted on their platforms. The companies have also said that there is plenty of competition, and that they have benefited consumers with free services like search and social media connections.
The arguments have long worked to deter new laws. But courts have recently decided differently.
“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” Judge Mathew said in his ruling Wednesday. “It relates to the way in which Facebook induces people onto the platform and ultimately keeps them there,” he said, “which in turn is what has allowed Facebook to become as profitable as it is.”
The legal backlash was nearly a decade in the making.
In March 2018, concerns over data privacy boiled over with revelations that Cambridge Analytica, which was based in Britain, obtained large tranches of data on U.S. Facebook users without their consent. Employees said the data was used to sway voters during the 2016 presidential election.
Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, was called to testify on Capitol Hill in two days of marathon hearings on privacy abuses related to the scandal. But Congress did not pass any related legislation.
Executives from Meta, Amazon, Google and others were also called to testify in Congress about how their products and monopolistic power abuses over the years have caused potential harms. Again, there was little effect.
Big: Report On Monopolies, Analysis: Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority, Lee Hepner, Oct. 22, 2026. Perhaps Dems’ best response to Musk’s “live by the sword, die by the sword,” should draw on another scripture: The government gave, and the government can take away.
A few months ago, Paramount owner David Ellison succeeded in forcing California and Democratic states attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against his acquisition of Warner Brothers. He used a variety of tactics, including a threat to move the studios out of the state, and ultimately bluffed the elected officials into folding. BIG predicted at the time that Ellison’s threatened capital strike, along with political coercion, was a preview of what is to come if voters choose Democrats as a Congressional majority.
And sure enough, that’s what one of Ellison’s close allies - Elon Musk - just did. Earlier this week, following reports that Musk had throttled Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, Politico ran a story that several Dem members of Congress are gearing up to hold oversight hearings if the midterms go their way in a couple of weeks.
Musk responded by explicitly threatening any Democrat or institution seeking to scrutinize him, his portfolio of companies, or his time at DOGE. Here’s what he said:
It’s a remarkable statement, and it speaks to a fundamental view held by Musk and his allies that the votes of ordinary people simply should not count. He and a small circle make the key decisions in our society.
Musk tweets so much that it’s hard to keep track of his views, but he is also explicit about that point too:X avatar for @HQNewsNow Headquarters@HQNewsNowElon Musk calls to imprison journalist Kara Swisher after she said Democrats should investigate him if they win back Congress. “Sounds like Swisher really wants to go to prison.”Image7:22 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 295K Views580 Replies · 2.11K Reposts · 7.87K Likes
Musk’s political threats are not really the story. The story is that he actually has the leverage to make them real, through a network of political influence and, more importantly, control over key social infrastructure. As with Ellison’s ability to harm California, Musk can actually threaten the Pentagon, foreign countries, and the U.S. government itself. And he does.
The story is that, depending on the outcome of the midterms, which we’ll know a lot more about in 11 days, we’re entering a new phase of a battle between democratic systems and oligarchical ones that will test the limits of Musk’s extraordinary power and the temerity of Democrats to actually do something about it.Twitter advertisers say they're worried about Elon Musk's tweets and actions | VoxSubscribedThe Fool on the Hill
Let’s start by reckoning with Musk’s power, which spans all sorts of infrastructure, campaign finance, and media. As to his control over critical infrastructure, the most salient revelation, and the catalyst for renewed political controversy, is Musk’s apparent role in throttling Ukraine’s access to military-grade satellite service through Starlink, a satellite-based internet network operated by Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX. Ukraine took significant damage and was unable to orchestrate its offensive strategy against Russia as a result of the cut-off.
How does this system organize the fate of wars? Starlink is adjacent to Starshield, a SpaceX service that provides secure communications for governments. It’s a critical piece of national security infrastructure. And that goes beyond providing internet access to war-torn battlefields.
By some accounts, Starlink operates roughly 75% of all active maneuverable satellites. It provides internet service designed to connect homes, businesses, vehicles, ships, aircraft, and more, including in remote locations that are poorly served by existing broadband or fiber-optic cables.
And it’s increasingly important commercially. Just yesterday, United CEO Scott Kirby cited the airline’s partnership with Starlink for boosting its market share. (To believe this, you have to believe there’s actually enough competition between airlines for Starlink to make a difference, and I have my doubts, but it’s clearly a useful service.)
SpaceX has private shareholders, but it is a government sanctioned firm whose growth over the past two decades is fundamentally owed to public funds, some $48 billion in contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, as well as access to key public space infrastructure. SpaceX started receiving DARPA money in 2003, a year after SpaceX was formed, and has been a go-to private contractor for every administration since. In other words, Musk’s control over essential infrastructure, and his ability to wield it privately despite procurement terms superficially nodding to safeguards, is a bipartisan creation of the federal government.
There is some debate over the extent to which Musk wields that power unilaterally or in collaboration with government officials — it’s far closer to a public-private partnership than a purely private entity — and a 2023 expose by Ronan Farrow reveals how that collaboration looks more like dependence across swaths of the federal government:
Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of [Farrow’s] inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told [Farrow]. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.”
Not unlike other historical and contemporary barons of distribution networks, from Cornelius Vanderbilt to Jay Gould to Andrew Mellon to Jeff Bezos, Musk’s control over infrastructure provides him with leverage over public institutions. His quasi-unilateral intervention in the Ukraine-Russia conflict is one example. And the way that power works is by threatening to pull the deployment of that infrastructure, or discriminate between who can access it, which has commercial and geopolitical implications. It’s the power of a capital strike, not unlike Meta’s renewed threat, just yesterday, to cut off service to the State of New Mexico in response to a jury verdict finding them liable for over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. Or take (Amazon) your (Google) pick (Uber/Lyft), really, because capital strikes are as American as unbridled monopoly power.
Musk’s threat is also to use his wealth, so much of which is traceable to benefits conferred by the government, to distort our democratic elections. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates that SpaceX is the source of over 75% of Musk’s overall net worth, which hovers around $1 trillion. And Musk’s election spending is a business investment for which he expects a return. As of mid-October, nearly 50 megadonors had spent close to $2.4 billion on the midterm elections, and Musk’s $369 million in campaign contributions dwarfs everyone else. At least $176.8 million has gone solely to support Texas AG Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate and to oppose Democrat candidate James Talarico.X avatar for @jamestalarico James Talarico@jamestalaricoThere is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.X avatar for @elonmusk Elon Musk @elonmuskThere is something deeply wrong with Talarico12:13 AM · Oct 22, 2026 · 49K Views385 Replies · 1.04K Reposts · 6.38K Likes
Musk is far from the first, or only, oligarch to wield other instruments of persuasion, including the media. His purchase of Twitter/X evokes Henry Ford’s 1919 purchase of the Dearborn Independent, then the second most widely distributed newspaper behind the New York Times, in the wake of his Senate campaign loss. And just as Henry Ford used his newspaper to grind various political axes, with a heavy dose of overt antisemitism, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has amplified partisan conservative voices and driven social wedge issues to divert attention from a more unifying politics.
Add to Musk’s efforts to control the public commons his lawsuit against Media Matters, alleging that the watchdog group interfered with Twitter/X contracts and economic advantage when it published a report showing advertisements appearing next to pro-Nazi content. Understandably, many advertisers pulled their spending from Musk’s platform. Here, Musk’s effort to censor his opponents is also a threat to bury any other opponent in litigation costs. And it’s yet another data point in Musk’s leverage over the federal government, reflected in the Trump administration’s transparent weaponization of antitrust. The FTC’s own, subsequent investigation into Media Matters is hard to see as anything but the abuse of public resources at Musk’s behest.Ladies and Gentlemen, the Democrats!
But of course, Musk and the billionaires are one part of the equation. The other is voters, who are choosing to move away from DOGE and the Trump era by voting for the ostensible opposition party. And what are some of those Democrats likely to do? That’s less clear.
One response is to campaign on the blatant corruption eroding our democracy, as Talarico is doing. Multiple studies have observed that ad saturation driven by massive campaign spending can have marginal returns on voter persuasion and eventually lead to voter suppression. And on some level, voters react to the source of funds. A recent Data for Progress poll showed that 75% of likely voters were less likely to vote for candidates who receive support from the AI industry. Musk is polarizing, at best, and has a net-negative favorability rating even in Texas.
A different response, one we saw with the Skydance merger, is to cower and fold before the superrich. For example, even though support for AI - another area of Musk investment - has become a third rail in politics, some Democrats are backing away from talking about it at all:
Senior Democrats and candidates are worried that if they go too hard in criticizing AI, industry-affiliated super PACs could drop millions more dollars against them, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and strategists. They are especially worried about a slate of competitive races, including Reps. Don Davis in North Carolina, Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Henry Cuellar in Texas and a handful of South Texas and Pennsylvania races, getting hit with even more spending on topics like AI.
I have experience in politics and in running large legislative campaigns, so here I’ll offer advice. Be direct and aggressive against men like Musk. Politicians don’t need to chase every polarizing issue, but the inability to put forward an honest and moral position on a defining economic and social question kneecaps the ability to harness broader political support.
And we can see that because Republicans increasingly want Musk’s money, but don’t want him near their campaigns. Musk’s donations are funneled through political action committees like the Senate Leadership Committee, America First, and Lone Star Liberty, none of which bear his name. And while Republicans have been far less critical overall of Musk’s political interloping, several spoke out against his DOGE cuts, and Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio has joined calls for an oversight hearing on Musk’s weaponization of Starlink in Ukraine. Republicans are constrained by Musk’s giving to form a more coherent political message. Democrats shouldn’t be.The Government Gave, and the Government Can Take Away
Here’s my prediction. I don’t think Dems will back down from their calls for oversight hearings regarding Musk’s conduct. And I suspect some Republicans will join, particularly if Dems overperform in the midterms. The fact about people like Elon Musk is that their power is also their weakness. Campaign consultants can hardly beg for a more perfect foil than someone whose most identifiable consumer product, the Cybertruck, is a politically charged purchase and a visual manifestation of ego.
But it would be naive, if not damaging, to think that oversight hearings are adequate on their own. Oversight hearings easily drift into theatrical content farms, and viral social media clips, on their own, risk reinforcing a growing perception that too many Democrats are more adept at pretending to care than doing anything meaningful to generate durable outcomes.
More importantly, the question isn’t whether there should be oversight, but the point of that oversight. It’s critical to neutralize Musk’s ability to threaten nation-states and our own government, and if that means building the case for breaking apart his empire or imposing new rules, that must be baked into the hearings from the beginning. A free society cannot be bullied by threats of capital strikes, particularly as to essential infrastructure, and the ability to channel capital must be done through democratic means.
What would real oversight of oligarchs look like? Well, it would mean seeking intel about corrupt slush funds for the White House ballroom or Trump’s presidential library, about the purchase of equity stakes in companies like Anduril just before receiving nearly $1.8 billion in government contracts, about leading a $300 million investment in Polymarket while it receives conspicuously favorable regulatory treatment, or about $2.6 billion in stock trades immediately prior to the Iran war. It would also mean simultaneously governing, by moving legislation to close the McDonnell “official acts” loophole, to ban profiting off of public service, and to ban Congressional stock trading. When the next President takes office, Congress should abandon the filibuster to do these things. The path to durable governance is through tearing down parliamentary barriers to governing.
Moreover, oversight hearings cannot stop at the low hanging fruit. Democrats must create a drumbeat for oversight of corporate bad actors. It’s a target-rich market: JetBlue and Instacart on surveillance pricing, Live Nation inducing a corrupt settlement with the Justice Department amid their losing antitrust trial, Skydance on its relationship to sovereign wealth funds, Jeff Bezos and Amazon on their ongoing monopolization of e-commerce, HPE-Juniper on the circumstances of their corrupt merger settlement, the Big Three PBMs, the Big Four Meatpackers, KKR and Black Bear on private equity crippling youth sports, Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic on the efforts to hide the private financial risk of the AI bubble in a systemically vulnerable network of private credit, insurance, pension funds and banks. And on and on.
And Elon Musk. The richest welfare recipient in the world. As to Musk, the most obvious thing to do is not a matter of partisan convenience, but of strategic necessity: nationalize SpaceX. It’s something Matt has written about for BIG previously. SpaceX should be treated like a public utility. It’s a private company in form, but hardly so in terms of the government funding that has been central to its growth.
Will Democrats actually accomplish real oversight? I don’t know. But I can say that squandering power breeds resentment, and fear of reprisal is an abdication of the duty to govern.
Fundamentally, Musk’s threat, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” is a cautionary admonition against violence, taken from scripture, Matthew 26:52. Perhaps the best response draws from another scripture, Job 1:21, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
New York Times, Just How Much Are Young Voters Backing Democrats Now? See the Shift, Claire Cain Miller, Oct. 22, 2026. In the new Times/Siena poll, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way — a jump from just two years ago.
In the last presidential election, Democrats’ support among young voters was their lowest in two decades. Two years later, polls show that 18-to-29-year-old voters are returning to the party in large numbers.
In the most recent New York Times/Siena University poll of likely midterm voters, published Wednesday, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way. That’s 15 points higher than in our last poll before the 2024 election, and comparable to the 2008 election, when a youth wave helped Barack Obama to victory.
Young voters have moved toward Democrats. Nationwide, young voters now favor the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district by 44 percentage points, compared with a 10-point margin two years ago.
And just 16 percent approve of President Trump’s job performance, at least 11 points lower than any other age group.
New York Times, James Talarico Made His Name Fighting Republicans. He Made Laws With Them, Too, Lauren McGaughy, Oct. 22, 2026. He described himself as a progressive fighter. Now, he is seeking Republican votes.
James Talarico’s record in the Texas Legislature has been a tale of two Talaricos.
There’s the Talarico who flipped a competitive state house district around Austin and arrived in the Capitol in 2019 as a 29-year-old, a Democrat preaching bipartisan cooperation. There, he accomplished things by working with Republicans, including 39 bills that became law with his name on them.
Then there’s the Talarico who was a vocal progressive fighter, especially after Republicans redrew his district lines, pushing him to run in a liberal Austin area. Voters there cheered as he fought unsuccessfully against religion in public schools and in favor of transgender rights.
The first Talarico earned accolades even from some of his Republican colleagues in the Legislature they dominate. The second, which helped catapult him into the national spotlight, is being used against him in his run for U.S. Senate.
Mr. Talarico has tried to balance his two political identities throughout his four terms in the Texas House, according to a New York Times review of his record and interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators. Even as he worked against partisan bills pushed by the Legislature’s conservative majority, the review found his ability to work with Republicans to pass laws stayed largely consistent.
In his Senate campaign this year, Mr. Talarico has emphasized the bipartisan side of his record. Seeking to prevail in a state that President Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024, he has toned down his criticism of Republicans and distanced himself from some past remarks, saying they “missed the mark” or were “cringe-y.”
His campaign literature no longer refers to him as a progressive.
“I worked with both Republicans and Democrats who wanted to get things done for Texans,” Mr. Talarico said in a statement. His campaign provided written answers but did not make him available for an interview.
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators, Mr. Talarico was described as a driven and disciplined lawmaker who used his oratory skills to amplify the message of his party.
This week on “The Daily,” The Times’s podcast, Mr. Talarico said Republicans in the Legislature forced him into a position when he “had to fight back against that extremism.” He said his viewpoint on partisan politics has changed.
“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” he said. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.”
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,With 12 Days To Go Trump And The Rs Are In Retreat, Their Battlefield Is Eroding, And The Election Is Breaking Towards The Democrats, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 22, 2026. To make the big blue wave that is emerging bigger we need to keep driving the early vote. For as Anderson Clayton told us a few weeks ago: "Elections are decided in November, but they are won in October."
In wave elections things usually break against the incumbent party at the end. We are clearly seeing that now. In poll after poll this past week the headlines read some version of “Trump hits new low” in the poll. Despite his ferocious campaigning, their enormous spending advantage, his serial bribes of the electorate, the power of the right-wing noise machine, and his control over and censoring of legacy and social media Trump has been unable to stem his decline. The coverage this past week has been brutal for our arrogant and vainglorious leader:
In recent days we’ve seen remarkable visualizations that capture just how much the country has turned on Trump and Trumpism. This one is from Reuters/Ipsos:
Not only has the electorate turned against Trump and the Rs, but they are turning towards us. In recent days we’ve seen gaudy generic ballot leads for Democrats:
Here’s the latest generic ballot tracker from FiftyPlusOne. We were up 6 on Labor Day. We are up 9 today:
+9 Dem is an 11 point swing from 2024, which is why we are competitive in so many Trump +10 and more states and districts now.
Which brings me to what is perhaps the most remarkable data we have about this election: the polling in the battleground Senate states. If you look at the polling across the broader battleground -- AK, GA, IA, ME, MI, MN, NC, OH, TX -- there is only one Republican who has consistently led in polling for either Senate and governor in any of these states. It’s Greg Abbott, in Texas, and even he has only led in half of recent polls.
Republicans do not have polling in any of these states, some deeply Republican, showing their candidates consistently leading -- despite all their spending, the power of incumbency, etc. While we do have polling in all these states showing our candidates for Senate and governor consistently leading. There is a legitimate possibility that we win both the governor’s race and the Senate race in all these states. This is not something anyone believed possible a year ago, and it is still leaves me stunned. For we are going deep, deep into red states and red places, places we’ve struggled in for decades, in ways that could fundamentally alter our politics and our maps in the coming years.
What we are seeing in Texas may be the most consequential development in the election but as we discussed with Jane Kleeb this week we are also seeing a revival of a prairie populist Democratic Party in the heartland - Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio -- that has enormous implications for the future of both parties:
I will be putting out a more thorough analysis of the early vote over the next few days but as I discussed last night we are seeing one very significant trend emerge: Hispanics are voting in very large numbers across the country. Here’s fresh data from TargetEarly. It shows how much bigger the Hispanic vote is today compared to four years ago on this day. That Hispanics roared and helped vote the racists out of office would be quite a story line from this election:
We also discussed something I will be commentating on a lot in the coming weeks -- our remarkable and inspiring candidates, the emergence of character and integrity as a powerful antidote to Trumpism, our embrace of “raucous pluralism,” and how the Democratic Party is evolving, changing, expanding, getting better -- as so many wanted, and demanded.Subscribed
Finally, we spent time talking about how in the world could have Trump allowed himself to fall so far without making a major course correction along the way. This is something we’ve discussed here frequently over the past year as Trumpworld was seeing all the same data we’ve been seeing - our heightened performance in special elections, our huge wins last November, our elevated primary performances in states throughout the country this year, national and state polling, consumer confidence surveys, soaring inflation, slower job creation, ugly health care stats - and yet he just kept going, he kept doubling down on policies that were neither making things better for people nor popular.
I’ve come to believe that it was his arrogance, his vainglory, his belief in a coming thousand year nerd Reich, his corrupt stock pile of money, his contempt for Democrats/democracy/the American people, his underestimating of the Iranians, the fluffing he gets from Natalie each day, his age and addled state - all of this contributed to him believing that we could never beat ME. I’m Trump. They are little people. I always win, survive. There are never consequences for my misdeeds. I am mighty and powerful and they are suckers and losers. And yet here we are. With a reckoning coming. With him now impotent, weak, repudiated, failed, and the American people angry, deeply angry at the corruption, of the “more for me and less for all of you” government, of the searing abandonment and betrayal, of monuments, and golf courses, and flying palaces, and the gluttonous stuffing of his pockets, of selling out to Putin……
The American people have had it. And we still have elections here despite all his efforts to make them go away. And the American people are not just angry at them. They have put their faith back in us to make things better and put things right. And the first thing they want us to do now is win this election in October by driving the early vote through the roof; then we need to ensure there is a peaceful transfer of power in Washington and throughout the country in January; and then we have to get on fight like we’ve never fought for anything before to make things better and put things right for the American people, for our democracy, and for our kids and our grandkids.
That’s what we talked about last night. Get to the video when you can. Share it with others. Hit like so more will see it and read this post. And yes my friends, it is that time, time to go….Win The Election In October, And Be Prepared Not Scared For All The Fuckery To Come.
There are three things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:
New York Times, He’d Be the First Openly Gay Man in the Senate. He Rarely Brings It Up, Jess Bidgood, Oct. 22, 2026. Chris Pappas, the Democratic nominee, would make history if he won. On the campaign trail, he doesn’t dwell on it.
It was a Friday night in an ornate New Hampshire opera house, and Representative Chris Pappas, the Democratic candidate for Senate here, had nearly finished his finely tuned stump speech.
He had slammed Washington corruption, promised to fight for affordable health care and lamented high prices, hewing to the message that Democrats across the country believe will win them back control of the Senate.
Mr. Pappas didn’t mention the man in plaid, standing amid the voters on the creaking wooden floor, who may nevertheless represent the most remarkable aspect of his candidacy: his husband.
Mr. Pappas, 46, is running a closer-than-expected campaign against former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican, a race that both parties view as critical. If he wins, he will be the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate — but this is not something he’s made central to his campaign.
“I’m not thinking much about history right now,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview. “I’m really thinking every day about the struggles of New Hampshire.”
His low-key approach to breaking a barrier mirrors that of some other Democratic Senate candidates this year, as a party burned by losses in cycles past backs away from identity politics. Former Representative Mary Peltola of Alaska talks little about the fact that she would be the first — or tied for the first — Native American female senator. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s Muslim faith has become the target of political attacks. But on the trail, he talks more about how he would be the first Democratic doctor elected to the Senate in decades than the fact that he would be the first Muslim in the chamber.
Mr. Pappas’s understated approach to his potential pathbreaking reflects his generation as well as the way that his state, with its libertarian leanings, has become more accepting of gay rights over the course of his decades-long political career. Mr. Sununu has left the matter alone.
But it also comes at a fraught national moment, as some gay rights activists warn of the potential for backsliding. Just last week, Vice President JD Vance made fun of James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, by suggesting falsely that he was gay.
“We are seeing some incredibly cynical attacks on the L.G.B.T.Q. community today that have been mainstreamed in our politics, and people in the community are scared for where this country is headed,” Mr. Pappas said in an interview.
Still, he said, his constituents have been broadly accepting.
“Our state motto is ‘Live Free or Die,’ ” he said. “I think people, regardless of their politics, really just want their neighbors to be able to be themselves.”ImageChris Pappas and Vann Bentley walk next to a white picket fence and white clapboard house flying an American flag.Mr. Pappas and Mr. Bentley leave a campaign event in Warner, N.H., in August.Credit...Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press ImagesFighting an ‘anti-gay bill’ — in 2004
If there is one thing New Hampshire voters know about Chris Pappas, it’s probably not the fact that he’s gay. It’s the chicken tenders.
He grew up in Manchester, where he was a fixture at the Puritan Backroom, the longstanding Pappas family restaurant where his grandfather is said to have invented the chicken tender. It has been a regular campaign stop for candidates for Congress and the White House for years. (Mr. Pappas is a co-owner of the business today.)
Mr. Pappas, who attended one of the state’s largest public high schools, wasn’t sure he would ever be embraced by his community as a gay man. There was no gay-straight alliance there, nor a single out student, as far as he knew.
“I’m living a reality today that I didn’t think was possible when I was growing up just a few decades ago,” he said.
But he came out at Harvard, and wove his identity into a political career that began when he came home and ran for state representative at the age of 22. “It’s not like I put a bullet point on my palm card, but I was very open about who I was,” Mr. Pappas said. Kathy Sullivan, the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said Mr. Pappas’s sexual orientation has rarely become much of an issue in his campaigns.
“I can’t tell you there was a moment when I went, ‘Oh, Chris Pappas is a gay man,’” she said. “It’s just not a big deal.”
“People who knew, knew,” Mr. Pappas said. “And then I think as the battles kind of raged on issues around equality, I found my voice and was regularly speaking out on those issues.”
Politico, Kevin McCarthy predicts GOP will lose House majority, Mia McCarthy, Oct. 22, 2026. “What are the three things Republicans will do if they win the majority?” the former speaker asked. “I can’t tell you what that is.”
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy predicted Republicans will lose the House in two weeks, citing historical midterm trends while also criticizing the sitting GOP leadership for how they’ve managed the chamber.
“In the last 100 years, all off-year elections, whoever is the party in power has the White House, has lost seats, and it’s only a few seats for the majority,” McCarthy said in an interview with Bloomberg TV Thursday.
Democrats, he added, will “get a majority” in the House: “I’m not quite sure how big it is, but they will probably win the majority.”
The former speaker, who ushered in the current GOP House majority in 2022 but only led the conference for less than a year before being booted from the speakership, went on to fault his own party for giving the election away.
“It’s not that the Democrats are going to win this election,” he said. “Republicans are going to lose it.”
He pointed to the skimpy House legislative calendar as a factor. Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies have routinely canceled scheduled session days amid member revolts that have undermined his grip on the razor-thin majority.
“You’re only given 24 months in a majority to manage it. They were in the fewest amount of days. They let the Democrats dictate,” McCarthy said. “You have to give a reason why to win. What are the three things Republicans will do if they win the majority? I can’t tell you what that is.”
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Democrats Lead In Ohio, Texas, And Iowa As Midterms Start To Look Like A MAGA Extinction Event, Jason Easley,right, Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races.
Republican operatives and strategists have been warning their party that the political environment for the GOP has been getting worse on the ground with each passing week for months.
Being the sole party in charge of the federal government meant that Republicans had a massive fundraising advantage over Democrats, but even though the economy is bad and voters have been enraged for the last decade, Republicans made a strategic blunder.
Trump’s party sat on its money. Republicans didn’t spend early. The GOP didn’t try to make the case early and often that their policies had the country on the right track. Instead, they followed Trump’s lead and waited for his promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make the economy boom.
By the time Republicans realized that Trump was making things worse, the hole was too deep. The candidates they recruited were overwhelmingly low quality, and momentum was rolling against them.
Poor strategy, a terrible economy, and a reviled president have created the perfect environment for Democrats to have a historic midterm election.
Red states where Republicans never expected Senate seats and governorships to be in play are now in jeopardy.
We are 11 days away from Election Day, and the red states of Texas, Ohio, and Iowa show how big things could get for Democrats.Three Different States Where Republicans Face The Same Problems
The non-partisan Cook Political Report had a Republican and a Democratic pollster conduct polls in Iowa, Texas, and Ohio.
Here is what they found:
A trio of new polls conducted as part of The Cook Political Report’s Battleground Project found Democrat Josh Turek ahead of Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson 46% to 44% in Iowa; former Sen. Sherrod Brown leading Republican Sen. Jon Husted 49% to 43% in Ohio; and former state Rep. James Talarico besting Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 49% to 44% in Texas.
In Iowa, Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand leads Republican Zach Lahn by 11 points (54% to 43%). In Ohio, Democrat Amy Acton is ahead of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy by five points (49% to 44%). In Texas, incumbent GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is leading Democrat Gina Hinojosa by just two points (48% to 46%).
Two findings make these polls different from other polls.
The Cook Battleground Project polls found that the Republican message that Democrats will raise taxes isn’t working:
Republicans have spent millions on advertising warning voters that Democratic candidates would raise their taxes if elected. But, in all three states, the polls found that voters were more worried that Republicans would “cut taxes for billionaires while enacting policies that will drive up costs for everyone” than they were that Democrats would “raise taxes on working families, making life even more expensive for working people.”
In other words, Republicans may be more trusted on handling taxes, but voters don’t see tax policy alone as a sufficient tool for tackling affordability.
Voters are smart. They understand that affordability is not a tax issue, but Republicans have had two years and only made America less affordable, so voters aren’t buying what they're selling.
The media often falsely equates the unpopularity of the Democratic Party with Trump’s unpopularity, but the Cook Battleground Project is the first to test this theory.
Cook found the same thing people on the ground have been saying for years. Individual Democrats are popular, even if the national Democratic brand is not: “Voters in these three states perceive the Democratic candidates more favorably than they view the national Democratic brand. Instead, it is Trump’s unpopularity that is dragging down the Republicans on the ballot.”
Trump is an anchor that drags down Republican candidates. Voters look at Republican candidates and see Trump, whereas they judge Democrats individually.
Republicans are paying the price for bending the knee to Trump and allowing his image to be the entire party.
When all the pieces are put together, it means that Trump rallies are hurting Republican candidates. He is a midterm Grim Reaper who is ruining elections wherever he visits.
The midterm election is shaping up to be more than a loss for Republicans. It looks like a firm rejection of Trump, the party built in his image, and the Republican brand.
More On U.S. Economy -- And Election Interference
New York Times, Opinion: In Six Decades of Public Life, I Never Thought I Would Write This Piece, Robert E. Rubin, right, (a senior counselor to Centerview Partners and was the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999), Oct. 22, 2026 (print ed.). Many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections.
The economy has been voters’ top issue in four of the six midterm elections this century — and 2026 appears all but certain to make it five of seven.
Beyond the cost of living, the war in Iran and tariffs, America faces a series of daunting longer-term economic challenges, from mounting federal debt to the effects of artificial intelligence.
Yet many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. Nov. 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.
There is a chance — some would argue a likelihood — that the midterms will proceed smoothly and honestly, with the winners seated in a straightforward manner.
There is also the possibility that the election will be, like so much else over the past two years, chaotic at best and lawless at worst. From amplifying false claims of fraud and slashing defenses against foreign meddling in our elections to attempting to bully states into using an error-prone database to purge voter registrations, the Trump administration has already thrown up obstacles to fair and free midterm elections.
There are widespread fears Mr. Trump and his allies could go further, including by sending armed federal agents to polling locations, seizing ballot boxes and exploiting a procedural loophole involving the clerk of the House that could enable them to refuse to seat duly elected Democratic members when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.
If the Trump administration launches an effort to manipulate the outcome of the midterms, the economic impact could be felt immediately, and it could last long after Mr. Trump’s presidency ends.
With the exception of the booming A.I. sector, corporate investment is already weak. The National Federation of Independent Business’s measurement of small-business uncertainty is 32 percent above its historical average. This seems like a bad time to inject substantially more instability into the mix.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The short-term risks from election interference look even more concerning when we consider the possibility that a fight over the outcomes will not necessarily remain contained to the courtroom. Mr. Trump has explicitly refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act in regard to the 2026 elections. Starting in late 2025, a surge of immigration enforcement agents into Minneapolis cost the city, its businesses and its residents an estimated $700 million. Sustained post-election chaos coupled with aggressive federal interference could create similar disruptions on a nationwide scale.
Any effort to undermine the election will eventually resolve itself, whether through political compromise, contentious rulings from courts, the use of force or all three. But the economic impact will outlast any immediate political crisis. The rule of law, undergirded by a tradition of free elections and the peaceful transfer of power, supports business decisions and attracts foreign companies to invest. It underlies the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It bolsters investors’ confidence in the full faith and credit of the United States and lowers interest rates on our debt. The integrity of our elections, in other words, has been one of the keys to American prosperity.
The United States has not yet seen its economy suffer from a lack of confidence in its legal system. Other countries have. “We can live with high inflation,” one Turkish executive told The Financial Times last year, “but our biggest disincentive to invest is the lack of the rule of law.” A 2024 State Department report similarly identified rule-of-law issues — including lack of respect for property rights, repression of criticism and arbitrary investigations and arrests — as major impediments to the business climate in China.
The United States does not have to become Turkey or China to feel the economic impacts of a diminished rule of law. The economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote of the “animal spirits” that encourage people to engage in market activity. Americans’ animal spirits have long been bolstered by the knowledge that their country is the best place on earth to start or invest in a business. A contested or overturned election could call that into question.
When I talk to leaders in business and politics, even many of those who acknowledge the election threat seem to consider such a possibility remote. They do not tend to take Mr. Trump’s attacks on voting seriously. That’s another way of saying that the markets are not pricing in what I consider a meaningful risk.
If Mr. Trump accomplishes in 2026 what he was unable to with respect to the 2020 election, or even if he causes widespread chaos by coming closer to his objective, it could create serious disruptions in the bond and equity markets. The yield on 10-year Treasuries recently reached 5.36 percent — higher than it was in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — in part because of concerns about the country’s policy trajectory. Election chaos could increase investors’ worry about the ability of our political system to deal with our fiscal problems, driving yields even higher. This would result in higher debt service costs for the government and higher mortgage rates and credit card bills for consumers, exacerbating our already considerable challenges.
I’ve lived my entire life as a citizen of a constitutional republic that provides rights and protections, and I’d like to continue doing so. I imagine most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, feel the same way.
Over the next few weeks, leaders in business and in all sectors of our society should work with state and local elected officials to help protect the political process that lies at the heart of our constitutional system. They can do this by making clear, nonpartisan declarations of support for election integrity, by supporting nonpartisan organizations that protect our elections and by using behind-the-scenes influence to discourage those who might be considering any steps to disrupt or overturn the midterms.
In more than six decades spent in and around economic policymaking, I never imagined having to write a piece such as this. If we act now, we can still protect our government, our people and our economy — and we can preserve the benefits that accrue to all of us, no matter whom we vote for, when American elections are fair and free.
More On Ohio Candidate's Despicable Child Rape Ad
Vice President JD Vance (Image by Sarah D. Rogers for The Bulwark).
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: JD Vance Is a Sociopath, Jonathan V. Last, above, Oct. 22, 2026. Oh, I’m sorry. Is my rhetoric imperfect?
America’s vice president is an Elizabeth Holmes–level sociopath. Today I want to take you through four statements from JD Vance that illustrate what a terrible human being he is.
Statement #1: In 2024, JD Vance advanced a blood libel about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. He was open about not caring whether or not his blood libel was true. On September 10, 2024, he told CNN:
Whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true—whatever the case may be4—Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. . . .
And I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. . . .
If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it.
Five days later, on September 15, 2024, another CNN interviewer pressed him on his fabrication. Again, Vance was unapologetic about his lying:
If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Statement #2: In an interview that aired on October 17, 2026, Vance was asked about his scapegoating of immigrants. He replied:
I would say, and to the extent that my rhetoric has been imperfect here, that’s on me.
This week, Vivek Ramaswamy released the most disgusting ad in the modern history of campaigns, featuring the toothless, addled, flat-out evil estranged mother of Amy Acton alleging that Acton is a serial liar.
Here I want to pause for a moment, because “evil” is a serious word.
When Acton was a child, her parents divorced. Her mother, Donna, was given custody of Acton and her brother. Donna remarried in 1975; her new husband, Cledith Arthur, had previously been indicted for sexually abusing his own eldest daughter. Once he married Donna, Cledith then abused her children. Physically and sexually. In 1978, Cledith was arrested and indicted on charges of raping Amy. She was 10 when the abuse began and 12 when Cledith was arrested.
Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody. Cledith Arthur, to avoid going on trial, fled Ohio. And Donna went with him, staying on the run from the law for the rest of Cledith’s life. Amy Acton never saw her mother again.
Imagine a mother who would marry a man knowing that he had sexually abused his daughter. Imagine a mother who would then offer up her own children to that man. Imagine a mother who, when the police showed up, would side with that man over her children. Imagine a mother who would run away—abandoning her children—because she chose a pedophile rapist over her own flesh and blood.
And now imagine that woman slithering out from her hole to defame her daughter in the service of helping a cretin like Vivek Ramaswamy.
I’m sorry, but “evil” is the only word. There’s a special place in hell for Donna Arthur.
In addition to that, Donna Arthur’s statements in the ad about Acton are, themselves, all lies, disproven by contemporaneous court records. This is calumny upon calumny.
Statement #3: Yesterday Vance went to Ohio to campaign for Ramaswamy. By itself, that’s a choice. At the rally, Vance defended Ramaswamy’s Donna Arthur ad. Here’s what he said: “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”¹
So Vance couldn’t work up the balls to disown the evil. He embraced it, even. But he did disown other Ohio Republicans who recoiled at Ramaswamy’s dishonesty:
I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.
He’s disgusted?
Disgusted?
Not by the pedophilia, the abuse, the mother who proffered her own children as sacrifices to her lover? No, JD wasn’t “disgusted” by any of that. He was “disgusted” by Republicans who wanted no part in Vivek Ramaswamy’s lies.
I guess that’s another example of JD’s “imperfect” rhetoric. What do you want? He’s just a politician. He doesn’t claim to be a saint.
Oh—wait a minute . . .
Statement #4: On August 31 Vance appeared on the Bryce Crawford podcast where he was asked to rate his odds of getting into heaven:
Crawford: On a scale of 1 to 10 — 10 being absolutely certain, 1 being not certain at all — how confident are you that you’d go to Heaven?
Vance: It’s high, but it’s not 10, right? I mean, it’s a 7 or it’s an 8. . . . If you’d asked me that question a year ago, it probably was like a 5 or a 6.²
Vance isn’t just bizarrely, heretically sure that he’s bound toward heaven—he thinks his chances have increased since he started bearing false witness on the regular.
This is sociopathy, plain and simple. Either Vance believes everything he’s saying, or he has no beliefs at all, and is a creature of pure, malicious nihilism.
I’m not sure which would be worse.
There is a Deep State—a real Deep State within the Trump administration and the broader Trump world. It is made up of JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Don Jr., and Peter Thiel, all of whom are aligned on the post-Trump direction of the Republican party.
Tucker went out on Trump first. Vance has followed, though only on deep background. Don Jr. came out of the closet a couple of days ago. And now comes the news that Thiel has joined them.
Put your Rubio fanfic away—this is the axis that will own the Republican party if/when Trump decides to leave power.
New York Times, Election Dispatches:Trump Defends Ramaswamy’s Attack Ad as Ohio’s Republican Governor Joins Backlash, Bayliss Wagner and Campbell Robertson, Oct. 22, 2026. President Trump on Thursday lashed out at critics of an attack ad that has roiled the Ohio governor’s race, and urged the Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, to continue airing it. Mr. Trump weighed in on social media hours after Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a fellow Republican, called on Mr. Ramaswamy to stop running the ad, which featured the estranged mother of the Democratic opponent.
Mr. DeWine called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” and said it was “wrong” for Mr. Ramaswamy to run it. The rare public rebuke of his party’s nominee to succeed him put Mr. DeWine in conflict with not only Mr. Trump but also Vice President JD Vance, another Ohio Republican, who told Republicans on Wednesday to stop “whining” about the ad.Campbell Robertson and Bayliss Wagner, A Republican rift over Ramaswamy’s attack ad widens, with Ohio’s governor and President Trump on opposite sides.ImageGov. Mike DeWine in a dark suit against a black background.Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio during a National Governors Association meeting in Washington this year.Credit...Allison Robbert/Associated Press
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio on Thursday joined a growing chorus of Ohio Republicans condemning an advertisement being aired by Vivek Ramaswamy, his party’s nominee to succeed him, that uses the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr. Amy Acton.
But President Trump followed Mr. DeWine’s denunciation hours later with a social media post that insulted both Dr. Acton and Mr. DeWine and called the ad “hitting pay dirt.”
With that post, the battle lines in a brewing Republican civil war over the advertisement were becoming clearer: Ohio vs. the White House.
Mr. Trump unreservedly championed the ad, describing it as “very powerful” and saying that everyone should “listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, and incapable Candidate.” Insisting that he had never heard of Dr. Acton before, Mr. Trump added: “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would.”
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The corporate cash behind Vivek Ramaswamy’s "despicable" TV ad, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 22, 2026. At 12 years old, Amy Acton was the victim of sexual abuse. After her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping Acton, her estranged mother, Donna Arthur, took her stepfather’s side and left the state with him as he fled justice.
Now, Acton is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Ohio and her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, is turning her history of abuse into a political attack ad. In the ad, Arthur accuses Acton of lying about her past. Arthur also came out against Acton in 2020, when Acton was leading Ohio’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as director of the state’s Department of Health, saying that she did not grow up in poverty and she was not raped by her stepfather. Court and police records cast doubt on Arthur’s claims.
The ad has been widely condemned by Democrats and Republicans as “morally wrong” and “revolting.” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, responded to the ad on Tuesday, saying, “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point.”
A Popular Information analysis of campaign finance records reveals that the ad was funded, in part, with contributions from the PACs and executives of major American corporations, including Bank of America, Deloitte, DraftKings, Kroger, and Nationwide.
The ad began circulating on social media on Monday night when it was included in a political survey. On Tuesday evening, Ramaswamy, left, told reporters that the ad came from his campaign but had not yet been shown on TV. Despite bipartisan backlash, Ramaswamy’s campaign decided to dig in later on Tuesday night, spending $4 million to air the ad across Ohio.
In the ad, Arthur did not specifically mention the rape charges against her husband, but repeatedly called her daughter a liar. “Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur said.
Arthur’s account, however, is not credible.
Court records indicate that Acton’s stepfather was found living in a tent when Acton was a child, and Acton’s campaign provided documents to CBS indicating that the family lived in a tent for a year.
Arthur has previously claimed that Acton lied about being raped by her stepfather. In a 2020 interview with an anti-abortion group called Operation Rescue, Arthur said, “I haven’t seen my daughter since she was 12 years old and that was when my daughter lied and said my second husband raped her.”
Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with raping Acton in 1978. He pleaded not guilty but was later indicted by a grand jury. Arthur supported her husband after his arrest. She went with him when he fled Ohio for Pennsylvania to avoid prosecution, abandoning her children. Cledith Arthur never returned to Ohio, despite warrants for his arrest. He died in 2004.
In the same 2020 interview, Arthur said that a rape accusation by Cledith Arthur’s daughter from a previous marriage against him was also false. Arthur said, “She had accused him of rape, but that was wrong too.” Court and newspaper records show that Cledith Arthur was charged with incest in 1974 for allegedly raping his eldest daughter, according to HuffPost.
After moving to Pennsylvania with her husband, Arthur was found guilty of theft by deception in 1995 and 1996 and animal neglect in 2021. When Arthur attempted to appeal the animal neglect case, a judge found her “not credible.”
The ad was condemned by a host of prominent Republican officials and political commentators. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump, said it was “the grossest ad I can think of… anyone behind it should be ashamed.” Lydia Mihalik, the director of the Ohio Department of Development for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R), said, “There are lines we shouldn’t cross, and this is one of them… I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to believe that exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong.” Republican strategist Leslie Shedd described the ad as “despicable” and “morally wrong and reprehensible.”
The ad was financed by Ramaswamy’s campaign, which has raised money from numerous major corporations — both through corporate PACs and from top executives.
Popular Information contacted these companies and asked if they believed the ad featuring Acton’s mother was acceptable. DraftKings declined to comment and the other companies did not respond.
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False Flags via The Bulwark, Political Commentary: MAGA Media Learns to Love Vile Vivek Ramaswamy Ad, Will Sommer, above, Oct. 22, 2026. For these supposed moral authorities, the only question is whether it works.
In the Ohio governor's race, Vivek Ramaswamy dropped an ad in which the estranged mother of Amy Acton denounced her daughter as a liar. Some of Ramaswamy’s usual defenders were repelled by the ad. But some powerful right-wing media figures have made a point of sticking with him. We’ll get into it below.
Conservative podcasting mogul Ben Shapiro can sometimes seem like the last decent person left in right-wing media. When he isn’t writing movies for James Franco, Shapiro has been a rare voice standing up to the MAGA movement’s slide into absolute madness: outright racism, antisemitism, and Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy theories.
But when it comes to Vivek Ramaswamy’s new ad attacking Democrat Amy Acton in the Ohio governor’s race—an ad that stars Acton’s estranged mother, who remained married to the man who was charged with raping her daughter—Shapiro has a surprising stance: He’s cool with it!
According to Shapiro, the ad is just another round of rough-and-tumble politics. On his show Wednesday, Shapiro dismissed criticism of the ad as liberal “pearl-clutching.”
“It turns out that in politics lots of bad things happen!” Shapiro said.
Instead of denouncing the ad, Shapiro said it was no worse than members of the Kennedy family criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or relatives of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) opposing his re-election. Besides, Shapiro asked, do you remember when Democrats said JD Vance had sex with a couch?
Of course, there’s one big difference between those spats and the new Ramaswamy ad: Acton’s mother was married to a man charged with raping Acton when she was 12 years old. After he was indicted, Acton’s mother fled the state with him to avoid the case. Acton has not seen her mother for forty-eight years.
Shapiro’s defense of the ad echoes an approach that has defined other MAGA media-driven frenzies this cycle, including the botched hysteria around James Talarico supposedly checking himself into a mental hospital in Ohio: throw accusations against the wall without bothering to care about the accuracy of them, and then demand that the Democrat come up with some sort of defense of them. In this case, court documents make clear that Acton was correct in her descriptions of the horrors she faced.
But Shapiro doesn’t seem to worry about the factuality here. And though he may be the most prominent defender in pro-Trump media of Ramaswamy’s bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, he isn’t alone. While the ad provoked shock on the right after it initially leaked, some notable figures have made clear they’re fine with it. Along with Donald Trump and JD Vance, some big names in conservative media are saying Ramaswamy’s $4 million ad campaign starring Acton’s mother is acceptable if it means keeping the Ohio governor’s mansion.
Glenn Beck—who, like Shapiro, styles himself a sort of conscience of the right—is on board. On his own show Wednesday, Beck initially praised Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, for “looking like a grandmother.”
Then Beck laid out a sort of point system where he could evaluate the competing claims made by Acton and her mother. On one hand, Acton’s stepfather was indicted by a grand jury for raping her, with even Arthur admitting he fled the state to avoid being prosecuted.
“We do know that he fled the state after being charged with the rape of a 12-year-old girl, Amy—and that doesn’t look good!” Beck conceded, giving Acton one “point.”
Then again, Acton’s mother claims she was once involved in setting up a sexual assault counseling program at a hospital. That, Beck felt, was worth a point on its own, resulting in a tie.
“Point each!” Beck said. “That means: Dismiss it.”
Several conservative commentators have speculated that Arthur may herself have been a victim of her abusive husband, meaning she’s essentially blameless.
“It sounds like Mom may have been part of this abuse,” Beck said, making clear that he meant Arthur suffered, too.
So did Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.
“From what I’ve heard about family situations like this, if the stepfather is doing the abuse, it might not just be of the kids, it could also be of the spouse, the wife,” Kelly said.
What’s the reason for this attempt to paint Arthur as somehow morally equivalent to her daughter? Both Beck and Kelly argued that the sexual abuse stuff should be ignored, with the focus instead on Arthur’s claims in the ad that her daughter is a habitual liar. But even setting aside that sordid history—no easy feat!—Arthur is hardly a reliable person whose claims should be taken at face value.
In 2021, for example, Arthur was cited for allegedly keeping four kittens, all less than a week old, in a hot car where the temperature measured 120 degrees. When her conviction was vacated in 2023 because she didn’t have access to counsel at her trial, a judge in that appeal nevertheless found Arthur—who claimed that the car wasn’t hot, and that she was being “stalked”—to be “not credible” as a witness.
NOT EVERYONE IN CONSERVATIVE MEDIA has been so quick to forgive Ramaswamy, right. Podcaster Erick Erickson has criticized the ad. And National Review was one of the first outlets to publish the details of the criminal case against Acton’s stepfather, an issue that the conservative pundits supporting Ramaswamy have sidestepped by mostly misstating the details of the case. (Shapiro, for example, wrongly claimed on his show that Acton’s stepfather was not charged by a grand jury.)
Sadly, the most reliably anti-Ramaswamy contingent has been the racist “groypers” who surround white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who already hates Ramaswamy for being Indian.
“What kind of person would run an ad like that?” Fuentes asked on his show, interspersing criticisms of the ad with a larger attack on immigration from India.
Attention-hungry former Florida gubernatorial candidate and Fuentes ally James Fishback put out a video saying he was no longer “proud” to be a Republican because of the ad.
But those voices on the right are relatively small, compared to far more popular voices like Beck and Shapiro. Unsurprisingly, the first major conservative pundit to back Ramaswamy’s ad was Megyn Kelly, who has been on a sort of anti-woman rampage lately, describing the victim in the alleged rape case at Cornell University as a “beefy” loser.
On her show Wednesday, Kelly compared Ramaswamy’s ad to George H.W. Bush’s racist “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 presidential race. But while many other people have made that comparison after the Ramaswamy ad leaked, Kelly’s take was unusual—because she saw the similarity as a good thing.
“Guess what happened?” Kelly said of the Willie Horton ad. “It worked! It moved the needle!”
The Daily with Sarah Jones, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Sick Ad Against Amy Acton is Already Backfiring, Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Amy Action called Vivek Ramaswamy’s sick ad exploitive. It’s also backfiring according to a top election forecaster.
The Ohio governor’s race has been taken to the swamp by Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy siding with the wife of an indicted rapist of his opponent, Democratic nominee and former state health department director Dr. Amy Acton.
But going this low doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the Republican.
A top election forecaster is describing the race as favorable to Democrats after previously calling the race a tossup, and explained the ad is already backfiring.
Larry Sabato, the editor-in-chief and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, reported that Sabato’s Crystal Ball is shifting four gubernatorial races to the left, including a significant change in Ohio, where the race moved from a toss-up to “lean Democrat.”
“I think we thought Amy Acton was ahead before this,” Sabato said on CNN. “This is a disaster. This ad is a disaster, and it's hard to believe that there are Republicans out there defending it, you know. You had Republican former governor of Kansas Bill Graves on just a few minutes ago, and he was powerful in his explanation of why not only this isn't going to work, but it is already backfiring.”
Sabato had the race as “lean Democrat” before the despicable ad, in which Ramaswamy sides with an indicted rapist of a child in an effort to attack his opponent, while bizarrely claiming that she won’t discuss the issues facing voters.
“Amid the controversy over Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, a top election forecaster is now describing the race as favorable to Democrats after previously predicting it to be a “tossup.” For months, the battle to lead Ohio has been one of the more contentious contests on the national radar,” CNN reported Thursday morning.Acton Calls Ramaswamy’s Ad ‘Exploitive’
Acton called Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s $4 million ad against her, in which he aligned himself with the woman defending the man indicted for raping her when she was a child, “hideous” and “exploitive.”
To be clear, when someone aligns themselves with the person calling an alleged child rape victim a liar, they are aligning with the indicted rapist. This is literally the system that protects predators, as we see with the Epstein files. It starts with calling child victims of rape liars.
The ad, which began circulating on Monday online, features the estranged biological mother of Dr. Acton, a woman who had custody of her children taken away from her and sided with her husband, who was indicted for raping her 10- to 12-year-old daughter. He only escaped prosecution because he fled from the law and eventually died.
Acton has not spoken with her mother since she was 12 years old, after Arthur stood by her stepfather after he was arrested, charged and indicted for raping Acton. Arthur remained married to him until he died.
Arthur lost custody of both of her children after their stepfather was indicted for raping Acton, the AP reported.
WBAL.TV reported via the AP:
According to police and court documents obtained by The Associated Press, Cledith Arthur was arrested and charged with the rape of his stepdaughter, then 12, in July 1978, after Acton’s biological father reported his alleged conduct to authorities. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978.
Cledith Arthur pleaded not guilty. He was indicted by a grand jury that September, but failed to show at a court hearing and remained a fugitive until at least 1981. He has since died.
Ramaswamy centered a woman so abusive to her children that they were taken away from her because she chose the indicted rapist over her own daughter. Appropriately, this is the “reliable narrator” for his campaign.
“My name is Donna Arthur, and I’m Amy Acton’s mother," Arthur says in the ad, which was first aired without the tags identifying who paid for it, according to the AP. "I love my daughter" but accused her of lying about her childhood, saying, "Amy has a serious problem; she is a liar."
Vice President JD Vance couldn’t bring himself anywhere near to condemning the ad, instead he told Republicans who expressed concern to stop whining. Naturally, the President himself wouldn’t stand up for a child whose alleged rapist was indicted.
This kind of depravity has become the norm for the party of Epstein, but even so, this ad reached new lows.Amy Acton Connects Her Childhood to What So Many Feel Right Now
Amy Acton responded by connecting the people who helped her and her brother to seeing the humanity in one another and the need to heal after this long decade of misery.
Speaking to a small group of voters, Acton said, “I remember as a kid people looking the other way, system's not working. But I also remember more the people who did look the other way. I talk about a couple who would pull my brother and I up on our front porch and feed us breakfast because they knew we were hungry, and that sticks between more, quite frankly.”
“And I think that's what we're living in right now: A time where we're we're seeing things and we're being asked to not see with our own eyes what we see.”
“But kindness is a fierce commitment to seeing humanity in one another, and everyone has longing for that. Everyone's exhausted.”
“This has been a long decade, and so just know that. I hope that's hope, that your fellow man is feeling it too. We've folks voting Trump three times showing up…
They're showing up, and we gotta heal this thing that's been broken.”
Ramaswamy is desperate to win the race, but the bad news for the DOGE bro is Ohioans aren’t worried about Amy Acton’s childhood more than they are the price of gas, an unjustified war in the Middle East, a president siding with Putin as he attacks the west in his hybrid information war, the cost of living skyrocketing thanks to Trump’s tariffs and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill undermining the affordability of healthcare even further.
Ohio hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in 20 years, but Vivek Ramaswamy’s repugnant MAGA personality might change that. And if that doesn’t do it, the chance to hear Dr. Acton’s call to seeing the humanity in our fellow humans might.
This nation desperately needs leaders who understand suffering and want to help, rather than people who see the suffering as easy prey.
U.S. Foreign Relatons, Global Strategies
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump vs. The Law of Non-Contradiction, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Yesterday, Russia released a wrongfully detained American: Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old retired schoolteacher who was imprisoned in 2022 after being accused of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine.
It is good when other countries release wrongfully detained Americans. Welcome home, Mr. Hubbard. But these exchanges also involve thorny diplomatic problems. Typically, America is forced to give something up to secure the release of a political prisoner, incentivizing more countries to wrongfully detain more Americans in the future.
Donald Trump has always had a difficult time wrapping his mind around tradeoffs like this. (See, for instance, his whole tariffs thing.) But we’ve rarely seen them utterly short-circuit his brain quite like yesterday—when he repeatedly insisted both that he alone could have secured Hubbard’s release without giving anything in return and that it was important for him to waive new sanctions on Russia, because if he hadn’t he could never have secured Hubbard’s release.
It started on Truth Social. In his post announcing the news, Trump bragged that Putin had given Hubbard back gratis: “The United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return—an unprecedented situation for Russia.”
You see, just another day at the office for President Donnie Deals.
Then, in a follow-up post twelve full minutes later, Trump said exactly the opposite. “Numerous people, who requested that sanctions be immediately imposed on Russia, have called to apologize to President Trump in that they didn’t know that he was negotiating the release of Stephen Hubbard, a truly big and important deal for the U.S.,” the president wrote. “If sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt.”
This is staggering stuff. Typically, deals to get back detained Americans have come in the form of prisoner swaps. In 2024, for instance, a complicated swap involving Russia, Belarus, the U.S., Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Norway resulted in the release of 26 people.
But as incentives go, prisoner swapping pales in comparison to the concession Trump admitted to giving to secure Hubbard’s release. If we rightly worry about oppressive countries snapping up Americans in order to secure the release of their own people, how much more should we worry about those countries detaining Americans in order to get billions of dollars of sanctions relief?
But the most dizzying part of the story isn’t how much Trump was willing to give Russia. It was how he genuinely seemed unable to grasp that he’d given Russia anything at all. Trump spent yesterday making it excruciatingly clear that he simply didn’t see the contradiction between his own two posts—the first claiming he’d given nothing up, the second itemizing exactly what he gave up.
Later, at a White House meeting, Trump made the same claim again: “We gave nothing in exchange, which is very rare. We never give anything in exchange.” And then, shortly after: “Let’s say we did what a lot of stupid people wanted me to do. A lot of really stupid people. . . . I was in the midst of getting Stephen out of Russia, and if we did what these foolish people wanted me to do [allowing sanctions to go into effect], he wouldn’t be coming out right now.”
Later still, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on this very contradiction, you could practically hear the gears grinding futilely between Trump’s ears.
“You said you didn’t give Russia anything in exchange for his release,” Collins said.
“If I would have done that,” Trump replied, “you would not have Mr. Hubbard coming back.”
“So you did give him something in exchange for the release,” Collins said.
“You don’t know anything. You’re fake news CNN,” Trump replied. “Right now you have a man that’s beautifully flying from Russia . . . that I got out, because I had a very good and very fast negotiation with President Putin. If you would have put those sanctions on, or whatever you want to call them, you could forget about him. You’d never see him again.”
“But you’re saying you lifted the sanctions in exchange for his release, right, Mr. President?” Collins asked.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN,” Trump replied.
Has a guy like Putin ever had it so easy?
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Oct. 22, 2026. Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections, according to U.S. officials and other people briefed on the deliberations.
As planning for a short but intensive operation progresses, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have stepped up exercises, flying planes over Iraq to practice strike maneuvers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss new strikes, U.S. officials said.
The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. Some officials say one more big round of attacks could push Iran’s economy over the brink and force the country to make diplomatic concessions after nearly eight months of conflict.
Still, there are reasons to be skeptical that a renewed war would be any more successful than the first phase of intense U.S.-Israeli strikes between February and April. Those rounds of fighting drove up energy prices and inflation around the world, eroded security in the Middle East and severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.
It is also far from certain Mr. Trump will approve fresh strikes. Repeatedly this year he has vetoed plans for a return to major combat operations, including this month when the U.S. and Israeli militaries were nearly ready to attack.
All of the officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss military planning.
Iranian officials have promised to retaliate this time by expanding their targets beyond commercial ships and energy infrastructure in the region to data centers and underwater internet cables.
They say the fighting will neither be quick nor limited.
While the United States is assembling a massive arsenal that will be fully in place by early November, diplomatic efforts have continued, as U.S. negotiators use the potential return to war as leverage with Iran to make progress on their demands on its nuclear program and control over the Strait of Hormuz.
So far, however, Iran’s negotiators have been unwilling to make concessions on the nuclear program, insisting on deferring that issue until later in the talks.
Some U.S. planners are convinced that an intensive three-day campaign could cause enough economic damage to change the Iranian position.
New York Times, Strike on Saudi Airport Kills 2 as U.S. Tells Some Diplomats to Leave, Ismaeel Naar, Oct. 22, 2026. For weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis have been attacking the kingdom’s aviation and energy sectors.
At least two people were killed in a strike on a major airport in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday evening, as Washington ordered some U.S. diplomatic staff to leave the kingdom following weeks of deadly attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.
The Saudi authorities said in a statement on Thursday morning that a Saudi national and an Indian resident died in the strike on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, a city in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province that is home to the state oil giant Saudi Aramco. Eight other people were wounded, the statement said, adding that airport was operating normally on Thursday.
In a separate incident, two people were killed and two others were wounded on Wednesday when a drone was intercepted over Aramco’s Shaybah oil field, also in the Eastern Province. Falling drone fragments sparked a fire in a contractor’s vehicle, killing a Filipino and a Nepali, the Saudi Energy Ministry said.
The Saudi authorities did not say who they believed had launched the strike on the airport or the drone intercepted over the oil field. There were no immediate claims of responsibility.
The Houthis have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure for weeks, killing at least 22 civilians and roiling energy markets.
The price of oil jumped about 3 percent on Thursday, with the global benchmark topping $112 a barrel, the highest level since mid-May.
Saudi Arabia announced a bombing campaign against the Houthis this month in support of the internationally recognized government of Yemen, which has been at war with the Houthis since 2014. That was when the Houthis, a rebel group from the country’s north, seized the Yemeni capital, Sanaa — which they still hold.
A fragile truce in Yemen unraveled earlier this year, and the country has since tipped back into a civil war that the United Nations says has displaced some 260,000 people since August.
As the fighting has spilled onto Saudi soil, the United States ordered all “non-emergency government employees and their family members” to leave Saudi Arabia, a State Department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, said in social media post on Wednesday night that cited the Houthis’ attacks, mounting civilian casualties and travel disruptions.
Washington had pulled many diplomatic staff out of the Middle East earlier this year after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, the Houthis’ main patron. But it started sending some back in late August.
Then in September, the Houthis seized areas of strategic territory on Yemen’s Red Sea coast in a lightning offensive, gaining greater control over a crucial choke point for global trade. In recent weeks, forces affiliated with the Yemeni government and backed by Saudi warplanes have mounted a counteroffensive to retake the territory.
The Red Sea has become an increasingly important route for Saudi oil exports since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway in the Persian Gulf, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February. The Houthis’ attacks on Saudi oil facilities and tankers traversing the Red Sea have heaped further pressure on energy markets.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, Opinion: Impeachment. It’s Not Just for Presidents, David French, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America.
Imagine that it’s January 2027 and Democrats hold both chambers of Congress. They’ve been elected in a wave of public outrage over inflation, the war in Iran, and — crucially — public corruption. In fact, a Fox News poll taken shortly before the election showed that “corruption in government” was the top concern of voters, even greater than inflation.
How should the Democratic majority respond?
Last week Senator Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan, shared her thoughts about this, and it made parts of the right very, very angry.
During a discussion at the University of Chicago, Slotkin argued that a Democratic-controlled Congress should impose accountability on the Trump administration, but also that it can’t become the “whole personality” of the Congress.
And so, she proposed, Congress should “pick signature cases and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.” She acknowledged the two failed impeachments of President Trump, but said, “The people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who did his bidding.”
Here’s the part that made the right truly mad: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message sent.”
The Chicago Thinker, a self-described conservative and libertarian student-run publication from the University of Chicago, clipped the latter portion of her comments and ignited a firestorm.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that Slotkin was “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign that goes after all and sundry, including what she calls ‘people who enabled’ Mr. Trump.”
A group called the Center to Advance Security in America even went so far as to file an ethics complaint against Senator Slotkin, claiming that she may have been trying to intimidate young Americans from pursuing careers in public service.
Others just lied. Greg Price, a MAGA influencer with a large following on X, said that Slotkin “just said that he [sic] wants to prosecute everyone who works for President Trump.”
Different others threatened her. Mike Davis, a prominent Republican lawyer and former clerk of Justice Neil Gorsuch, posted on X, “Try it, @ElissaSlotkin. Learn about the Second Amendment, sweetheart.”
Jesse Kelly, a talk radio host who also has an immense following on X, wrote, “Elissa Slotkin should be arrested for what she said. These are the kinds of things we have to do to communists in order to stop this from escalating.”
“Crush this before it gets worse,” he said.
The hysteria was so out of proportion to Slotkin’s comments, that it’s worth pondering whether this was Trumpists’ own exercise in “deterrence.” They’re trying to deter accountability for MAGA’s immense corruption.
In reality, however, Slotkin was raising the right question and — by focusing on the “signature” cases — in the right way. How should a Democratic Congress respond to the extraordinary corruption of the Trump White House? And what can it do if President Trump is essentially immune to prosecution and impeaching the president has already failed, twice?
Her top-line answer is sound — pick the most egregious cases and pursue his enablers. But the default method should be impeachment rather than prosecution. Done correctly, impeachment can be more unifying and more effective than a campaign of criminal prosecution.
In fact, a campaign of criminal prosecution may well be impossible. Prepare for Trump to issue a host of pre-emptive pardons, protecting everyone from his family to his cabinet to his most senior advisers from criminal liability for any federal crimes committed in office or near one.
In other words, Trump may use the most misguided provision of the Constitution — the pardon power — to wreck the rule of law. In response, Democrats and Republicans should revive the impeachment power, the most underused portion of the Constitution, to save both the rule of law and the structure of our government.
First, let’s talk a bit about the law. Any efforts to prosecute Trump or his enablers criminally will run up against three roadblocks. Two are obvious, one is less so.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives the president the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” This power is one of the last vestiges of royalty given to the American president, and its reach is limited only by his or her integrity.
Trump now understands this reality fully, and no one should doubt his willingness to exercise his power to the fullest.
As Joe Biden demonstrated (in one of the worst moves of his presidency) the power to pardon can even be pre-emptive, granting pardons for cases that might be brought. It extends to people inside and outside the government, and it can grant total immunity from legal accountability for even the most heinous of federal crimes.
The second barrier to prosecution is unique to the presidency: Trump v. United States — the most misguided Supreme Court decision of the new century. As I’ve argued before, an otherwise originalist court reached a decidedly un-originalist decision to grant former presidents sweeping immunity for actions undertaken in office. The immunity isn’t absolute, but it’s broad enough to make any post-term prosecution of a president extraordinarily difficult.
The final barrier is both legal and practical. Proving a public corruption case is hard, and it’s getting harder. For example, in a 2016 case, McDonnell v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a former Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell. He and his wife received roughly $175,000 in loans and gifts from a businessman named Jonnie R. Williams Sr.
The court found that the government had not proven that McDonnell had committed any “official acts” in exchange for a financial benefit. McDonnell had set up meetings between Williams and Virginia public officials, had hosted events benefiting Williams’s company at the governor’s mansion, and had contacted other Virginia officials on Williams’s behalf.
Those were not official acts, the court reasoned, because “to qualify as an ‘official act,’ the public official must make a decision or take an action on that ‘question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding or controversy,’ or agree to do so.”
A later case, called Snyder v. United States, reversed the conviction of James Snyder, the former mayor of Portage, Ind. He received a gift of $13,000 from a truck dealer after Snyder spent more than $1 million at the dealership to purchase garbage trucks for the city.
The Supreme Court found that Snyder had received a “gratuity,” not a bribe, and the relevant federal statute criminalized bribery, and did not criminalize granting a gratuity after a favorable decision had been made.
Taken together, these decisions opened up an immense gray zone for financial influence, leaving bribery prosecutions viable in only the most brazen of cases.
I bring up these cases not because they foreclose any prosecution of Trump officials, but rather because they show that simply proving that money changed hands under suspicious or plainly immoral circumstances is not the same thing as proving a crime.
What this means in practice is that public corruption cases should be brought, but they must be brought carefully and selectively, when the law is clear and the evidence is overwhelming.
There could be plenty of those to go around — but only if Trump stays his hand on pardons. And he almost certainly won’t.
But impeachment is different. It’s a political remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors” that involve violations of the public trust, not just violations of the law. And it has an important prophylactic effect that not even a felony conviction possesses — it can ban a convicted person from “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”
The impeachment power is also broad. It extends to the president, vice president and all “civil officers” of the United States. While the term “civil officer” isn’t defined by the Constitution, it almost certainly extends to cabinet heads, ambassadors, other senior executive branch officials and federal judges.
In fact, a number of federal judges have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office in American history.
While we know that it is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Republicans will cross the aisle to vote to impeach and convict Trump, would they have the same loyalty to, say, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the recently deposed ambassador to Greece who The Wall Street Journal reported had solicited a substantial from gift from a Republican donor before her Senate confirmation?
Does that loyalty extend to Richard Grenell, the special missions envoy who’s worn a number of hats during both Trump administrations and who’s embroiled in his own pay-to-play scandal after Alina Habba Mildon, the president’s former lawyer who went on to work at the Department of Justice, accused him of siphoning off millions of dollars intended for a donation to the Kennedy Center, which he ran at the time? (Grenell denies any wrongdoing.)
Does that loyalty extend to Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who’d already committed an impeachable offense when he disclosed military plans on unclassified Signal group chats and hasn’t slowed down since?
As I was writing this edition of the newsletter, news broke that Julio Herrera Velutini, a billionaire from Venezuela, retained Mildon last year for a four-year period with a compensation package worth more than $50 million. He received a pardon from Trump shortly afterward. (Habba, too, denies any wrongdoing.)
Herrera had been charged with felony bribery, but negotiated a plea deal for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But even that was too much for him to bear.
More Global News
New York Times, Looted Goods From French Stores Flood Resale Sites After Riots, Jenny Gross, Oct. 22, 2026. Officials in France are pressing online platforms like eBay and Vinted to remove items that were stolen during public disturbances over the weekend.
The online listings started appearing just hours after the looting in France. For sale were a variety of items — handbags, skin care products, lip glosses — suspected of being stolen by people who had smashed windows and emptied stores in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities over the weekend.
Protests in France, which started over conditions in schools and broadened into demonstrations against the rising cost of living, descended into unrest on Saturday and Sunday. Several government buildings were damaged and more than 3,000 shops were looted, leading to the arrest of more than 2,500 people, officials said.
In Paris, many of the shops across Les Halles were looted and vandalized, while the Place de la Bastille and Place de la Concorde became center points for standoffs between the police and protesters. Stores that were broken into included Louis Vuitton, Céline, Hermès and the North Face, as well as video game shops, pharmacies and electronics stores. A preliminary estimate showed the damage would cost several hundred million euros.
Resale sites like Vinted said this week that they were cracking down on items suspected to have been looted. Vinted said it was working with the French authorities to detect malicious behavior.
“Since this weekend, our teams have taken immediate action to identify and remove listings linked to the looting, and we have stepped up monitoring of suspicious listings,” Vinted said in a statement. “When our rules are breached, we act against the accounts involved, up to permanent bans.”ImageThe interior of a store that has been looted with containers and small objects strewed on the floor.
President Emmanuel Macron of France warned on Sunday that “those who looted will have to pay back, and those who sought to bring down the republic will be held accountable.”
But many more people participated in the looting than the police will be able to arrest, and it will be virtually impossible for resale sites to take down all stolen items because of the scale of the theft, said Charlotte de Montpellier, an economist at ING Bank.
“I don’t expect that those companies will be able to track everything,” she said. The test for the broader French economy, she added, will be how long the protests last, and whether the unrest continues. “More could come, and that will of course have a significant impact on the final bill,” she said.
France was calm on Wednesday, but Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, said a significant security operation was planned ahead of more protests expected on Saturday.
Serge Papin, the trade minister, and Anne Le Hénanff, the digital affairs minister, met on Monday with resale platforms to discuss strengthening their cooperation with the French authorities to identify and report stolen goods. Alliance Française des Places de Marché, which represents platforms like eBay, Vinted and Etsy, said in a statement after the meeting that its members had agreed to increase monitoring to detect goods that might have been obtained through looting and inform consumers of the penalties associated with buying stolen goods.
The damage to companies goes beyond replacing looted products. On Tuesday, Carrefour, the largest food retailer in France, lowered its full-year financial targets because of indirect costs of the riots: increased spending on security and logistics, fewer customers, precautionary closures and reduced hours because of curfews.
Future U.S. Politics
The Contrarian, Opinion: MAGA Hubris Fuels the Blue Wave, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Like many authoritarian cults, the MAGA crowd does not believe their reign will ever end or that their opponents will ever gather their wits to respond to assaults on their rights, liberties, and physical safety.
The fascists act with impunity because they cannot imagine the political pendulum will ever swing back; they cannot conceive that their abuse will ever trigger a backlash of sufficient strength to overpower their repressive rule.
But some savvier Republicans (including White House staffers who are already lawyering up) are getting a wake-up call. In the run-up to the midterms, it seems to be slowly dawning on some of them that their abusive conduct has lit a fire under the Resistance, and that a reckoning is coming.
We see the backlash in voter turnout and enthusiasm in precisely the places where MAGA tried to strip millions of voting power. Trump’s voting suppressors never anticipated the counter-redistricting effort Democrats mounted in places like California. Moreover, they seemed unprepared to see a dramatic swing in both red statewide races (where gerrymandering is irrelevant) and in the districts they thought would be safe after they carried out Donald Trump’s orders to deprive non-white voters of their representatives of choice.
The Callais decision further inflamed the pro-democracy coalition. Southern Senate seats that never would have been competitive are now in play; re-redistricted congressional seats are at risk. Nationally, Hispanics have swung back hard for Democrats.
Early voting has been surging coast to coast. In Georgia, for example, over 1 million ballots have already been cast, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The early numbers offer more encouraging signs for Democrats than Republicans, particularly in metro Atlanta and other left-leaning parts of the state.” A similar surge in early voting is underway in Florida. Nearly 100,000 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting in South Carolina.
Organizing around early voting has been productive. No Kings Coalition organizers report:
According to a new analysis by TargetSmart, early voting surged by 51% in ZIP codes that hosted a No Kings event compared to the same relative Saturday in the 2022 midterm elections (October 22, 2022). Across the 13 states analyzed — Georgia (46 Events), Indiana (46 Events), Maine (32 Events), Minnesota (88 Events), North Carolina (71 Events), Nebraska (15 Events), New Mexico (29 Events), Nevada (22 Events), Ohio (79 Events), South Dakota (8 Events), Tennessee (24 Events), Virginia (85 Events), and Wyoming (14 Events) — overall early voting was up 32%, meaning communities with a No Kings event outperformed the general statewide increase by 19 percentage points. ….
The data also highlights a surge in historically underrepresented voters: in ZIP codes with a No Kings event, early voting among voters of color increased by 90% compared to 2022, versus a 29% increase among white voters.
The more desperately the Republicans try to cling to power, the more the Resistance builds. The Justice Department’s pathetic efforts to harass states and take over the voting process not only failed spectacularly in court (e.g., in the Missouri and U.S. Post Office cases, in over 2 dozen cases in which the feds tried to grab state voter rolls, or in the botched raid to grab Fulton County ballot materials) and petered out in a series of spasmodic, widely ridiculed efforts to hunt down noncitizen voters. It also seems to have played into the hands of early vote organizers who exhort voters not to allow the regime to rob them of their precious right to vote.Subscribed
The baseless DOJ lawsuit suing California for refusing to eject a random list of 20,000 voters from the rolls triggered a furious response from a coalition of groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which intervened in the suit and vowed that voters would not be intimidated. As California Attorney General Rob Bonta declared in a Sunday interview, “Here you have the federal government, with bluster and intimidation and bullying, trying to scare them into disenfranchising voters, and it’s wrong….They’re desperate.” He continued, “It’s embarrassing for them. They’re in the death throes of this election cycle, staring down a blue wave where they’re going to get thrashed, and they are planning for what they do after they get thrashed.”
In a similar vein, Big Tech’s ham-handed interference with mass organizing has itself fueled a backlash. Meta’s interruption of the No Kings Coalition Instagram feed for over 4 hours — reminiscent of efforts for which Meta was sued in Brazil — triggered a demand for information from Meta, calls from Congress to investigate, and a seething response from the independent Meta Oversight Board, which called out “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts.”
As the Oversight Board explained: “From the removal of political activist accounts during protests in the U.S. ahead of the midterm elections to technical restrictions that hit the accounts of a presidential candidate in Brazil leading to allegations of electoral interference, it’s clear that Meta must do more to ensure that its enforcement practices during elections are transparent and consistent and that political speech is protected rather than stifled.” Its co-chairs continued, “We have repeatedly warned that during elections and periods of heightened political tension, Meta’s content moderation failures often manifest themselves in two ways: overenforcement that suppresses political speech and underenforcement that undermines electoral integrity.”
The ferocious response from a variety of civil society groups and elected leaders nicely tees up a full-throttle effort to investigate and begin real regulatory reform of Big Tech, which has — with Trump cheerleading — made itself the target of voters’ ire on everything from AI to data centers to election interference and child endangerment.Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in October 2026, rallying nobody.
Finally, the anti-MAGA backlash is getting a further boost from growing disgust over Trump’s overt corruption — about which VP JD Vance ludicrously claims ignorance and Republicans refuse to address. From the outrage engendered by taxpayer-funded self-promotional ads to the outcry over Kimberly Guilfoyle’s penny ante graft to the massive self-aggrandizing building projects and crypto-scams, Trump has fed the very narrative that helped dislodge Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Even Fox News polling reflects the degree to which these issues have broken through. Six in ten people said they “were extremely concerned” about corruption, with almost 90 percent saying they were either extremely or very concerned about government corruption.
In sum, the arrogance of autocrats can prove their undoing. In trying to block out independent media, they have ensconced themselves in an echo chamber, missing signs that their message is badly misfiring and that their actions are boomeranging. Be it on voting, Big Tech abuse, or corruption, the Trump regime’s overreach has inured to the benefit of Democrats and their allied pro-democracy forces, evidenced in the substantial enthusiasm advantage for Democrats, the spiking early voting numbers, and the expanding electoral maps. If the blue wave manifests itself, a good deal of the credit will go to MAGA hubris.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Gramsci’s Foreshadowing, William Kristol, right, Oct. 22, 2026. There’s a remark by the early-twentieth-century Marxist thinker and Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist government in 1926 until his death in 1937, that’s been much quoted in recent years:
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
I’ve long thought Gramsci’s formulation to be an apt comment on the present moment. And I was reminded of it this morning as I read about Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, and Donald Trump and Steven Witkoff. For, if I can update Gramsci, it seems to me that today…
Trumpism is dying, and a new liberalism struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.
It’s worth noting that the famous line ascribed to Gramsci isn’t a literal translation of the 1930 entry in his Prison Notebooks: In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati. The late Professor Joseph Buttigieg—yes, the father of Pete!—editor of the comprehensive English-language edition of the Prison Notebooks, translated Gramsci’s comment more literally: In this interregnum a great variety of morbid phenomena occur.
In fact, “morbid phenomena” may describe our Trumpists more accurately than “monsters.” After all, monsters are in a way impressive. They can have a certain grandeur. But Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance, Donald Trump and Steven Witkoff? They’re not grand or impressive. They’re merely the “morbid phenomena” of our day, the visible detritus of a failing and flailing movement that’s, sadly, dominated our politics for the last decade—and that, of course, remains powerful today.
Jim Swift wrote yesterday about the disgusting attack by Ramaswamy, on his opponent in the Ohio governor’s race, Amy Acton—an ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother accusing her daughter of being a “liar” who “lies about her past.”
In fact, the mother’s husband, Acton’s stepfather, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing his stepdaughter when she was 12 years old. Her mother lost custody of both Amy and her brother, who also was abused. The stepfather posted bond, fled, and lived as a fugitive until his death in 2004. Acton’s mother left town with him.
In a statement, Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said that, “Our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” And he also explains that “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it. She continued to receive that abuse” because at 11 and 12 years old, she tried to protect her younger brother.
But Ramaswamy has doubled down on his smear. His campaign is putting $4 million behind the spot.
Yesterday, in Cincinnati to campaign for the Republican ticket, Vice President JD Vance at first seemed indifferent to the truth of this ad that calls a survivor of childhood sexual abuse a liar. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance said.
But later in the day, at a rally with Ramaswamy, he actually praised his fellow Republican for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.” What’s more, Vance said that he was “a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad.
So there it is, the morbid phenomenon of late Trumpism on full display: Smearing a survivor of child sexual abuse; running an ad featuring a primary enabler of the abuse; and complaining that some decent people in his party are offended by this.
But the Trumpists don’t just like enablers of child sexual abuse. They also love brutal and aggressive dictators.
Send today’s Morning Shots to a friend or family member.
Andrew wrote Monday morning about Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and his support for Russia and Vladimir Putin. And indeed, later that very day, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”
Even Neville Chamberlain didn’t claim that Nazi Germany had been fine on Czechoslovakia. And Trump’s befuddled appeasement of Putin has continued full bore this week, as Andrew details below.
Yesterday, U.S. special envoy Steven Witkoff joined the chorus, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” after he released a 74-year-old American who had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia for four years: “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”
Sucking up to a murderous aggressor and brutal dictator is another one of the morbid phenomena of Trumpism.
It’s all repulsive. And dangerous.
But let me close by returning, across the aisle as it were, to Antonio Gramsci. I don’t endorse Gramsci’s politics, or much of his analysis, insofar as I understand it—though my sense is that some of it is quite brilliant. But I think Gramsci understood this: You can’t just wait for the morbid phenomenon bedeviling the world to collapse on its own.
Yes, fascism has weaknesses. And yes, fascism in its various manifestations needs to be understood and argued against. But above all, fascism has to be confronted. And then defeated. That was true in the last century. It’s true today.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Elon Musk Could Face a Mountain of Subpoenas in 2027... This week’s Next Level starts as a Secret Podcast before SAM and TIM crash the stage, live in Atlanta! The gang discusses what a Democratic House could mean for Musk and a mountain of subpoenas in 2027.QUICK HITS
BACK TO IRAN: The thing about endless wars is they tend to keep dragging on. Although Trump has been trying hard to redirect the public’s attention from Iran to Ukraine—at least until the midterms are over—the New York Times reports that the U.S. and Israel are developing plans for possible new strikes:
The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. Some officials say one more big round of attacks could push Iran’s economy over the brink and force the country to make diplomatic concessions after nearly eight months of conflict.
Still, there are reasons to be skeptical that a renewed war would be any more successful than the first phase of intense U.S.-Israeli strikes between February and April. Those rounds of fighting drove up energy prices and inflation around the world, eroded security in the Middle East and severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.
Trump spent most of this year nursing the delusion that total Iranian capitulation was always just one more spectacular bombardment away. He seemed to have inched away from that mindset in recent months. But apparently hope springs eternal. Read the whole thing.
MEASURING THE WAVE: Speaking of the Times, its latest gold-standard poll with Siena College paints a grim picture for Trump with less than two weeks to go until Election Day. Not since Harry Truman in 1946 has a president been so unpopular entering the midterms. Only 34 percent of voters approve of his performance, and likely voters prefer Democratic House candidates to Republican ones on the generic ballot by a whopping 11 percentage points.
There are, however, a few silver linings for the GOP. The Democratic party writ large remains, incredibly, even less popular than Trump himself, with only 28 percent of voters saying they are “satisfied” with it. (Thirty-six percent said as much about the Republican party.) And the generic Senate ballot in the 35 states with upper-chamber contests this cycle was much closer: Only a five-point lead for Democratic candidates. It’s a reminder that the last thing Democrats can be is complacent. Even if they clean up in November, they’ve still got a lot of work to do.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Democrats Lead In Ohio, Texas, And Iowa As Midterms Start To Look Like A MAGA Extinction Event, Jason Easley,right, Oct. 22, 2026. New polling shows Democrats leading in Ohio, Texas, and Iowa in nearly all of the gubernatorial and Senate races.
Republican operatives and strategists have been warning their party that the political environment for the GOP has been getting worse on the ground with each passing week for months.
Being the sole party in charge of the federal government meant that Republicans had a massive fundraising advantage over Democrats, but even though the economy is bad and voters have been enraged for the last decade, Republicans made a strategic blunder.
Trump’s party sat on its money. Republicans didn’t spend early. The GOP didn’t try to make the case early and often that their policies had the country on the right track. Instead, they followed Trump’s lead and waited for his promise that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would make the economy boom.
By the time Republicans realized that Trump was making things worse, the hole was too deep. The candidates they recruited were overwhelmingly low quality, and momentum was rolling against them.
Poor strategy, a terrible economy, and a reviled president have created the perfect environment for Democrats to have a historic midterm election.
Red states where Republicans never expected Senate seats and governorships to be in play are now in jeopardy.
More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
President Trump, who has actively suppressed his transcripts from his schooling and falsely implied repeatedly that he graduated college with high honors, insulted CNN's Caitlin Collins and another female reporter at the White House on Oct. 22, 2026.Hope for America, Commentary:Trump's newest ABSURD attack on Kaitlan Collins was stunning, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Oct. 22, 2026. Just after 4:00 this afternoon, Donald Trump walked out of the Oval Office and spent barely seven minutes with reporters before turning questions about Russia sanctions into another ugly attack on women.
He called CNN’s Kaitlan Collins a “dummy” and a “low IQ person.” Minutes later, ABC’s Karen Travers asked about the same subject, and he demanded to know whether she was a “stupid person.”
Then he headed to South Carolina for a rally that was supposed to promote Darline Graham, only to spend almost an hour and a half talking about himself. Protesters interrupted him at least a dozen times in the first 20 minutes. When a supporter punched one of them, he praised it: “That was great, man. Wow. Man, I loved that.” Just the night before, he had explained that saying “Please don’t hurt them” was a way to keep the press from getting him. Now he was openly celebrating the violence again.
As I watched, my youngest daughter walked into my room, and I immediately paused the television. She is old enough to understand what is happening, and she needs to recognize the warning signs of a would-be dictator. But I also wanted to preserve what little childhood she has left without the narration of a madman filling the background. I kept thinking about how impossible it would have been to imagine Barack Obama calling a female reporter a dummy for asking a question. There used to be a minimum standard of human decency attached to the presidency. Now we are watching a man praise violence, insult anyone who questions him, muse about renaming oceans, confuse the Nobel Peace Prize with the Pulitzer Prize, and insist that he is in a very good mood. Something is very wrong, and I keep thinking about what another two years of this will do to our country and to the young people learning what power looks like.
Taking back Congress will not make Donald Trump stop. It can slow him down, force hearings and subpoenas, create public records, and buy time for legal challenges and the institutions still functioning. We also have to prepare for the period after election night. He is already saying Republicans cannot lose unless the other side cheats, laying the groundwork for another attack on results he does not like. We could see pressure to keep winners from being seated and renewed attacks on anyone reporting that the election was fair. We are voting for the elections that follow this one, too, and for the next president to actually take office. More Americans are willing to confront him even when surrounded by hostile supporters. Their courage and coordination make the growing resistance visible. We can meet this moment by turning that determination into votes against him and the enablers who keep his cruelty and chaos in power.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 21, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Everything feels out of whack in the United States. First of all, the president’s behavior is becoming more and more erratic. Earlier this week, he walked past the open door of his armored car, known as “The Beast” and wandered toward an open field before Secret Service agents redirected him.
And he is losing any filter he used to have. At campaign rallies, he has taken to commenting on how he finds Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted physically attractive. “I looked at his a‑‑, and then I looked at his legs, and my—I said, ‘His a‑‑ is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.’ Then I looked at his legs, and I said, ‘Man, his feet are big.’ Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. It was like a piece of steel. I said, ‘This guy’s a monster.’”
Today he snarled at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person, you’re a dummy, and you work for CNN.”
In the news, Trump’s abandonment of the traditional allies of the United States to embrace Vladimir Putin and Russia remains front and center. Today, videos circulated of Trump’s special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, praising Putin as a “humanitarian” even as the Russian military continues to bombard Ukrainian civilians, this week killing a baby in a stroller at a public park.
Today, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton told Kara Swisher: “I continue to believe that Putin has things on Trump. I continue to believe that he is holding photos, videos, whatever it might be.” Clinton reiterated that Trump “is a willing Putin puppet to help Putin. Putin’s not going to stop with Ukraine…. I guess Trump has this idea that he wants to divide the world,” Clinton said. “He gets the Western Hemisphere, Putin gets Russia and Europe, and Xi Jinping gets the rest of the world.”
Meanwhile, Trump claims he had nothing to do with the slowing of Starlink over Ukraine, telling a reporter: “I wasn’t involved.” When asked if Elon Musk ordered it, Trump responded: “I don’t know who did it, but I was not involved.”
Congress members, including Republicans, have vowed to hold whoever was responsible for the cuts accountable. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said on Monday that those limiting Starshield “will be fully investigated and will be held fully accountable.” He said Congress would investigate and mete out “immediate harsh and punitive budget cuts to any responsible agency or agency head.”
Musk is not taking that threat calmly. In response to a report by Calen Razor in Politico that Democrats intend to investigate Musk’s role in cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink communications networks, leaving Ukraine vulnerable to Russian attacks, Musk posted on social media: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …”
His was a shocking threat against members of Congress, but the move of Europeans and Canadians to develop their own satellite communications systems given the dangers of relying on Starlink seems to be worrying Musk. If Congress also moves the United States away from his contracts, he could be in real trouble. As Douglas P. McCormick noted in Fortune last June, Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune is not real. Almost all of his net worth is unrealized equity in companies he runs. His wealth is simply the market’s estimate of the worth of his promises to deliver in the future, and those promises depend on government contracts.
Americans are beginning to see the costs of Trumpism more generally.
As Paul Krugman noted in his newsletter this morning, twelve million Americans have lost healthcare coverage under Trump, and those who still have it have seen the cost of their premiums rise sharply. The situation will get worse in the future, since when they wrote their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans put the worst of their cuts off until after the midterms.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fell by more than 5 million people, or nearly 13%, between July 2025, when the Republicans enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and June 2026. Nearly half of those no longer receiving benefits are children. Starting this month, more of the costs of SNAP will fall to states. The amount of their payment will be based on their error rates, causing them to err on the side of denying benefits and cut costs, leading even more to lose benefits in the future. Some states may have to withdraw from SNAP altogether.
In The Atlantic today, David Frum wrote that the bill for Trumpism is coming due. Although Trump promised in his first term to eliminate the national debt and in his second to balance the budget, maybe even financing a $2,000 check for every American taxpayer, the budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 clocked in at about $2 trillion, about $160 billion more than it was during former president Biden’s last year as president. Next year’s deficit will likely be even greater.
How we got to this point, Frum reminds us, is that the Republicans’ 2025 extension of their 2017 tax cuts will reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. Their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. That leaves a growing deficit that climbs to more than $4 trillion as the cost of servicing the debt grows.
Economist Justin Wolfers explained: “Washington has discovered a brilliant financial strategy. Cut benefits for people who need them, cut taxes for people who don’t, and borrow the difference from people who aren’t old enough to vote.”
Those numbers, Frum notes, don’t include the cost of Trump’s war on Iran. The administration acknowledges that fuel and munitions for that war have cost about $45 billion, but the real costs run far higher with the destruction, for example, of U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Department of Defense has asked for an additional $200 billion for the war, and Trump has asked for $1.5 trillion to fund the military in 2027, which Frum notes is up 44% from before the war on Iran.
In order to stay in power, Republicans are peddling what Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel recently called “fear porn.” Matt Gertz of Media Matters quoted Watters’s explanation: to engage non-MAGA voters, he said: “You have to say, these people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes, and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous, you know what we’re all about. And that’s really a choice.”
In September, Watters warned that “the Democrat party and its communist base are running against America” and “want to shatter the pillars of Western civilization.” He continued his dark fantasy: “They want to abolish the Senate, police, ICE, and of course the border. Some of them are even calling for reparations and rent control. Others have a little bit of a problem with whites, and a majority of Democrats don’t prefer capitalism. It’s like we’re fighting the Cold War here in our own country.”
Host Sean Hannity told viewers: “We can vote to build on the successes of President Trump, his first two years in office, or you can shred your Constitution, allow our country to be taken hostage by this new radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement and their far-left extremist candidates.” He called Democrats “completely insane.”
A company formed last month in Wyoming has been circulating in Texas phony leaflets and text messages pretending to be from a trans rights group. Addressed to the “student” of the household, the flyers claim to be a resource guide for transgender and LGBTQ+ youth. The flyers are deliberately inflammatory, purporting to give a roadmap to children for how to separate from their parents and replace them with other adults or organizations.
Right-wing groups are sharing the mailers and linking them to Democrats. A Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives called them “disgusting and evil” on social media and posted further: “The radical left is trying to brainwash Texan children and unravel the basic framework of our society.”
In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “the most vile political ad in Ohio history.” It features the biological mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, saying Acton is a liar for saying she lived in a tent as a child. In the ad, the woman tells Ohioans not to “let her become your governor.”
Acton, 60, has not seen her biological mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from the woman’s home after a grand jury indicted the woman’s second husband for raping Acton. The woman helped her husband escape custody and avoid trial until he died. Charles Hilu of the National Review reported that court records confirm Acton’s history, and noted that the impoverished family did, in fact, spend a winter living in a tent.
Acton’s brother replied to the ad, saying both of them had been abused, but she had received the worst of it as she tried to protect him. “Shame on Vivek,” he said.
While Vice President J.D. Vance defended Ramaswamy’s ad, others were appalled at his attempt to use her childhood trauma against her.
The Columbus Dispatch endorsed Amy Acton and called the ad “revolting.” MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, donated $500,000 to Acton, saying: “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight.”
New Jersey’s Republican former governor Chris Christie told Karen Tumulty and Dan Merica of the Washington Post: “The question for all Republicans is whether this type of attitude is what we want leading our party going forward. For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center. Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease that we should be seeking to cure.”
Today Ariana Baio of the Guardian reported that Neil Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, has voted for Democrat James Talarico rather than Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to be the next U.S. senator from Texas. Bush explained: “I have been a Republican for most of my life, and I still believe deeply in many traditional Republican principles. But character matters more than party affiliation. Our democracy depends on leaders who respect our institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability, and seek to unite rather than divide.”
Defiance.org, They threw us out while filming Trump’s corruption. We’re releasing the film anyway, Miles Taylor, right, Oct. 22, 2026. I spent the fall quietly filming a documentary about what Donald Trump has turned Washington into. One week before the election, you’re going to see all of it.The government ejected our film crew from the Washington Monument. It tells you everything about why we made this documentary.
A federal government with nothing to hide doesn’t just “toss out” a film crew from one of the most famous public places in the nation’s capital. Especially not when the filmmakers start pointing out the ways in which the president has betrayed the American people. That would seem suspicious, no?
Let me back up for a second. Next week — one week before the midterm elections — we’re releasing a documentary about Donald Trump and his enablers’ abuses of power. It’s called CORRUPTIONLAND. We’ve been working on it for a while. And in September, our film crew went up the Washington Monument to get something no other vantage point in America offers: a full 360-degree view of “the swamp” and what Trump has done to it since returning to office.
That’s when he ran into a roadblock. Last night on Jen Psaki’s show on MS NOW, I told part of the story.
But here’s what happened in full.
We arrived on an ordinary weekday and got tickets like everyone. To be clear, the Washington Monument permits cameras. Tourists and social-media influencers film up there every single day. So we brought in our handheld cameras, got waved through by the first set of guards, and cleared the physical security screening zone. Nobody raised an eyebrow. In fact, they specifically inspected our equipment and gave us the go-ahead.
Then we got to the top of the monument and started rolling. I spoke about how the corruption in Trump’s Washington was so blatant that you could see it everywhere, pointing through the little windows to the specific locations where the president has defaced the nation’s capital or engaged in corruption — from the torn-up reflecting pool to the Kennedy Center to the ground where he’s building a soaring arch in his own honor, dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial.
That’s when two National Park Service (NPS) staff approached and asked us to stop filming.
I calmly asked why. They said we weren’t permitted. I explained that what we were doing didn’t require a permit, and that we’d checked the NPS website in advance to be sure. They stepped away to confer, discussing the subject matter of our documentary. We resumed filming.
Then I walked around to another side and pointed out the mess that’s been made at the public golf course that Trump is ripping up and how Congress never gave him the authorization, to say nothing of the White House ballroom monstrosity that you could see from the other set of windows.
All the while, I could tell in my peripheral vision that the NPS staff were still huddling, nervously. Of course they were nervous. In Trump’s Washington, every federal agency has been politicized and every federal employee has been made to fear the president’s retribution. They’ve watched tens of thousands of their colleagues get fired or forced out merely on the suspicion that they are disloyal.
One of the NPS staff walked back over with the verdict.
“You need to leave.”
We tried to point out the absurdity, especially because other tourists had just emerged from the elevator, too, and were filming! With cameras not much different than our own. When it became clear the Park Service wouldn’t budget, we decided not to make a scene. After only a few minutes at the top of the Washington Monument, we were directed to depart the premises. In fact, they escorted us to the elevator, took us to the bottom, and made sure we walked out of the facility.
That’s the extent of the fear in Washington, D.C. today. Civil servants eject a documentary crew from a monument that belongs to the public, built to honor a man who gave up power voluntarily. Why? Evidently because the subject being discussed was a president who craves power — and uses it to instill fear in our government and across the nation.
By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve watched the Park Service get politicized under Trump. Earlier this year, NPS went after D.C. protesters who we’ve collaborated with to oppose the president’s corruption. In fact, the agency threatened to take down their signs and revoke their permits because they displayed posters about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. NPS said the posters were “obscene” and that another one posed a “threat,” until a federal judge intervened and ruled this summer that the signs were “well within the heartland of protected First Amendment speech” and permanently ordered the agency to stand down.
I’ll say this. The Trump administration can keep trying to bully and intimidate us all they want. But what they cannot do is stop this film from coming out.
There’s a very good reason it exists. This summer, I called my colleague Xander at DEFIANCE.org and said: we’re seeing three Watergate-level scandals a day, and then we forget them. People forget Trump fired the people who investigated him and are supposed to monitor public corruption… they forget about his kids investing in companies that then win Pentagon contracts… they forget about his arrests of journalists and prosecution of foes. There’s so much of it that none of it sticks.
But what Xander said did stick with me. He said all these stories are really one story. We’re being robbed, by a man who captured the federal government, in a million different ways at once.
So we decided to make that one story. And we did it without a studio or a news network or a billionaire backer — a film finished in a record sprint. As I write this, I’m still waiting on the final edit, partly because every single week there’s been new corruption related to what we filmed. Just this week, the president stood at a rally and told Marine families poisoned at Camp Lejeune that if his party wins, they’ll get their settlement money, and “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”
He’s making our case faster than we can film it.
The result is CORRUPTIONLAND, a 35-minute documentary that gets to the core of the rot in Trump’s Washington. And along with it, we’ll be releasing a map that tallies up the dollar value of that corruption. I’m gonna tell you right now, even I was blown away by the preliminary number, and I thought I’d seen it all.
We’re releasing this one week before the election for the obvious reason: Congress is one of the last guardrails to stop corruption, and voters need to wake up. Thankfully, many are. Corruption is the number one voting issue this election cycle, for the first time since polling began, and it’s animating people to get to the polls. Hopefully, YOU can use this film to stir even more people to action.
So, save these dates:
Monday, October 26, 8pm ET — THE VIRTUAL PREMIERE. This is for all DEFIANCE.org Members who helped make the documentary possible. Your link arrives in this inbox before Monday. The event will include special guests, people from the film, then the documentary itself, the night before anyone else sees it.
If you’re not a DEFIANCE.org Member, you can join today and be in the room with us Monday night.
P.S. DEFIANCE.org is a nonprofit “club for the courageous.” We literally exist to FIGHT the corruption you just read about. We announce a new effort every week to counter Trump’s abuses of power. That’s what your membership funds. If you haven’t yet, become a member today.DEFIANCE DAILY
In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tonight at 5 pm ET!TRACK THE TRUMP-EPSTEIN READING ROOM & BOOKMOBILE
The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room is in Detroit for one more day. If you’re in the area, make an effort to get there. You won’t be disappointed. RSVP at trumpepsteinreadingroom.com/detroit/.
If you missed yesterday’s event with U.S. Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed, Sen. Chris Murphy, and Rep. Maxwell Frost, check it out here:
Politico, DOJ indicts Virginia Democrat who led redistricting push on drug trafficking, money laundering charges, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Oct. 22, 2026. State Sen. L. Louise Lucas publicly bashed the White House while helping engineer Virginia’s ill-fated push earlier this year to draw a 10-1 map ahead of the November midterms.
The Department of Justice indicted L. Louise Lucas, a long-serving Virginia state Democratic lawmaker who publicly clashed with the White House amid its redistricting push, on five counts related to drug trafficking and money laundering that were unsealed Thursday.
Lucas, a powerful state senator who chairs the appropriations committee, helped engineer Virginia Democrats’ ill-fated push to gerrymander the House map ahead of the November midterms. While voters approved of the redrawn districts in a referendum in April, the state Supreme Court overturned the map in May, ruling that Democrats broke state law when they violated the proper procedure while rushing to get the measure in front of voters.
She was indicted, alongside family members and other associates, related to a cannabis business she helped start.
The indictment accused Lucas and her associates of steering proceeds from illicit cannabis sales to expand their business, directing marijuana licenses to partners and using her political influence to benefit her network. FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters in a Norfolk, Virginia, press conference Thursday that Lucas had “accumulated nearly $5 million in ill-gotten gains.”
The FBI raided Lucas’s office in May, which she cast as retribution for her efforts in Virginia’s redistricting process. Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I grew up under Jim Crow,” she said in a statement distributed by her lawyer Thursday. “I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them. I spent my life fighting back, and I’m not stopping now.”
In the press conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche fiercely pushed back against accusations that the case was motivated by President Donald Trump’s personal animus toward Lucas. Investigators began looking into the lawmaker “long before” Trump reentered the White House, he said.
“Don’t trust me,” Blanche said. “Read the indictment.”
Buying and selling cannabis for recreational use remains illegal in Virginia but will become legal next summer. Lucas will appear in federal court this afternoon.
The longtime Virginia senator is the latest White House foe to find herself under DOJ’s scrutiny. Last week, federal agents searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), part of an ongoing investigation into her immigration status.
Last year, Trump implored then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey — all bitter rivals — writing “we can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” And he’s pushed to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook from her place on the central bank, accusing her of committing mortgage fraud.
In a statement Thursday, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger said that Lucas “and her family deserve the opportunity to present their defense and speak to the allegations presented.”
But she railed against the DOJ’s decision to charge Lucas less than a month before the midterm elections in November.
Lucas herself is not on the ballot.
“The timing of this indictment undermines the U.S. Department of Justice’s previously longstanding policy of not taking legal actions — to include indictments or significant investigative steps — close to an election and sadly, this timing further erodes the trust the American people deserve to have in the Department of Justice,” Spanberger said.
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump’s BBC Lawsuit Nightmare Gets Worse As Judge Orders President To Testify, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 22, 2026. Trump tried to shake down the BBC with a defamation lawsuit, but the broadcaster has fought back at every turn, and now Trump must testify by December 11.
Donald Trump did this all to himself. Trump got angry when the BBC used footage of his 1/6 speech in a documentary and accused the British broadcaster of defaming him and harming his business.
In what has become a predictable pattern that Trump has used to shakedown other media companies, the president sued for $10 billion and claimed that his reputation and business had been damaged.
The president even got the lawsuit heard in Florida, but almost immediately the wheels began to come off. The BBC did something that CBS and ABC did not do.
The BBC refused to pay. The BBC also fought back.
The British broadcaster tried to subpoena Trump’s adult kids who were with him on 1/6. They were also granted access to Trump’s business records by the judge, only for the president to amend his lawsuit to remove the claim that his business had been harmed; thus, he did not have to turn over his business records.
The BBC has also tried to get the phone records for every phone that Trump used on 1/6 beyond the White House switchboard. The 1/6 Committee was limited to only White House phone records, which were incomplete.
What Trump expected to be another step in his media-bullying cash grab turned into a legal rock fight, and now a judge has ordered Trump to sit for a deposition by December 11.Trump Has Been Trying To Get Out Of Testifying
Trump has been trying to get out of testifying for months, which is odd behavior for someone who brought the lawsuit and claimed that he was defamed.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that the judge threatened Trump wth sanctions unless he testified:
“The court has admonished plaintiff for his lack of participation to no avail,” US Magistrate Judge Enjolique A. Lett said in a brief order in Miami. “Going forward, the court expects strict compliance with its order, the failure of which will lead to sanctions.”
Lett made the comment in response to a BBC motion to compel Trump to answer their questions in a deposition — which he has tried to postpone, including a session scheduled for Friday, “due to other matters of national importance.” The judge scheduled a hearing by Oct. 22 on the issue, according to the order.
The BBC wants former special counsel Jack Smith to testify. Trump is trying to block Smith’s testimony.
However, before the question of Smith’s testimony can be settled, the judge ordered Trump to be deposed by December 11.
The AP reported:
The order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett came as lawyers for the British broadcaster complained that Trump had delayed his appearance. Charles Tobin, the attorney for the BBC, said that with two months left in the discovery period, “we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff.”
…
Lett said Trump must sit for a deposition by Dec. 11, or face sanctions up to dismissal of his lawsuit -– unless the discovery period was extended past Dec. 18.
The lawsuit would never have happened if Trump hadn't filed it. There was no defamation. The BBC did not edit the footage they used or do anything defamatory. The lawsuit was part of Trump’s effort to rewrite history and erase his role in inciting the 1/6 attack.
Trump is drunk with delusion about his own power, but Trump has no power or authority over the BBC. The other media outlets paid up because they either needed the administration’s approval or feared retaliation.
The BBC has none of those concerns. Trump has no authority and can do nothing to the BBC, so the broadcaster can follow the First Amendment playbook can fight the president.
Trump is going to lose this lawsuit, and his deposition could be devastating if it ever becomes public.
The BBC is showing the world how to defeat Donald Trump.
New York Times, Why a Pillar of Christian Journalism is in Turmoil, Ruth Graham, Oct. 22, 2026. Former employees of Christianity Today say new leadership has been pushing back on independent journalism. About half of its staff members have left or been laid off over 14 months.
Last year, leaders of the evangelical publication Christianity Today summoned the entire staff to a hotel ballroom in the Chicago suburbs for a meeting about their future.
The publication’s chief operating officer, Nicole Massie Martin, opened her presentation with a Bible verse from the Old Testament about rejoicing even in dark times, “though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food.” Then Thomas Addington, the interim president, delivered a blunt message: Christianity Today’s reputation as a staid voice of intellectual centrist evangelicalism — embodied by its proximity to Wheaton College in Illinois — had to change.
Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears.
Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.
In interviews, a number of employees who have departed since the meeting in 2025 said that the changes at Christianity Today seemed to be about more than stabilizing its finances. Its new leaders, they believe, are abandoning the publication’s longtime commitment to independent journalism, a record that includes investigating accounts of misconduct by high-profile evangelicals
Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until last week, described its new leaders as being driven “by fear, by the kind of anxiety about reputational and financial loss that makes bold, interesting, principled journalism very difficult.”
Multiple journalists said that Ms. Martin and Mr. Addington have made attempts to discourage certain articles and lines of reporting based on feedback from their own social and professional circles. One reporter, who was granted anonymity because of concerns over the terms of his severance agreement, said he was instructed this year to slow down an investigation into a faith-based organization that had financial connections to Christianity Today.
“Every journalistic organization has debates about what content to prioritize,” Mr. Addington said. “C.T. is no different.” At the meeting in 2025, he said, he was using Wheaton and TikTok as “metaphors for where C.T. has been and where the media environment is taking us.” The outlet remains committed to independent journalism, he said.
Last week, the new editor in chief, Erik Petrik, took down an article that discussed evidence that the popular evangelical writer Elisabeth Elliot, who died in 2015, was bisexual. Edited and fact-checked over the course of weeks, the article disappeared within 12 hours of publication, after receiving backlash from conservatives online.
New York Times, From Kenya to Japan, Rush to Fix Security Flaw Takes Sites Briefly Offline, Lynsey Chutel, Amelia Nierenberg and Brian O. Otieno, Oct. 22, 2026. Governments and businesses around the world scrambled to prevent hackers from exploiting a vulnerability in PHP, a popular programming language
Japan’s prime minister. A hospital in Germany. Taxpayers in France. An I.T. firm in Kenya.
People’s online routines were disrupted around the globe on Wednesday and Thursday as governments and companies rushed to protect their websites, after security researchers found major flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.
Many took their websites down as an emergency precaution while they fixed the flaw, which was identified using artificial intelligence. A fix was quickly available, and software developers and tech departments from Helsinki to New York scrambled to apply it, meaning that in many cases the outages lasted less than a day.
But the flaw and the temporary shutdowns it provoked showed how far-reaching potential cyberattacks could be — and how deeply the internet has embedded itself into our lives.
Oct. 21
Top Headlines
Russian President Vladimir Putin With Poodle Trump (Hartmann Report Graphic)
Oct. 21, 2026. Trump is empowering Putin, abandoning Ukraine, and preparing to bargain with dictators over the future of the world. The Republicans who could stop him are doing nothing...Trump-Putin Collude To Release Kidnapped American As 'Humanitarian' Propaganda Stunt
A photo provided by the Moscow City Court showing Stephen James Hubbard in court in 2024 (Distributed by Associated Press).
News Roundups
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.
Oct. 21, 2026. Here are today’s headlines: The Wall Street Journal reports Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine and discussed it with Trump, despite both of their denials; Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff thanks Putin for diesel and calls him a humanitarian; Zelenskyy says he’d agree to peace deal freezing the current lines; Vance says nobody hates corruption more than Trump, the most corrupt individual ever in politics, while The New York Times exposes a $50 million job for Alina Habba before a billionaire’s pardon; Vance smears a protester asking for action on the Epstein files and rages about the Vivek Ramaswamy ad…scolding Republicans who got upset with the ad.Oct. 21, 2026. Donald Trump’s special envoy sat across from Vladimir Putin, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for the deportation of Ukrainian children, and told him, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” He said it in the same week a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller in the Kharkiv region. Then he thanked Putin for the diesel deal and talked about bringing more Russian fertilizer into the U.S. We should all be glad Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired teacher from Michigan, is finally coming home. But Trump himself tied his release to blocking the sanctions Congress passed.There’s more. The New York Times reports that a billionaire’s family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a deal worth more than $50 million, and weeks after she started, Trump pardoned him. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the briefing room into a swimming pool. Elon Musk now admits he “got carried away” with DOGE, as Republicans demand he testify under oath about throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network. And in North Carolina, Trump told veterans and military families exposed to Camp Lejeune’s poisoned water that “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: It Was Always Likely That Things Would Get Worse For Trump And The Rs As We Got Closer To Election Day. And They Have, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 21, 2026. In my posts over the last few days we’ve discussed how the late polling in the 2026 election was showing Trump dropping further and hitting new lows for the cycle. These polls also showed the generic ballot opening up and getting better for us. As we’ve discussed here it was always the likely scenario in a wave year that at the end voters would break to us and away from them. There is now a lot of data to suggest that is what is happening.and Andrew Egger, Oct. 21, 2026. The Ohio Republican crawls below the gutter. Trump and his cronies keep using slurs like they’re going out of style—which, to be fair, they are. .Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s October surprise was supposed to make voters question Democrat Amy Acton’s character. Instead, yesterday, a leak of his attack ad featuring her estranged mother blew up in his face.Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio isn’t the only red state where Republicans seem to be resorting to desperate tricks to salvage a race. In Texas, Ken Paxton and his supporters have been trying to turn transgender issues into a centerpiece of his race against Democrat James Talarico. Now they’re trying to whip up a new, artificial trans panic to make the sale.Elon Musk Scandals, Global Power Grabs
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute to the crowd at a conservative political rally in the United States -- a salute that Musk described as innocent.
Oct. 21, 2026. A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.More On Trump Foreign Policy Scandals
author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump’s former ambassador to the Netherlands, creates hatred for the U.S. everywhere.More On Billionairre, High Tech Tyrants
retired former FBI Assistant Director, Oct. 21, 2026. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account during Saturday’s rallies across the nation. We deserve answers.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
More On Trump Family Scandals, Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran
Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia. Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia. Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting
More On GOP Attack Ad On Ohio Child Rape Victim
right, Oct. 21, 2026. So, now J.D. Vance is officially on the record as: Defending Nazis marching in Ohio to incite violence against Haitian immigrants for eating their pets; Defending actual Nazis praising Hitler on Young Republican chat group platforms; Now defending Ramaswamy's attack ad against his opponent, a former child rape victim who he accused of lying.Special Reports: Venezuelan Earthquake Tragedy Reexamined
More Global News
Top Stories
Russian President Vladimir Putin With Poodle Trump (Hartmann Report Graphic)
The Hartmann Report, Opinion: The Greatest Betrayal in American History Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes, Thom Hartmann, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump is empowering Putin, abandoning Ukraine, and preparing to bargain with dictators over the future of the world. The Republicans who could stop him are doing nothing...
What the hell is going on in the Republican Party?
Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation?
Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate.
That came just three days after he spit on the grave of Lindsey Graham by signing an executive order waiving every operative section of the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that both houses of Congress had passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
Gone are the 500 percent tariffs on Russian goods, the secondary sanctions on Putin’s oil customers, and the requirement that the sanctions stay in place until Russia made peace on terms Ukraine accepted. All destroyed on a Friday night while Congress was out of town. And now he’s publicly, shamelessly defending it and essentially daring Republicans in Congress to do anything about it.
This all came a week after one of Trump’s roughly every-two-weeks-since-he-was-sworn-in phone calls with Putin, presumably to get his instructions on how to destroy American democracy, gut our government, and hand Europe over to the revived USSR that Putin fantasizes about.
Putin apparently ordered Trump to end diesel sanctions and thus send him billions of dollars to build more drones and glide bombs to kill more Ukrainian children, and Trump said, “Sir, yes sir!”
The Wall Street Journal noted that the same call was where Putin suggested the meeting with Trump and Xi and that a former Russian intelligence officer described it to the paper as a “new Yalta,” three strongmen dividing the planet into spheres of influence.
While Democrats and average Americans are furious, a tiny handful of Republicans have timidly objected.
Graham’s sister Darline, who now holds his Senate seat, says she doesn’t trust Putin and wouldn’t have waived a thing in the law. Ted Cruz called it a “mistake,” as if Trump had made a math error. Don Bacon said Trump is prolonging the war, although the reality is that he may have just handed Putin a victory this winter. Putin and the Russian media certainly think so.
The Australian billionaire Murdochs, through their papers the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, have objected: the Journal’s editorial board said that Trump had “stuck a shiv” in the back of Graham’s legacy, and the Post warned that a Yalta 2 summit could trigger a full-on Republican revolt that could even end in impeachment.
Which raises the most important question in America today: If Murdoch’s papers can speak the truth to the GOP out loud, can call for action, why can’t a single Republican leader in Congress find a similar ounce of spine?
Tom Nichols, a lifelong Republican and a professor emeritus at the Naval War College, wrote in The Atlantic this weekend that Trump has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation. The Lincoln Project, founded and run by Republicans, is saying the same thing. This should have nothing whatsoever to do with partisan politics.
We’re literally watching the plot of The Manchurian Candidate play out on the evening news, except that in Richard Condon’s story the asset gets stopped before the convention, and in ours he’s sitting in the Oval Office and systematically dismantling our country while handing Ukraine (and probably, soon, the Baltic states) to his master, Putin.
My father’s Republican Party believed that America was good and the USSR was a threat to both peace and democracy. Even the GOP in Reagan’s day, for all its sins, saw the Soviets and other autocrats worldwide for what they were.
The party of Mike Johnson and John Thune, however, appear to have decided that the fate and future of American and European democracy is simply negotiable, and that it’s just fine that Putin is now running our foreign policy.
Look at what the man they’re protecting right now, today, has already done to make America more like Russia.
Federal ICE/HSI agents raiding the home of a sitting member of Congress, an echo of Putin’s early years, three weeks before an election. Threatening election officials with imprisonment if they don’t do his bidding. He has masked, armed thugs terrorizing people and killing American citizens, just like Putin’s secret police.
Like Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam he hangs 40-foot banners with his face from federal buildings in DC (with our tax dollars) and is slapping his grotesque name on anything he can reach. And let’s not forget the threats against broadcasters’ licenses, the defiance of federal court orders, and the open contempt for the Hatch Act: is Trump freelancing as a wannabe dictator, or is Putin coaching him with those regular phone calls?
Putin illegally invaded Ukraine, in violation of international law and common decency. He has no legitimacy, and he was deeply in trouble as Ukraine had been taking down his ability to refine and sell oil. Trump has given him both legitimacy and an economic lifeline, and America got absolutely nothing out of it.
Nothing.
Except that we’ll now get to watch the rape and destruction of the physically largest democratic nation in Europe. Perhaps that gives Hegseth an erection and represents a “great new business opportunity” for Witkoff and Jared, but it should make every American blindingly furious.
This is how Trump’s master, Putin, runs his wars. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has documented torture by Russian forces that they call widespread and systematic.
Rape, they confirmed, was used as a weapon of torture in nearly every Russian detention center in occupied Ukraine that they examined. Both men, women, and children of both genders have been raped by Russian soldiers in occupied villages while their families were forced to listen from the next room: this is part of Putin’s instructions to his men. It’s official Russian policy.
The Ukrainians are terrified, as are many Americans who live and work in that country. Watch this interview with Phil Ittner, a seasoned, hardened professional war correspondent for decades who’s seen the worst of the worst around the world as he breaks down describing what’s happening in Kiev right now.
Ukraine has verified the names of more than 19,500 children kidnapped and shipped into Russia; Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab puts the real number closer to 35,000 in a country, Russia, where child pornography is not a crime.
The International Criminal Court — which Trump is trying to punish with sanctions right now — issued an arrest warrant for Putin’s abduction and exploitation of these Ukrainian children, but apparently that’s just fine with Trump and the Republicans in the House and Senate.
That’s the guy Donald Trump defers to, sucks up to, and wants to join in Shenzhen to redraw the map of the world.
That’s the monster JD Vance was holding up for admiration when he told a Turning Point crowd in April that cutting off weapons to Ukraine was one of the proudest moments of his vice presidency. It gives a whole new meaning to the word “vice.”
Meanwhile, writing the checks to finance Trump and his lickspittle Republicans is the richest man on Earth.
Elon Musk has put $366 million into this midterm cycle, $276 million of it in the last three months alone, all since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires buying judges and politicians. This is beyond gilded age corruption; it’s something entirely new in the American experience.
This is the same Elon Musk the Wall Street Journal reported has been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022. He once refused to turn on Starlink to prevent Ukraine from hitting Russia’s fleet. Who it now appears personally slowed down Starshield to prevent Ukraine from stopping Russia’s torment of Kiev.
Is this what the five Republicans on the Supreme Court intended when they handed down Citizens United? Justice John Paul Stevens — who’d served in the Navy during World War II — warned in his Citizens United dissent that the decision would’ve given Tokyo Rose’s propaganda broadcasts “free speech” protection; now it’s been extended to Putin and his online trolls.
Stevens’ clerks thought the 2010 reference to 1944 was dated. He was just early.
So, where the hell are the Republicans? The House isn’t scheduled to return until after the election, and the Senate is on vacation, too. Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune could call both bodies back into session tomorrow to impeach this deranged traitor to American values and history, but neither has lifted a finger.
Are they terrified? Or are they in on it with Putin and Trump?
Democrats are essentially powerless; they can give speeches and file bills that Republicans ignore, and write strongly worded letters, but that’s about it. Senator Richard Blumenthal — who co-wrote the Graham Act with Lindsey — was right when he said Trump’s waivers for Russia to sell its oil have nothing to do with national security and “everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.” But he has no power to stop any of this.
The only people in Washington with the constitutional power to stop this, right now, before the Shenzhen summit and before the next trainload of Ukrainian kids hits the Russian hinterlands and movie studios, are the Republicans who can impeach Trump in the House and convict and remove him from office in the Senate. Now.
Refusing to do so is today’s GOP spitting on the graves of every American who died at Belleau Wood, Omaha Beach, and the Chosin Reservoir so this country would never, ever bend her knee to a dictator.
They can keep calling themselves “Republicans” if they like, but they’ve forfeited the right to call themselves “patriots” or, arguably, even “Americans.”
My dad’s party — and the Republican statesmen of his day like Goldwater and Dirksen — would’ve been on a plane back to Washington the Friday night Trump killed those sanctions, and had an impeachment resolution on the floor by Monday morning.
Even Reagan, who stood in Berlin and told Gorbachev to “tear down that wall,” wouldn’t have recognized a Republican Speaker or Senate leader who let his president hand Moscow a billion-dollar diesel contract paid for with the blood of millions of Ukrainian civilians.
Call Republican legislators — and Johnson and Thune — at 202-224-3121 and demand they explain why they’re not taking this guy out of office the way genuinely patriotic Republicans did with Nixon back in the day.
Ask them if they’re standing with Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of America, or with Trump’s dear friends Putin, and Xi?
Then ask the same thing of your Republican state legislators, county commissioners, and city council members. If they stay in that party, they’re implicitly endorsing this historic betrayal of our nation.
Trump-Putin Collude To Release Kidnapped American As 'Humanitarian' Propaganda Stunt
A photo provided by the Moscow City Court showing Stephen James Hubbard in court in 2024 (Distributed by Associated Press).
New York Times, Calling Putin a ‘Humanitarian,’ Witkoff Thanks Him for Releasing an American, David E. Sanger, Kim Barker and Ivan Nechepurenko, Oct. 21, 2026. The move buys good will with President Trump while costing the President Vladimir V. Putin — who is wanted for war crimes — little.
Praising President Vladimir V. Putin as a “humanitarian,” the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday thanked the Russian leader in St. Petersburg for releasing an American held for years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.
The release came after President Trump made a direct appeal to Mr. Putin to let the 74-year-old teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, return to the United States. Russia had accused Mr. Hubbard, who was held for over four years, of being a Ukrainian mercenary.
“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Mr. Witkoff told Mr. Putin. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”
Mr. Putin, who started a war of aggression against Ukraine that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, is wanted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court. Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly expressed sympathies for strongmen and parroted Kremlin talking points, has long made clear his disdain for the I.C.C.
His envoy’s embrace of Mr. Putin on Wednesday capped a tumultuous 12 days in which Mr. Trump has repeatedly sided with Russia and sidelined Ukraine.
The American president has announced that the United States will buy Russian diesel fuel and suspend the imposition of new sanctions. Mr. Trump also called on Ukraine to replace President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Putin’s nemesis.
Ukraine said the United States had intermittently cut off intelligence sharing; limited its access to Starshield, the military version of the satellite internet service Starlink; and suspended delivery of its already limited supply of Patriot interceptors, the only defense Ukraine has against Russian ballistic missiles.
Mr. Witkoff, over repeated visits to Moscow, has raised eyebrows in Kyiv for his what critics call his at times fawning behavior toward Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump himself faced similar criticism for welcoming Mr. Putin to Alaska with a red carpet in the summer of 2025, ending years of diplomatic isolation for the Russian leader over the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Trump administration says it is trying to build a relationship with the Russian leader as it pursues negotiations to end the war.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that he had asked Mr. Putin last week to release Mr. Hubbard, who was “on his way back home and will soon be with his family.”
“The United States, out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return — an unprecedented situation for Russia,” the American president wrote on Truth Social. “There was no ‘swap’ necessary for this release.”
Turning over Mr. Hubbard, who was tortured, sometimes starved and placed in the general prison population in a country where he did not speak the language, came at little cost to Mr. Putin. But the move buys him good will with Mr. Trump, who is arguing that he alone has the relationship with Mr. Putin needed to get him to end the war.
Mr. Witkoff’s remarks came at the start of talks in St. Petersburg, where the U.S. envoy had come to discuss new variants of a proposed plan to end the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He told Mr. Putin he had “brought some papers” with “some ideas about the different elements of some sort of peace deal,” saying that the Russian leader could “read that at your leisure later.”
Mr. Trump had telegraphed that he had sought Mr. Hubbard’s release, talking to reporters about it on Tuesday, when the former teacher was still in captivity. But Mr. Trump didn’t mention that Mr. Hubbard was being held because Mr. Putin’s government had sought to take American prisoners for leverage.
As Mr. Putin and Mr. Witkoff were meeting, though, Russia’s security services announced the arrest of a German citizen on charges similar to Mr. Hubbard’s.
In recent days, as Mr. Hubbard was moved out of a penal colony and prepared for release, it became clear that his value to Mr. Putin had changed. He was now more valuable to the Russian leader as a symbol of the renewed relationship with the U.S. president than as a pawn in negotiations.
Mr. Hubbard’s health is fragile. The Trump administration has pushed for his release since learning of his case, making it a priority, lawyers for Mr. Hubbard said. He will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment.
Mr. Hubbard was essentially abducted by Russian soldiers from eastern Ukraine shortly after Russia invaded and accused of fighting for Ukraine. Russian sentencing documents said he was given the call signs, or nicknames, of “Samurai” and “Ninja,” and that he manned a checkpoint on a bridge over a river.
This was highly unlikely.
Mr. Hubbard, a Michigan native, was living in the city of Izium, near Kharkiv, after a peripatetic life, teaching English for years in Japan and moving for a time to Cyprus, where one of his sons lived, before settling down with a Ukrainian woman. After that relationship ended, Mr. Hubbard opted to stay in Ukraine.
He had just turned 70 when the Russians invaded. His son in Japan told him to keep his head down, but Mr. Hubbard did not seem to understand that the war had started, text messages between the two men showed. Those messages also showed no evidence that Mr. Hubbard had joined the Ukrainian military. He told his son that all was well. He gave daily updates, like when he went to church. He had a hard time buying food, but said once that he bought caviar “for nutrition.”
The Russians said they arrested him inside the home of an acquaintance in April 2022.
A still from video released by the Moscow City Court Press Service showing Stephen Hubbard at a hearing in the Russian capital in 2024.Credit...Moscow City Court Press Service
New York Times, Who Is Stephen James Hubbard, the American Released by Russia? Kim Barker and Lynsey Chutel, Oct. 21, 2026. Mr. Hubbard, above, shown during his frame-up in a Russian court, is a 74-year-old teacher, who was held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.
Russia on Wednesday released a 74-year-old American teacher after holding him as a prisoner for more than four years. He had been convicted of working for Ukraine as a mercenary, charges that the United States said were fabricated.
The teacher, Stephen James Hubbard, was the only American in Russia considered “wrongfully detained” by the State Department and the only one to have been captured in Ukraine during the war and taken to Russia. His release came after President Trump, who has been easing American sanctions on Moscow, appealed directly to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Here’s how Mr. Hubbard became an unlikely pawn in an international conflict.How did he end up in Ukraine?
Mr. Hubbard grew up in Big Rapids, a small Michigan city, with his mother and sister. As a young man, he enlisted in the Air Force and then the National Guard but did not stay long in either. His first marriage, at 20, fell apart, and his second marriage took him to Japan in the mid-1980s. There, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church. He became sympathetic toward Russia.
After his second marriage ended, Mr. Hubbard moved to Cyprus, where a son from his first marriage lived and where he fell in love with a Ukrainian woman. The couple moved to Izium, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014, where Mr. Hubbard taught English online.
Mr. Hubbard was a solitary man, family members said. He avoided email and social media, and he was suspicious of potential government surveillance. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Hubbard sent family members updates about his daily activities, which included searching for food and going to church. In text messages with a son of his who lives in Japan, he gave no indication that he had joined the Ukrainian military.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.How was he captured?
Russian forces captured Mr. Hubbard, then 70, just weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
The circumstances of his arrest are murky, but the Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had been arrested at the home of an acquaintance and that he had been manning a military checkpoint. The Russian authorities said that Mr. Hubbard had joined a regional territorial unit to defend Ukraine and that he received training, weapons, ammunition and $1,000 a month.
In October 2024, a Moscow court sentenced Mr. Hubbard to six years and 10 months in a penal colony on charges of serving as a mercenary in Ukraine. Russian state news agencies reported that he had pleaded guilty to the charges.Where was he held?
Mr. Hubbard was first held at a detention camp near the Russia-Ukraine border and later imprisoned in at least five different Russian detention centers. At times, his family had no idea where he was and the United States Embassy had no access to him. The New York Times pieced together accounts from fellow prisoners of war to trace where he had been held.
Unlike other Americans held in the Russian prison system, Mr. Hubbard, who spoke neither Ukrainian nor Russian, was kept in the general population, his lawyers said. Ukrainian prisoners of war who were held with Mr. Hubbard said that he had been repeatedly tortured because he was an American — beaten, forced to stand all day, given little food and poor medical care.New York Times,
In May 2025, Mr. Hubbard was allowed to call his son in Cyprus, Joseph Coleman. In an interview, Mr. Coleman said that he had spoken for about a minute with his father, who initially sounded like he was in good spirits.
“But then somewhere in the middle it turned and you could you could hear the frustration in his voice,” Mr. Coleman recalled. “You could hear maybe a slight lack of hope.”
Mr. Coleman, who is a Greek Orthodox priest, wrote a long letter to Mr. Putin in September, emphasizing his Orthodox faith and pleading for his father’s release.
“My father is not a man of violence,” Mr. Coleman wrote. “He is a teacher and a peace-loving man, and above all he is my father.”
Why was he released?
Mr. Putin announced his decision to release Mr. Hubbard during a meeting with Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday.
Russia released Mr. Hubbard unilaterally, rather than in a prisoner swap — suggesting that for Mr. Putin, the American prisoner’s value had changed from a pawn in negotiations to a symbol of his renewed relationship with Mr. Trump.
In the days before Mr. Hubbard’s release, relations between the White House and Ukraine had frayed, with Mr. Trump moving to buy Russian diesel, lifting sanctions on Moscow and pressuring Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries.
Mr. Hubbard, who is in fragile health, will be flown to a State Department facility in Texas for evaluation and treatment. His sister planned to travel to Texas to meet him. Mr. Coleman and another of Mr. Hubbard’s sons, the one who lives in Japan, also flew to the United States to be with their father.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How Low Can Vivek Go? Jim Swift and Andrew Egger, Oct. 21, 2026. The Ohio Republican, right, crawls below the gutter.
Trump and his cronies keep using slurs like they’re going out of style—which, to be fair, they are. On Monday in Kansas, Trump denounced news reports that he said portrayed Sen. Roger Marshall as “a Shylock-type guy.”
And yesterday, after Trump tussled in the Oval Office with reporter Andrew Feinberg of the Independent—calling him a “sick person” and saying “I actually think there’s something wrong with you”—a White House communications account described Feinberg as a “Mongoloid Moron.”
Trump, as he ages, is losing his last fragments of self-control, and his comms staffers are rotting their brains more every day in the bigoted fever swamps of right-wing social media. The slurs will continue until morale improves. Happy Wednesday.
News Roundups
Meidas Touch Network, Wednesday Afternoon Updates: Witkoff Salutes Putin, New Mexico Files Epstein Lawsuit, Vance Goes Full Pedo Protector, Brett Meiselas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Here are today’s headlines:
New Mexico’s AG sues Epstein’s lawyer and accountantThere’s a whole lot of important updates in this one, so buckle up.
The Starlink Cover Story Falls Apart
The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Musk ordered a slowdown of the military-grade Starlink system Ukraine relies on, capping speeds in a way that left some offensive and interceptor drones virtually useless. Musk and Trump have both been furious at Ukraine for striking Russian diesel refineries. Two people told the Journal that Musk and Trump discussed the decision on a call after it went public, and one said they talked before the throttling. After Zelensky warned Ukrainians could die, SpaceX called the White House looking for a shared story.
Now look at how many stories they’re telling:
So Rubio promised to fix something he says the government doesn’t control. Even Fox’s Peter Doocy admitted Musk “might have throttled it.” They’re all deflecting because the truth is impeachable.
Witkoff’s Love Letter to Putin
Steve Witkoff opened his meeting with Putin with “It’s so good to see you,” then said Trump is “grateful for your decision to remove export controls on Russian diesel.” Remember, the throttling was tied to anger over Ukraine hitting Russian diesel refineries. Trump seems totally OK with Ukraine bombing the Ukraine energy grid and civilians, though.
Putin claimed prices dropped 5 to 6%. Feeling that at the pump? Me neither. He said the first tanker would carry 40,000 tons once “the financial arrangements are in place,” meaning more sanctions relief. That’s roughly 300,000 barrels, a rounding error in a global market that burns many millions of barrels of diesel a day.
Then Witkoff told Putin, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” Putin returned the flattery and offered to mediate with Iran, citing Russia’s “trust-based relationship” with Tehran. The U.S. joined Netanyahu in a disastrous war, fuel prices surged, Trump cut a sanctions-relief deal with Putin, and now Putin wants to be the “peacemaker.”
Zelensky Would Accept a Freeze
Asked on Fox & Friends whether he’d accept a deal freezing current lines, with Ukraine keeping 75% or more of its territory, Zelensky said “Yes,” calling a freeze a real way to end the war.
Vance: Nobody Hates Corruption More Than Trump
In Cincinnati, Vance said, “There is no person who hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government more than Donald J. Trump,” and waved off critical stories as anonymous or “completely fraudulent.”
Well, now’s a good time to point you to this NYT bombshell published yesterday about former Trump lawyer Alina Habba…
Venezuelan billionaire banker Julio Herrera Velutini faced felony bribery charges, then pleaded to a misdemeanor in August 2025.
He hired Trump lawyer Christopher Kise, and his 27-year-old daughter gave $3.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Still no pardon.
The family then offered Alina Habba $10 million a year for four years plus bonuses to be general counsel of Concord Partners, a Florida company with no public profile set up in late October 2025. (A deal that would bring Habba $50 MILLION…)
Habba was a senior adviser to Pam Bondi at the time, with a DOJ office and a U.S. Marshals detail.
She started Jan. 1. Weeks later, Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon.
People familiar with the contract told the Times they believed Habba was hired to help with the pardon.
That’s A-OK with JD Vance. And that’s just the tip of the corruption iceberg.Vance Smears a Heckler, Defends Vivek
At a rally, a man behind Vance spiked his MAGA hat and yelled “You protected pedophiles!” before being hauled out. Vance’s response: the guy “has not washed his hair in about 3 months,” and “the people who haven’t washed their hair in 3 months are Democrats.” The guy was wearing a MAGA hat, by the way.
Asked about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Amy Acton’s mother, Vance said he was “a little bit disgusted”…by Republicans “whining” about it. That’s right. Vance wasn’t disgusted by the ad featuring Amy Acton’s abusive mother, who stayed with her husband who was indicted for raping Acton starting at 9 years old. Instead, who was mad at the the people who objected to it. “
“Politics is a tough business... Stop whining about an advertisement.”
-- JD Vance, pedo protector
New Mexico Goes After Epstein’s Enablers
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a federal lawsuit against Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn, accusing them of helping finance and conceal Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, including abuse at his Zorro Ranch. The suit seeks to block potential bequests of $50 million and $25 million from Epstein’s estate, and says Indyke received more than $16 million from Epstein between 2011 and 2019 and Kahn more than $10 million. Both have denied knowingly facilitating Epstein’s crimes. Torrez says a criminal investigation continues: “Jeffrey Epstein did not operate alone, and his death does not end the pursuit of accountability.”Trump Doesn’t Want to Be Filmed with BBC
In a new filing in his lawsuit against the BBC (Southern District of Florida), Trump’s lawyers say he can’t be deposed on video and accuse the BBC of failing to confer on a new date. Trump had agreed to sit on Oct. 16, then backed out, citing Iran, the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, and the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.” He found time to campaign in Georgia and attend a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, though.
Trump Is Radioactive
Three polls out this morning show Democrats leading by double digits on the generic ballot: CNN/SSRS at D+10 among registered voters, Verasight at D+12 among likely voters, and the final New York Times/Siena poll at D+11 among likely voters asked about their actual congressional candidates, 52% to 41%. Democrats lead women 56% to 37% and are even running neck and neck with men, 47% to 46%. As the Times’ Nate Cohn pointed out, no party has won the national vote by that kind of margin since Democrats did it in 2008. CNN also found Democrats up 15 among independents, with nearly six in 10 voters calling Trump a factor in their vote, two to one against him.
Trump’s approval sits at a record low 32% in CNN’s poll and 34% in NYT/Siena. As Jake Sherman noted, Clinton and Obama were both at 46% when they lost the House in 1994 and 2010. In the Times’ history of midterm-year approval, only Truman in 1946 (33%) was lower. Voters now trust Democrats over Republicans on nearly everything the Times asked about: health care by 20, cost of living by 15, gas prices by 14, corruption and AI by 11 each, foreign wars by 10, the economy by 8, and even immigration by 4. And the party of the working class? It’s 53% to 40%, with Democrats leading. That includes 78% of Black voters, 67% of voters 18 to 29, 61% of Hispanic voters, and 58% of people who didn’t vote in 2024. This is what a wave looks like.
Per AdImpact, Trump appeared in 47% of GOP ad airings in May and just 1% in October, while 21% of Democratic airings mention him. In a hilarious misstep, Minnesota Republican Eric Pratt’s campaign site accidentally published its own AI prompt, which noted, “The President is not popular” and asked the AI writing his policy platform to not mention him. Oops. He removed it after screenshots of the page went viral.Image
And Rep. Eric Burlison complained on Fox Business about the “hellscape that we’re living in.” Republicans control every branch. The hellscape is them.
Israel, Iran, and Oil
Netanyahu says Israel still intends to overthrow Iran’s regime, citing Trump’s pledge to “finish the job” together. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in the Financial Times that Iran seeks peace but is “fully prepared to defend ourselves.” UKMTO reported two tankers struck overnight, the Soyia near Al Faw, Iraq, and the Al Dasma in the Strait of Hormuz, with all crews safe. Brent is at $110.03. And we have new information on Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu. An Israeli Channel 16 poll found 77% said it made no difference.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, greets President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, far left, and fellow New York City real estate and golfing crony Steve Witkoff, next to Kushner, with both Kushner and Witkoff designated by Trump as U.S. special envoys to negotiate deals regarding Russia-Ukraine and Middle East matters, among others (Russian media pool photo by Sputnik). Chart below by New York Times.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Administration Praises Putin as “Humanitarian,” Republicans Demand Musk Investigation, Trump Seeks to Evict the Press, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Donald Trump’s special envoy sat across from Vladimir Putin, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for the deportation of Ukrainian children, and told him, “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.” He said it in the same week a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller in the Kharkiv region. Then he thanked Putin for the diesel deal and talked about bringing more Russian fertilizer into the U.S. We should all be glad Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired teacher from Michigan, is finally coming home. But Trump himself tied his release to blocking the sanctions Congress passed.
There’s more. The New York Times reports that a billionaire’s family gave Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, a deal worth more than $50 million, and weeks after she started, Trump pardoned him. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the briefing room into a swimming pool. Elon Musk now admits he “got carried away” with DOGE, as Republicans demand he testify under oath about throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network. And in North Carolina, Trump told veterans and military families exposed to Camp Lejeune’s poisoned water that “if we don’t win, there’s no money.”
This is why I do this work. My family is in Ukraine, living under the same bombs this administration keeps downplaying. That’s why I’m finishing a deep dive on Trump’s ties to Russia going back 50 years, and it’s coming soon. And on election night, I’ll be live from 6 PM to midnight Eastern on all platforms, with big guests.
None of this is possible without you. There’s no billionaire, corporation, or politician behind this newsletter, and as you can see, the people in power would rather the press not be in the room at all. If you want independent journalism that keeps asking the questions they don’t want asked, please become a paid subscriber today, and share this with someone who needs to read it.Subscribed
Let’s get into it.
Witkoff Calls Putin a “Humanitarian” as Russia Frees American Prisoner and Kremlin Warns Ukraine to Make “Necessary Decisions”
Trump envoy Steve Witkoff praised Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” during their meeting in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” Witkoff told Putin at the opening of the meeting. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.” It was Witkoff’s ninth meeting with Putin, held at an imperial palace outside St. Petersburg, and he again traveled without the career diplomats or intelligence officials who usually accompany such talks. According to accounts of the meeting, Witkoff thanked Putin on Trump’s behalf for the diesel deal and the two discussed expanding Russian fertilizer exports to the U.S. once the war ends. Russian state media reported that the first diesel shipment bound for the United States was dispatched on Wednesday.
Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 75-year-old retired American teacher imprisoned for four years, and Trump tied it to his decision to block sanctions. Hubbard, a Michigan man, was convicted in Russia of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine, charges he denies, and sentenced in 2024 to nearly seven years. Putin told Witkoff that Hubbard was already at the airport, and Witkoff told Putin, “because of you, he’s going home to his family.” Trump said the U.S. “was not required to give anything in return” and that “no ‘swap’ [was] necessary.” But he also said people who had called for sanctions on Russia had apologized, and that “if sanctions would have been placed, certainly those negotiations would have come to a complete and total halt.” Critics note the release followed a pattern of Moscow using prisoner releases to build goodwill with Witkoff.
The Kremlin signaled no change in its demands and warned that Ukraine must make “necessary decisions” or face a “worse” situation. According to Russian state media, Kremlin officials said progress toward peace is “theoretically possible,” but only if Ukraine’s leaders make the decisions Moscow wants. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would study the proposals Witkoff brought but that talks would take a long time. Russian officials also told Witkoff that a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping was “possible,” potentially at next month’s APEC summit in China, a format that would exclude Ukraine. Putin also offered to help resolve the conflict with Iran. Witkoff said he hoped to resume three-way talks involving Ukraine, but the Kremlin showed no new willingness to engage.
Zelenskyy said he won’t accept any deal crafted without Ukraine and that Starshield access remains “limited.” “Don’t talk about us without us,” Zelenskyy told Fox News, insisting that any resolution must involve direct talks between himself, Trump, and Putin and be approved by Ukraine’s parliament. He also opened the door to freezing the war along the current battle lines. Zelenskyy thanked the U.S. for restoring intelligence warnings of Russian missile strikes, calling them “very, very important for our people, for children, adults, civilians.” But he said Ukraine’s access to Starshield, the military version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, remains limited, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio is working to restore it. Witkoff is expected to return to Oslo after his visit to Russia for more talks with European officials.
Ukraine and Norway are racing to build their own ballistic missile defense as U.S. Patriot supplies run dry. Zelenskyy announced Wednesday that Ukraine and Norway are accelerating work on FREYJA, a European program to develop new capabilities to intercept ballistic missiles, with the first tests targeted for the end of this year. He met with Norway’s defense minister and the CEO of Kongsberg, which makes the NASAMS air defense system Ukraine already uses to protect its cities. Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point has developed an interceptor missile under the program designed to counter Russia’s Iskander-class missiles at a lower cost than U.S.-made Patriots. The push comes after CNN reported last week that Ukraine had completely run out of Patriot interceptors, amid reports the Pentagon was holding up deliveries. Zelenskyy said new Norwegian military aid packages could arrive as early as November.
A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal.
The family of a Venezuelan billionaire seeking a Trump pardon gave Alina Habba, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers, a deal worth more than $50 million, The New York Times reports. Banker Julio Herrera Velutini faced felony charges in a scheme to bribe Puerto Rico’s governor to fire a regulator investigating his bank, but struck an unusually lenient deal in August 2025 to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor campaign finance violation. He still wanted that charge wiped away, so he hired Christopher Kise, a lawyer from Trump’s personal legal team, and his 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, gave $3.5 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC. As of last fall, the pardon still hadn’t come. Then the family hired Habba, offering her $10 million a year for four years plus bonuses, guaranteeing her more than $50 million in total. She signed the deal while still serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
Weeks after Habba started the job, Trump granted Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. Habba’s new role was general counsel at Concord Partners, a Florida company Isabela Herrera set up in October 2025 that has no public profile and whose business remains unclear even to some people in the Herrera family’s business empire. Habba began working there on January 1, while also serving as a senior adviser at the Justice Department overseeing U.S. attorneys, with an office at the department and a U.S. Marshals protective detail. Soon after, Trump pardoned Herrera, along with former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez and a former FBI agent charged in the same case, shortly before they were set to be sentenced. People familiar with Habba’s contract told the Times they believed she was brought on to help secure the pardon and were surprised by the size of the payout. Career prosecutors had pushed for harsher sentences in the case.
Habba, the Justice Department, and the White House all deny she had anything to do with the pardon. “Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” Habba said in a statement. The Justice Department said she didn’t speak to anyone about a pardon, and a White House official said she had nothing to do with it. Habba declined to describe her work for Concord, and the Herrera family didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Times describes a growing “pardon industry” in Trump’s second term, in which wealthy defendants pay well-connected lawyers, fixers, and lobbyists hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for access. House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a report this summer on what they called Trump’s “pay-to-play clemency industry.”
The revelation comes as Habba is locked in an escalating feud with fellow Trump ally Ric Grenell over millions of dollars that came from Congo. Shortly after the pardon, Habba began dating Turkish investor Turhan Mildon, whom she married last month in a New York ceremony attended by Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and White House counsel Will Scharf. Habba has accused Grenell of diverting a nearly $6 million donation her husband intended for the Kennedy Center, which Grenell was running at the time, out of a $17.6 million transfer to a Texas defense firm, TX-AT. But according to the Times, documents Habba’s side first gave the White House redacted the sender’s name, and the White House later learned the money actually came from a bank account tied to the Congolese government. Mildon is an adviser to Congo’s president and holds a Congolese diplomatic passport, and Grenell once consulted for TX-AT, though he denies any role in the transfer and calls the accusations absurd. Scharf, who attended the couple’s wedding, is now leading the White House investigation.
Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House and Replace Briefing Room With a Swimming Pool
Trump has repeatedly pushed to kick reporters out of the White House and turn the press briefing room back into a swimming pool, The New York Times reports. According to three people familiar with the discussions, Trump urged then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt several times to move journalists out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, telling her in August it would be her “last legacy.” The proposal never moved forward before Leavitt stepped down on August 27. Trump has told aides he wants to restore the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt installed in 1933 for polio therapy, which Richard Nixon later covered over to make room for the press. On September 27, Trump posted images on Truth Social showing the briefing room labeled “Fake News” next to a gilded swimming pool labeled “FDR Pool.” The White House communications director said “all options remain on the table,” and that reporters would most likely be moved across the street to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Advisers who once talked Trump out of the idea have been replaced by allies urging him to punish the press. Trump floated evicting reporters in his first term, but senior aides repeatedly dismissed the idea as impractical and counterproductive. The Times reports that Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who often spends weekends with Trump at his golf clubs, has helped drive the swimming pool idea, even creating a foam board rendering of the briefing room as an in-ground pool. Senior officials say Pulte also brings foam boards highlighting potential targets for revenge prosecutions. Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s longtime lawyer, who pushed many of Trump’s lawsuits against news outlets, has also grown more influential. The Times notes that removing the press from the White House would be highly symbolic and difficult for future presidents to undo.
The push is part of a broader campaign against the press. In September, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House over coverage he called “fiction and lies,” and the administration revoked the credentials of more than 70 journalists. A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled last week that the ban violated the outlets’ First Amendment rights and ordered their passes restored, a ruling the administration is appealing. On October 9, the Justice Department sent letters demanding information from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News after the networks briefly halted pooled White House coverage in solidarity with CNN, in what people familiar with the effort described as an antitrust investigation. Earlier, FBI agents showed up at the homes of Times reporters with grand jury subpoenas after they reported on security concerns about Trump’s Qatar-donated Air Force One, subpoenas the Justice Department later withdrew after a judge’s rebuke. Trump has also sued ABC, CBS, and The Des Moines Register.
The report came as Trump lashed out at reporters again in the Oval Office, telling one, “You better be careful.” During the announcement of his new anti-fraud program, Trump threatened The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg after he asked why tipsters would get only a 1% commission, far less than federal whistleblower law typically provides. When Feinberg later began asking about Trump’s golf courses, Trump cut him off: “Quiet. Quiet! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” The White House’s official Rapid Response account then attacked Feinberg online using an ableist slur, and JD Vance called him an “imbecile journalist.” Trump has also turned on conservative outlets, attacking Fox News for “defending Dumocrats.” When a reporter asked him about France’s president blaming him for unrest there, Trump called it “fake news” and demanded to know who she worked for, then apologized once she said The Daily Wire, telling her, “The Daily Wire is good.”
Musk Says He “Got Carried Away” With DOGE as Republicans Demand Investigation Into His Ukraine Starlink Slowdown
Elon Musk admitted he “got carried away” during his time running DOGE. Speaking on the debut episode of biographer Walter Isaacson’s podcast, Musk said, “I think I had it going for too long,” and that he should have stayed “more in the background” and kept it to “a month or two.” Asked whether being close to the president was “seductive,” Musk said, “It was a little bit,” describing it as “kind of cool” to be in the Oval Office while “big momentous decisions are being made.” When Isaacson suggested he “seemed to get a bit too intoxicated by it” with “the chainsaws and all that,” Musk agreed: “Yeah, I think that’s true. I got carried away basically.” DOGE claimed $215 billion in savings, but firings, lost productivity, and rehiring reportedly cost taxpayers $135 billion in 2025 alone. Researchers writing in the medical journals Nature and The Lancet have projected that DOGE-driven cuts to foreign aid could lead to millions of deaths, including an estimated 163,500 children a year.
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick says Musk may have broken the law by throttling Ukraine’s military satellite network and is demanding an investigation. The call comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk personally ordered the slowdown of Starshield, the military version of Starlink, and may have discussed it with Trump beforehand. “If Musk ordered Starlink to be slowed down in Ukraine, this could be a violation of the law,” Fitzpatrick said on CNN. “We have to conduct an investigation. We must summon witnesses... place them under oath, and get to the bottom of the matter.” He added that “this is a very, very serious issue” that “cannot be swept under the rug.” Ukrainian officials have said the restrictions made it harder to counter Russian jet-powered Shahed drones.
The Journal’s report blows up the administration’s earlier explanations. Before the report, Trump said he hadn’t limited Ukraine’s access and didn’t believe Musk was responsible either. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the administration had “nothing to do with that,” claiming no one ordered the slowdown and that it “sort of happened.” Musk himself had posted that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” But according to the Journal, Musk ordered the cap himself, and SpaceX later called the White House seeking a unified message suggesting the two had coordinated in advance. Zelenskyy says Starshield access remains “limited.”
A growing number of Republicans now want answers. Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, called for a congressional investigation, saying, “Lives are at risk and lives are lost over these things.” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota also backed a probe, though he suggested it “may very well have been some sort of a technical glitch.” A bipartisan group of nine senators, including Republicans Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, and Lisa Murkowski, has already asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether the Defense Department or its contractors contributed to the disruption. “Any restrictions on these capabilities, particularly without advance notification, raise serious questions about the Department of Defense’s contractual oversight,” the senators wrote.
Trump Ties Camp Lejeune Payouts to GOP Midterm Wins, Ramaswamy Doubles Down on Acton Ad, and a Bush Breaks With the GOP
Trump told North Carolina voters that victims of Camp Lejeune’s contaminated water will only get paid if Republicans keep Congress. Speaking at a rally in Greenville, Trump said, “If we win the House and the Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible.” Then he added: “If we don’t win, there’s no money.” People who lived or worked at the North Carolina Marine Corps base from the 1950s to the 1980s were potentially exposed to contaminated drinking water linked to serious illnesses. As of September, the Justice Department had offered to settle just 3,637 of the 408,500 claims filed by victims, according to Roll Call. Trump’s comments effectively made compensation for veterans and military families conditional on how people vote.
Trump rallied for his handpicked North Carolina Senate candidate even after national Republicans pulled their money from the race. Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chair who boosted Trump’s 2020 stolen-election claims, is trailing Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s former governor. Senate Republicans’ top super PAC canceled tens of millions of dollars in ads for Whatley earlier this month, and Trump-linked groups have put in just over $2 million. Cooper had $12.4 million on hand heading into October, compared with Whatley’s $916,000. “I’m the one who got him into this,” Trump said with a nervous laugh. “I hope it works out.” Early voting data shows Democrats outpacing Republicans in the state, and at least six protesters were escorted out of the rally.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign admitted it produced the video featuring Amy Acton’s estranged mother and said it will spend $4 million promoting it. In the video, Donna Arthur calls Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor, “a liar” and suggests she has mental health issues. Arthur lost custody of her children after Acton’s stepfather was indicted in 1978 for raping Acton when she was 12, and Acton hasn’t seen her mother since that day in court. After initially refusing to say who made the ad, Ramaswamy’s campaign confirmed late Tuesday it was theirs and said Arthur was not paid. The ad drew bipartisan condemnation, with Ramaswamy’s former Republican primary rival Casey Putsch calling it “pretty damn low” and saying he’ll now vote for Acton. More than 676,000 Ohioans have already cast ballots in the race.
Neil Bush, son of one president and brother of another, broke with the Republican Party and voted for Democrat James Talarico in Texas. “I have been a Republican for most of my life,” Bush wrote on Facebook. “But character matters more than party affiliation.” He said he was “deeply troubled” by Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton, citing Paxton’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which Bush called “an affront to our democratic institutions.” Bush went further, writing that Trump “and those who have enabled him have done enormous damage to the Republican Party.” He praised Talarico for his “integrity, civility, humility, and a willingness to listen,” adding that Talarico’s faith is “a source of humility” rather than “a political weapon.”
Trump refused to commit to endorsing JD Vance for president in 2028, with Vance standing right behind him. At an Oval Office event Tuesday, a reporter noted that Vance had said in an interview he believed Trump would endorse him if he runs. Trump cut the question off, calling Vance “a very talented person” but saying, “I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.” Vance quickly agreed, saying, “No, sir, I said that too.” “It’s early, very early right now,” Trump added. “We have to get through the midterms, see how it goes.” Vance is currently the frontrunner in polling for the 2028 Republican nomination.
Other news:
Democratic attorneys general and secretaries of state are ramping up plans to counter any attempt by the Trump administration to interfere in the midterms. Twenty-four Democratic attorneys general have been coordinating with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and civic groups through weekly Zoom calls and in-person “tabletop” exercises in Milwaukee and Detroit to prepare for scenarios like ICE agents showing up near polling places or federal officials seizing ballots. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, who leads the effort, called the Justice Department and the administration “the biggest adversary to a smooth election.” The DOJ has sued 30 states for unredacted voter lists and has lost 26 of the cases courts have ruled on, and it has announced plans to deploy 1,000 poll monitors, compared with 289 in 2022. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his biggest worry is that the administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote.” The Brennan Center’s Larry Norden said the administration’s efforts have “consistently lost” for 18 months, but that “we must continue to be prepared.”
New York congressional candidate Brad Lander says he was detained by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank while harvesting olives with rabbis and volunteers. “We were simply harvesting olives in a grove,” Lander posted on X, sharing a photo of himself on a bus. “The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.” Lander, the former New York City comptroller, was in the West Bank with a coalition helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives amid a surge in settler violence. Last week, settlers injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine and targeted European diplomats in separate attacks, and a UN report found more than 900 Palestinians were injured in settler attacks in the first half of the year. Lander is the Democratic nominee in New York’s deep-blue 10th District after defeating Rep. Dan Goldman in a primary dominated by debate over Israel. The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
French President Emmanuel Macron blasted foreign leaders, including Trump, for exploiting France’s riots with “unacceptable” and “stupid” claims. Trump has used the cost-of-living unrest in France to rally his supporters, claiming without evidence that Muslim migrants are responsible and urging Macron to “close your borders.” Macron said there has been “foreign manipulation of information” since the riots, including AI-generated images of scenes that never happened and false claims that France was “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists.” Asked if he was referring to Trump, Macron replied, “Among others.” He accused leaders “on the other side of the Atlantic” in the middle of election campaigns of “using our country for their own political campaigns.” Macron spoke in Qatar at the end of a Gulf tour where he secured additional diesel supplies to ease France’s energy crisis.
Thousands of California state workers went on strike Wednesday in a first-ever walkout by their union. SEIU Local 1000, which represents about 100,000 public employees including nurses and teachers, has been at an impasse with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration since its contract expired June 30. The union is pushing for a 20% raise over three years, higher state health care contributions, and flexible telework, after Newsom required state workers to be in the office four days a week. The union has accused the state of bargaining in bad faith, including by saying there was “no money” for additional pay. The state tried to block the strike, arguing it endangered public safety, but a labor board designated about 5,000 essential workers who will stay on the job. Newsom’s office has not commented on the work stoppage.
The United Nations says the world must cut carbon emissions by nearly a fifth in four years to avoid a disastrous overshoot of climate targets. The UN Environment Programme said the “window has closed” on limiting warming to 1.5C, but that cutting emissions 18% by 2030 and 45% by 2035 could keep the overshoot as small as possible. Under current policies, temperatures are on track to rise 2.8C above preindustrial levels, endangering life across much of the planet. “The herculean effort was not made,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “We procrastinated, and now we are saying this window has closed.” The report notes that the United States, the world’s second-biggest emitter, has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement under Trump, and that other countries’ pledges have weakened in response. Experts say renewable energy is growing faster than expected, but political leadership is “dragging its feet.”
An off-duty Con Edison worker was shot and killed on the George Washington Bridge in what police suspect was a road rage incident. The 46-year-old was driving on the bridge Tuesday night when a gunman fired a single shot through his car’s rear window, striking him in the shoulder, according to law enforcement sources. Video shows the victim nearly crashing into another driver on an entrance ramp shortly before the shooting. His car then struck a median, while the suspect drove away. The shooting shut down the bridge for hours, and all lanes reopened around 1 a.m. Police have not released a description of the gunman, who remains at large.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: It Was Always Likely That Things Would Get Worse For Trump And The Rs As We Got Closer To Election Day. And They Have, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 21, 2026. In my posts over the last few days we’ve discussed how the late polling in the 2026 election was showing Trump dropping further and hitting new lows for the cycle. These polls also showed the generic ballot opening up and getting better for us. As we’ve discussed here it was always the likely scenario in a wave year that at the end voters would break to us and away from them. There is now a lot of data to suggest that is what is happening.
Two high-quality polls released this morning also found this encouraging dynamic manifesting in their data. First up - the venerable New York Times poll:Here’s the NYT summary of the poll:
President Trump’s approval rating hit a new low just a few weeks before the midterm elections, driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices, according to a new national poll from The New York Times and Siena University.
Just 36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Mr. Trump’s performance, while 59 percent said that they disapproved. That is his lowest approval rating recorded in any Times/Siena poll. More than two-thirds of independent voters said that they disapproved of the way he has handled his job as president.
Likely voters said that they preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts in the final Times/Siena national poll before the midterm elections, a slight improvement for Democrats since last month. The metric is widely seen as a strong indicator of political momentum.
The national political environment is bleak for Republicans. Americans broadly disapprove of economic conditions under the Trump administration, with three-quarters rating the economy as fair or poor. A majority of voters blame Mr. Trump for the decline: 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iran and nearly three-quarters disapprove of his handling of gas prices, which are above $4 a gallon.
A remarkably similar summary to what we read in the NBC, ABC/WaPo, and Reuters/Ipsos poll summaries over the past few days. Everybody is seeing the same thing, and interpreting it the same way.
The second poll released this morning comes from G.Elliot Morris/Strength In Numbers/Verasight. It also finds movement away from them, and towards us, just like in all these other polls:
Here’s the summary of the poll:
Generic ballot: Democrats lead 52–41 among registered voters (D+10 unrounded), and 54–42 among likely voters (D+12). These are both new highs for our poll, and higher even than the Democratic Party’s margin in generic ballot polls ahead of the 2018 and 2006 midterm elections.
Job approval: 34% approve / 62% disapprove (net −28 before rounding), essentially unchanged from September’s record low of −30. 50% strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, vs 16% who strongly approve.
Immigration: Trump’s net approval on immigration fell five points to −16, a new low. Border security (−6) and deportations (−18) are also at new lows, too. Eight of 13 issues are at series lows.
Party trust: Democrats lead on 10 of 13 issues and tie Republicans on deportations. They are now ahead on immigration (D+2), and the GOP’s edge on border security is down to seven points from 22 in May 2025. Democrats lead by 13 on voters’ own most important problem (47–35), tying May for their widest margin in our tracker.
The midterms as a referendum: 40% say their vote for Congress will mostly be a statement against Trump, vs 21% who say it will be a statement of support. When given a binary choice 58% want a Congress that acts as a check on the president, vs 25% who want one that helps him pass his agenda.
Top problem: 39% name prices and inflation the single most important problem facing the country, tying May for the highest share we have recorded. 63% put it in their top three.
Impeachment: 51% think there are grounds for Congress to impeach Trump, vs 39% who don’t. 50% would support the next House impeaching him in 2027, while 38% would oppose it.
A lot of wows and holy shits in this data.Subscribed
Here are the generic ballots we’ve seen this past week. +11 Dem means the likelihood of a big blue wave is far greater today:
We also must note now that the visualization of the data we’ve seen over the past week consistently looks like this:
And this:
The signs of Trump’s titanic failure and historic repudiation are all around us. The inflation numbers last week were horrific, with one measure, PPI, coming in more than double the forecasts. Job growth has slowed. Interest rates of all kinds have soared. His failed war in the Middle East is spreading and getting worse. Diesel is at an all time high. Fertilizer, gas and utility costs have surged. Health care costs are going up for all Americans, and care will be harder to get for everyone too from the barbaric cuts Trump and his allies made to our health care system. Global markets view him and his economic team as over their head buffoons. He is bending the knee to Putin. Consumer sentiment in the University of Michigan survey is the lowest in over 65 years:
We cannot forget for one moment that this huge rejection of Trump and Trumpism has come despite their enormous ad spend, his ferocious campaigning, the proven power of the right-wing eco-chamber, and their growing control over legacy and social media. Even with all these structural advantages we are competing deep into red states and red places we’ve struggled to win in for decades. Objectively it is astonishing where we are now; astonishing of how much of an opportunity we have now to take power away from them all across the country; astonishing how Trump has failed to heed the warnings and course correct over the past twelves months; astonishing at what an unbelievable f-uck up and failure he is, how impotent, weak, desperate and pathetic he has become.
But he we are now, my friends. With the election we all wanted to have emerging right in front of us. So we need to work doubly hard now, dig a little deeper to support our candidates and party committees, drive the early vote to make the big blue wave even bigger, and …….
Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight The Fuckery That Is Already Here
Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET to talk about all this. Register here. There are three things you can do today in addition to supporting our intrepid candidates and state parties:
Dr. Amy Acton, Democratic nominee and current front-runner in polls to become next governor of Ohio.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ramaswamy’s October Surprise Blows Up in His Face, Jim Swift, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s October surprise was supposed to make voters question Democrat Amy Acton’s character. Instead, yesterday, a leak of his attack ad featuring her estranged mother blew up in his face.
By Tuesday evening, after the ad had been roundly condemned—including by other Ohio Republicans—Ramaswamy’s response was to announce he would spend $4 million promoting the ad.
The video surfaced Monday night. DJ Byrnes, author of the Ohio politics newsletter The Rooster, published a recording featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. Byrnes said a voter saw it in a poll, recorded it, and sent it his way.
For hours, it was unclear who was behind the ad. V-PAC, the super PAC supporting Ramaswamy, right, said it wasn’t involved. Ramaswamy’s campaign initially defended the attack without answering directly if it was responsible.
In the minute-long video, Arthur calls Acton a liar, disputes her account of growing up homeless, and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”
What the ad doesn’t say is why Acton and Arthur are estranged. Acton says she last saw her mother when she was 12. Her stepfather had been charged with raping her. She and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody. Her mother and stepfather then skipped town while out on bond, according to a 2019 account in the Youngstown Vindicator.
National Review obtained court records corroborating key parts of Acton’s account, including the criminal proceedings against her stepfather. Her account of abuse and homelessness was also public in 2019, years before she ran for governor.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, has corroborated his sister’s account. He says he also suffered abuse in the household, and that their mother stayed married to the man who raped Acton until his death.
Even Ramaswamy’s copartisans were quick to denounce the ad. After learning of the circumstances behind Acton’s estrangement from Arthur, Dan Hauser, a strategist for Sen. Mike Lee, deleted his post sharing the video and apologized for sharing it. Lydia Mihalik, the director of Ohio’s Department of Development under Gov. Mike DeWine, condemned the ad.
Others questioned what, exactly, the campaign thought it would accomplish. Former Republican communications consultant Liz Mair said the ad made her sympathetic to Acton, while Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham wondered how anyone expected it not to backfire. Chris Christie reposted footage, shared by a Democratic strategist, of himself roasting Ramaswamy on the presidential debate stage. Nikki Haley weighed in, too: “Not laughing. Just seeing what we tried to tell everyone back then. He’s a bad guy.”
Acton’s campaign responded to the Arthur video Tuesday afternoon with an ad featuring Stearn. “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” he says, describing how his older sister—at “11 and 12 years old”—tried to protect him.
By Tuesday evening, the backlash had followed Ramaswamy into a town hall in Westerville. Shortly after he took the stage, a heckler confronted him about Acton’s mother. The man was escorted out.
Afterward, speaking to reporters, Ramaswamy finally admitted that his campaign had made the ad. He argued that voters should listen to people who know Acton “well,” including her mother, and said he had never met Arthur and that she wasn’t paid for the ad.
Ramaswamy also said he wished the campaign were about substantive issues, accused Acton of spreading lies about him and his family, and decried her decision not to debate him.
Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign told Axios that the ad performed well in testing with persuadable voters. The outlet reported that the resulting $4 million statewide push began streaming Tuesday night.
Campaign manager Jonathan Ewing called it a “campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton.”
This is not the first time Ramaswamy has had a problem involving a campaign ad and a child abuser. I reported just a week ago that Ramaswamy’s property-tax ad featured Vernon Edwards, a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty to two counts of gross sexual imposition involving his niece, who was younger than 13.
The campaign pleaded ignorance. “The man has been removed from the ad,” spokesman Evan Machan told me. It also deleted an earlier social-media video showing Ramaswamy shaking Edwards’s hand and complimenting his patriotic shirt. But the ad featuring Edwards ran during the Browns victory over the Ravens, after the campaign had promised to remove him from it.
Ramaswamy’s campaign’s callousness, mendacity, and shoddy staff work would be a liability in any race. But it seems especially likely to hurt him in an environment where Republicans already have a problem with a nagging child sexual abuse scandal.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Manufacturing Trans Panic, Andrew Egger, right, Oct. 21, 2026. Ohio isn’t the only red state where Republicans seem to be resorting to desperate tricks to salvage a race. In Texas, Ken Paxton and his supporters have been trying to turn transgender issues into a centerpiece of his race against Democrat James Talarico. Now they’re trying to whip up a new, artificial trans panic to make the sale.
Last week, GOP voters across the state started receiving strange—and, to them, enraging—text messages. “New school year?” one read. “Here’s your complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” The text then linked to the “Back to School Toolkit” of the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), a state trans advocacy group.
These confusing “back-to-school” texts—which arrived long after the start of the school year and mysteriously seemed to land mostly in Republican inboxes—caused an immediate outcry, with conservative influencers going viral denouncing them across social media. But TENT denied sending the texts at all.
The texts, it turns out, were only the prelude. This week, a more extensive and expensive campaign unfolded along similar lines. This time, Texas voters—again, primarily Republicans—received mailers at home, purportedly from an organization called the “Texas Transgender Student Union”—an organization incorporated last month in Wyoming, with no physical or online presence save the mailers themselves. Again, the mailers linked repeatedly to resources on TENT’s website, as well as to the American Civil Liberties Union.
While the faux TENT text messages simply reminded voters that trans advocacy groups exist, the mailers went much further, containing reams of language seemingly designed to confirm conservatives’ worst fears about such groups’ intended aims.
TENT’s actual Back to School Toolkit focuses on legal resources for trans students in navigating Texas’s increasingly trans-hostile laws, reminding them what sorts of activities and activism state law does and doesn’t restrict. It also has educational resources for students and their parents who want to protect themselves from Texas conservatives’ increasingly militant view that a child presenting as trans is prima facie evidence of child abuse, and how families might deal with, for instance, having Child Protective Services called in against them.
But the mailer that circulated this week presented a very different worldview, one in line with the common Republican belief that the chief aim of these organizations is to lure trans children away from their families. It contains sections on “What to do if your parents don’t support you” and “What if I want to be emancipated?”
“Even if your family doesn’t accept you as you are,” the mailer reads, “groups like this are ready to become your found family.”
In a statement to The Bulwark, TENT strongly denied any association with either the earlier texts or the mailers. “TENT did not author, authorize, approve, or distribute these materials. Any and all materials are not affiliated with our organization and are impersonations.” The group declined to comment on the experience of being turned into an electoral scarecrow apparently by Republicans, citing their need as a nonprofit to refrain from commenting on partisan political activity. They also—understandably, but perhaps unwisely—largely scrubbed their website, meaning that their own resources can today only be accessed through internet archives.
This has only made it easier, even as it’s become clear that the mailers were impersonations, for conservative activists to argue that the mailers’ contents are broadly similar to TENT’s own advocacy materials. But, again, the opposite is true. You can still read an archived version of TENT’s “back to school toolkit” yourself. Far from being a roadmap and encouragement for trans Texas students to escape their families, the “family resources” section of TENT’s toolkit is entirely focused on helping “families navigate heightened state scrutiny, especially as state agencies have been weaponized against supportive parents and guardians of [trans] youth.”
All this is entirely in keeping with Texas Republicans’ unbelievable smear campaign against Talarico, which has darkly twisted his past enthusiastic advocacy for trans students.
The GOP messaging apparatus has repeatedly insinuated—and sometimes outright stated—that “Talafreako” has a pedophilic fetish for trans youth. In lurid GOP-funded ads, an AI model of Talarico in a dress sings about how he wants to change “the gender of all of your offspring,” or an AI Talarico in scrubs prepares to perform a sex-change surgery on a little girl. On the campaign trail, JD Vance returns again and again to the same line: “A guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history.”
Republicans would like it if Trump were popular and successful, and they could just run on that. Since he isn’t, they’d like for their threadbare old warnings that Democrats are all communists in disguise would scare voters back to their side. But that doesn’t appear to be working either. For Texas Republicans, this is the Hail Mary play: Insist that Talarico and trans organizations are working hard to steal your children from your home and subject them to “transgender mutilization,” all in furtherance of their own dark sexual urges. It probably won’t work. But that doesn’t make it any less contemptible.
Brendan Hartnett contributed reporting.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Senate candidate ABDUL EL-SAYED to discuss his admiration for Barack Obama, the shortcomings of the Obama presidency, and the lessons he hopes to carry into the Senate.QUICK HITS
WILL VANCE GET THE ROSE?: Vice President JD Vance wants Republicans to see him as Donald Trump’s heir apparent, and lately he’s been discussing the possibility more. “I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028,” he told journalist Mark Halperin on Monday, adding that “I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”
Trump doesn’t seem so sure. Asked to weigh in on the vice president’s prediction yesterday—with Vance standing right behind him—the president begged off. “He’s a very talented person and he’s a very good person,” Trump said, “but we’ve literally—I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.”
“No sir,” Vance quickly replied. “I said that, too.”
“Who would believe that?” Trump went on. “I don’t talk about it with him, he doesn’t talk—it’s early, very early right now. We have to get through the midterms. We’ll see how it goes.”
TAKING THE OIL: Another can’t-miss report on Trumpian corruption this week from ProPublica. Yesterday, the publication obtained the 18-page strategic partnership agreement governing the United States’ new imperial access to Venezuela’s oil reserves:
The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.
One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries.
The Trump administration is taking a 35 [percent] stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement.
The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise.
New York Times, Trump Approval Hits New Low Two Weeks Before Midterms, Poll Finds, Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik, Oct. 21, 2026. Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional district, a New York Times/Siena poll found.
President Trump’s approval rating hit a new low just a few weeks before the midterm elections, driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices, according to a new national poll from The New York Times and Siena University.
Just 36 percent of likely voters said that they approved of Mr. Trump’s performance, while 59 percent said that they disapproved. That is his lowest approval rating recorded in any Times/Siena poll. More than two-thirds of independent voters said that they disapproved of the way he has handled his job as president.
Likely voters said that they preferred Democratic candidates over Republicans by 11 percentage points in their congressional districts in the final Times/Siena national poll before the midterm elections, a slight improvement for Democrats since last month. The metric is widely seen as a strong indicator of political momentum.
The national political environment is bleak for Republicans. Americans broadly disapprove of economic conditions under the Trump administration, with three-quarters rating the economy as fair or poor. A majority of voters blame Mr. Trump for the decline: 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the cost of living, 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iran and nearly three-quarters disapprove of his handling of gas prices, which are above $4 a gallon.
But Democrats still face serious challenges, particularly as they seek to win control of the Senate. To do so they are trying to flip seats in Republican-leaning states including Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Ohio, which Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2024. Other polls show that Democrats and Republicans are locked in tight races in several key Senate contests.
[Follow all of the latest polls heading into November’s elections.]
Still, the deep economic frustration has even broken into the coalition that elected Mr. Trump to his second term. Over the past year, Democrats have improved their standing among men, young voters and Hispanic voters — winning back some voters in those groups who helped propel Mr. Trump to victory two years ago.
Paul Gettings, a Republican who lost his job running a logistics company in June, said that he supported Mr. Trump in 2024 but plans to back Democrats this year. He cited frustration with high gas prices, the war in Iran and what he sees as harsh immigration enforcement in Simi Valley, Calif., where he lives.
“I’m very disillusioned with the Republican Party and how they can continue to support Trump,” said Mr. Gettings, 62, who is unemployed. “He’s turned into a politician just like the rest of them and it’s a lot of empty promises.”
Among all registered voters, including those who are less likely to vote, Mr. Trump’s approval rating was even worse, with 34 percent approving of his job performance. Mr. Trump built his 2016 and 2024 wins partly on the strength of his support among white voters without a college degree, but the poll found that group is about evenly split in its approval of his job, with 48 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving.
[See all of the latest polls measuring President Trump’s approval rating.]
As views of Republicans have declined, public perceptions of Democrats have grown increasingly positive over the last two years on an array of measures.
Elon Musk Scandals, Global Power Grabs
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one descended from pro-Nazi forbears in Canada who emigrated to South Africa to live in its white-run apartheid system, deliver a Nazi-style salute to the crowd at a conservative political rally in the United States -- a salute that Musk described as innocent.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Oct. 20, 2026 [Order Came From Musk!!!?!!], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Oct. 21, 2026. A blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal tonight by Alexander Ward, Natalie Andrews, and Josh Dawsey says that it was billionaire Elon Musk who ordered Space X to slow down its service in Ukraine, rendering some drones that stopped incoming missiles and others aimed at Russian targets useless.
The reporters say it is unclear if Musk operated without input from White House officials. Some of their sources say he did; others say he coordinated with multiple senior officials, including Trump.
According to Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to try to dismiss the slowdown as a business decision: “We haven’t pulled anything back. There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to. And that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions, but nothing’s changed from our view. We haven’t made any directives or anything like that.” He added: “[W]e wish the Ukrainians, obviously, success.”
After the slowdown caused a public uproar, the Wall Street Journal reporters write, representatives from SpaceX, the parent company of Starlink, called the White House to coordinate messaging to say that Starlink and the administration had agreed to the slowdown ahead of time.
Musk’s decision to change the course of a war with “a seeming flick of a switch,” taking it upon himself, with or without the complicity of White House officials, to reverse the foreign policy of the United States of America for the benefit of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is a stunning assumption of power reminiscent of Revolutionary War general Benedict Arnold’s weakening of the Americans’ defenses and draining of supplies at the strategic fort at West Point to enable the British to capture it before he was discovered and defected to the British Army.
Another lens through which to see this story is the apparent eagerness of White House officials to turn Musk into a scapegoat for a decision they were happy to endorse until it blew up in their faces.
A New York Times story by Tyler Pager suggests a different leak from the White House. Pager relates that billionaire Venezuelan banker Julio Herrera Velutini wanted a presidential pardon. His family hired Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who at the time was working at the Justice Department, as general counsel at a company, Concord Partners, that was launched by Herrera’s daughter, has no public profile and whose business is unclear. Habba’s contract is worth more than $50 million over four years. Just weeks after she began to work for Concord Partners, Trump granted Herrera a full pardon.
Habba denied having any role in the pardon and refused to describe her work for Concord Partners, but Pager reports that “[p]eople familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”
Thomas Frank at Politico received a recording of a speech Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave today at a private conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which he said the Trump administration plans to shift responsibility for disaster management to the states.
Hamilton’s speech built on an internal memo from October 15, which Frank also covered, that said the administration seeks to turn disaster response over to local and state government, thereby “reducing federal dependency.” “Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said today.
Today Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that sources have told them that Trump wants to move the press out of the White House and that Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has pushed to go after Trump’s political opponents for mortgage fraud, is one of those pushing the idea of restoring the press briefing room to its original form as a swimming pool. Another is Boris Epshteyn, the lawyer who has pushed the lawsuits the president has launched against journalists.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the pool installed because swimming helped strengthen his muscles, weakened by polio. President Richard Nixon had it covered over and turned into a briefing room to accommodate the growing White House Press Corps. Haberman and Swan note that forcing the press out of the White House would be “highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.”
These four stories, just from today, encapsulate the administration’s betrayal of U.S. national security, its corruption, and its disregard for the welfare of Americans. It’s not a great record to run on, and the leaks from the administration show that at least some insiders are aware of how unpopular and dangerous that record is.
And so, Trump is pulling out all the stops to keep Democrats from winning control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
In what appears to be a transparent attempt to shore up wavering support from a constituency that until recently was one of his most loyal, Trump announced yesterday that the Agriculture Department would provide $8 billion to help farmers slammed by the high cost of diesel. Kevin Draper of the New York Times reported that rates of payment will be announced next month, and the money will come no sooner than late November or early December, well after the election.
Trump announced the prospective payments at an event for Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose reelection campaign is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton. Meredith Lee Hill and Grace Yarrow of Politico report that Marshall had asked Trump for the program. Republicans like Marshall are hoping Trump’s announcement will help stop the flow of voters away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats in the farm states. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, whose reelection is uncertain given the strength of his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke, said: “This will go a long way to making sure the folks that feed us have it a bit easier when they most need it.”
But Trump officials told Hill and Yarrow that the fund Trump intends to use for the payments—a taxpayer-funded account in the Department of Agriculture—doesn’t have enough money in it to make the payments. Either Congress will have to add more to it, or the administration will have to take the money from a different program.
Top agricultural groups say farmers need at least $50 billion to make up for the impact of tariffs, disasters caused by weather, and the high cost of fuel and fertilizer caused by the war on Iran.
Trump told the Kansas audience at the announcement that if they reelect Marshall, he will also allow year-round sales of gasoline containing 15% ethanol, a big deal for corn growers. But, he added, “if Adam Hamilton is in, I’m not doing it.”
Still, Democrats are not letting the White House change the subject from its betrayal of Ukraine. This morning, Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) posted a video, saying he had just gotten off a phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and a number of other representatives and senators.
“I was just appalled by what I learned,” he said. “The president said that Starlink—Starshield—has been throttled so that the Ukrainians can no longer intercept most of the Russian drones that are wreaking havoc at schools and hospitals and civilian centers. He said that they are completely out of missile interceptors. And make no mistake: that’s our fault.
“More significantly, that’s the fault of Donald Trump, who has now shown his hand as an ally of Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk. We can’t really get straight answers about whether it’s Elon or Donald Trump, but at the end of the day, because they throttled Starlink, Ukrainians are dying.
“In the call, I made the point to some of my colleagues, which is, it’s time to accept that Donald Trump is rooting for a Russian victory here. And that the Congress needs to step up and actually pass veto-proof legislation. Enough dilly-dallying with the secretary of state in the Oval Office. We need to step up and pass veto-proof legislation that will provide assistance, military aid, and access to Starlink for the Ukrainians. That’s the only way this is gonna get done, and it needs to get done now.
“Ukrainians are dying, and Putin will win this if Donald Trump has his way,” Himes said, “[W]e’re going to act as a Congress and override this president’s desire to see Vladimir Putin win.”
New York Times, SpaceX and Tesla Explore Merger to Create a De Facto Elon Inc., Ryan Mac and Jack Ewing, Oct. 21, 2026. A deal would consolidate Elon Musk’s holdings in rockets, cars and artificial intelligence into a company worth well over $3 trillion.
Elon Musk has taken a big step toward creating Elon Inc.
The world’s richest person said on Tuesday that SpaceX and Tesla were exploring a merger, which would consolidate his interests in rockets, electric cars and artificial intelligence into a multitrillion-dollar behemoth.
Mr. Musk is both the chief executive and the largest shareholder of both companies. During an earnings call for SpaceX, he said that the boards of the rocket maker and the electric car manufacturer had formed special committees of independent directors to consider a merger.
“Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” he said. But as a conflicted party, who could essentially decide the terms of the deal, he will not be in on the discussions, he added.
Mr. Musk’s statements were the clearest sign that he is exploring whether to create a technology giant that could be worth some $3.5 trillion given the companies’ current market values. Since SpaceX held its initial public offering in June, its executives have publicly flirted with the idea of combining Mr. Musk’s two crown jewels.
The idea of a merger has garnered support not only from Mr. Musk, but also from his legions of fans and investors, who see synergies in software development and hardware manufacturing between SpaceX, which encompasses rockets, A.I. models and the Starlink satellite internet service, and Tesla, which makes cars, self-driving technology and robots.
But a consolidation of Mr. Musk’s business empire has also raised concerns from some lawmakers and critics, who believe that the world’s richest person, whose net worth has recently hovered around $1 trillion, has already amassed too much power.
Mr. Musk, Tesla and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
SpaceX’s stock jumped 8 percent in premarket trading on Wednesday, while Tesla’s gained about 1 percent.
Tesla reports its latest quarterly earnings on Wednesday, after the close of trading in U.S. markets. Mr. Musk will probably face more questions about the possible merger on a call with analysts.
Beyond sharing a chief executive, Tesla and SpaceX have deep connections. Mr. Musk has moved money and workers between companies, and the carmaker has sold hundreds of millions of dollars in batteries and vehicles to the rocket maker, according to financial filings. Tesla invested in xAI, the A.I. company that merged with SpaceX this year, and Tesla and SpaceX plan to produce A.I. chips together at a joint factory called Terafab.
Micah Walter-Range, an analyst for VettaFi Space Index, a stock index that tracks commercial space companies, called a merger between SpaceX and Tesla “an intriguing concept.”
“It’s not hard to see why a vertically integrated company seems attractive,” he said. “Tesla robots linked by Starlink to xAI data centers for control and A.I. model training purposes would give SpaceX an end-to-end advantage that nobody else could replicate quickly.”
Last week, during a launch event for Tesla’s new Roadster, Mr. Musk looked on as a vehicle deployed thrusters under its chassis that lifted the car over a row of other Tesla vehicles, including a Semi truck. The car did a flip as it passed overhead.
Mr. Musk said SpaceX engineers had worked on the Tesla product. The demonstration showed “what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world best rocket company,” he noted.
More On Trump Foreign Policy Scandals
Wayne Madsen Report, Analysis: Pressure growing for Canada to expel U.S. ambassador Pete Hoekstra, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 21, 2026. Trump’s former ambassador to the Netherlands, creates hatred for the U.S. everywhere.
In the wake of Albertans overwhelmingly rejecting an American-backed referendum on secession from Canada, attention in Canada is shifting to a popular demand to have the Canadian government declare persona non grata (PNG) Donald Trump’s ambassador in Ottawa, the irascible Pete Hoesktra. Critics of the U.S. ambassador cite his repeated outlandish interference in Canadian domestic politics. The PNG move comes amid Trump’s repeated demand that Canada become the 51st state along with his insulting suggesting that after concluding his Hitlerite “Canschluss,” Canada could keep its national anthem as a “state anthem.”
A petition calling for the expulsion of Hoesktra is gaining steam. As of October 21, 2026, the petition has attracted more than 275,000 signatures and has parliamentary sponsorship. The petition, initiated on July 21 by Calgary resident Leanne Walker, includes several valid points:
Hoekstra admitted knowledge of an American political technology company called 10xVotes. However, he denied knolwedge of its involvement in the Alberta secession referendum vote.
There is also a second parliamentary petition demanding Hoekstra’s expulsion. Petition e-7124, sponsored by then=New Democratic Party Quebec MP Alexandre Boulerice, collected 27,103 signatures before closing June 25, 2026. It requested a formal review of Hoekstra's conduct and possible recall.
The popular petition does not compel Carney's government to expel Hoekstra, although a formally presented parliamentary petition requires a government response.
Hoekstra dismissed the petition campaign in an August interview, saying that he only answers to Donald Trump. The petition campaign is more than an isolated protest. It is a parliamentary petition campaign with hundreds of thousands of supporters. The PNG campaign is centered on Canadian sovereignty and allegations of American involvement with Alberta, and more recently, Quebec separatists (as indicated by the collage below).
As one of the Trump administration’s more rabid supporters, Hoekstra has not only been linked to the pro-U.S. statehood Alberta Prosperity Project, but to similar organizations in other provinces. These include the Saskatchewan Prosperity Project, led by Brad Williams, and the British Columbia Prosperity Project, organized by Peter Letourneux, and which advocates joining Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Yukon in a possible new country that would be amenable to U.S. statehood.
If expelled from Canada, Hoesktra would join several other infamous American ambassadors who have been formally declared persona non grata. These include Vincent de Roulet, declared persona non grata in 1973 by the Jamaican government of Prime Minister Michael Manley amid accusations of improper interference in Jamaican affairs (a personal anecdote: de Roulet did not ingratiate himself with Jamaicans when he complained that locals were only entering the U.S. embassy lobby to use the rest rooms); Philip Goldberg, expelled in 2008 by Bolivian President Evo Morales for supporting opposition forces and conspiring against his government; and Patrick Duddy, expelled in 2008 by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in solidarity with Bolivia and amid charges of U.S. interference in Venezuelan domestic politics (including support for the secession of oil-rich Zulia state); and Heather Hodges, expelled in 2011 by President Rafael Correa over a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable concerning Ecuadorian police corruption.
Hoekstra may justifiably follow in the ignoble footsteps of past U.S. ambassadors who were expelled over their misdeeds.
More On Billionairre, High Tech Tyrants
Lincoln Square Media Opinion: ‘No Kings’ Means You, Too, Mark Zuckerberg, Frank Figliuzz, right, retired former FBI Assistant Director, Oct. 21, 2026. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account during Saturday’s rallies across the nation. We deserve answers.
Millions of Americans took to the streets Saturday for No Kings Day, a pro-democracy mobilization against the concern that a single, unitary authority seeks to control our freedoms.
Just as the rallies reached their peak, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reached in and proved their point. The movement’s most vital communication channel suddenly vanished. Meta temporarily shut down the official No Kings Instagram account, along with the pages of several key organizers and leaders. For hours, during the most critical window of the mobilization, the digital heartbeat of the protest went dark, leaving organizers locked out and fueling immediate fears of political censorship.
The fallout was swift, and the explanation from Silicon Valley was frustratingly familiar. Tech giants like Meta operate with the power of sovereign royalty, yet when their systems disrupt core constitutional activities, they retreat behind the shield of technical glitches. This incident exposes a dangerous vulnerability in our public square: the automated suppression of legitimate political speech during a highly volatile election year.
Meta’s initial response was a brief, hollow apology about algorithms. Company spokesperson Andy Stone stated on X (not even a Meta platform) that an automated trigger designed to catch accounts posting, sharing, or commenting at unusually high frequencies, had been pulled “in error.”
It took a full 24 hours for Meta to offer a more granular, detailed explanation. On Sunday, Stone clarified that engineering teams found the restriction was triggered not by outgoing posts, but by the account’s intense “reading” behavior, which network security systems mistakenly flagged as an automated Claude AI tool that might be scraping data. Humans blaming an automated system they created, for wrongly perceiving the presence of an AI tool created by humans, which ultimately suppressed the freedom of humans.
This delayed explanation was met with deep skepticism by the No Kings leadership. The group rejected the idea that a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure could simply mistake the highly publicized, verified accounts of a massive civil movement for a nefarious bot. Denouncing the disruption as an unacceptable failure of civic responsibility, No Kings leadership issued a strict ultimatum, demanding a fully transparent, comprehensive explanation by Wednesday night. They argue that the public deserves to know exactly what parameters triggered the ban, why human content moderators failed to intervene immediately, and what safeguards are being implemented to prevent a recurrence before Election Day.
The digital blackout of constitutionally-protected activity caught lawmakers’ attention. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) aggressively criticized the platform’s failure. In a public post, Murphy pointed out the absurdity of the situation, noting that Meta pulled down the preeminent organizing page on the single biggest day of these protests, providing zero real-time explanation while keeping users locked out for the entire afternoon. Murphy later suggested that if the incident wasn’t deliberate malevolence, it was a profound indictment of a company failing to prepare for predictable, major moments of political action.
Murphy is right. Meta’s failure could have been a moronic mistake, but that’s the point. Zuckerberg is left with only two avenues of explanation – either he’s blindly ceded leadership of Meta to mechanized systems, or he purposefully decided to suppress political activity. While the latter would be more troubling than the former, the two options are effectively the same – Meta acted like a king on No Kings Day.
Historically, Meta has been inconsistent in its treatment of political activity. In that inconsistency, often the result of trial-and-error attempts to get it right, it’s become the digital version of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. For years, the platform has bounced between being criticized for letting malicious political traffic spread completely unfettered, and being blasted for heavy-handed, automated over-enforcement that crushes legitimate speech. During global protest movements, Meta has allowed organizing tools to remain active during high-volume foreign and domestic civil rights rallies. Yet, it’s also been criticized for failing to curb coordinated nefarious looking behavior and hate speech connected to violence.
During U.S. election cycles, Meta seems to rely on automated defenses to intercept large foreign bot networks and malicious state-sponsored traffic. But Zuckerberg faced intense scrutiny for being slow to suspend accounts that drive dangerous political conspiracies. Even in the most forgiving view of Meta’s mistakes, its reliance on automation to address human behaviors appears to have undermined human oversight of that automation.
A fact-based analysis suggests that the No Kings Day blackout could genuinely have been the innocent result of rigid defense systems. Tech platforms deploy aggressive, high-volume behavioral triggers to stop automated scraping and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. When thousands of users interact with a page simultaneously, or when managers rapidly refresh administrative dashboards to respond to a fast-moving crisis, security architecture can misinterpret the surge as bot activity.
Claims of algorithmic innocence shouldn’t equate to absolution. Meta isn’t helpless. It possesses the technical capacity to override these automated safety nets for high-profile events. The company regularly implements heightened electronic monitoring during major events like the FIFA World Cup, national elections, or corporate rollouts to ensure high-traffic accounts do not face automated blocks. The fact that Meta failed to apply similar proactive overrides for a heavily-promoted, nationwide voting drive points to systemic negligence at best, or willful blindness at worst.
Zuckerberg’s way too cozy relationship with the Trump regime, coupled with the fact the fact that the No Kings movement directly opposes Trump, only serves to fuel public perceptions that what happened on Saturday might have been purposeful. That’s another mistake of Zuckerberg’s own doing.
When Silicon Valley ignores the people who use its products, it does so at its own peril. Increasingly Meta and its counterparts seem more intent on preserving themselves than serving the public. During this high-stakes election season, an unannounced four-hour digital media blackout as organizers and rally participants attempted to communicate, was an unacceptable suppression of constitutionally-protected freedoms. Like millions of Americans, I had No Kings Day on my calendar. Are we to believe that Zuckerberg did not?
Meta must become hyper-aware of the political calendar. Algorithmic security systems must be paired with human oversight capable of instantly reviewing and reversing automated errors targeting legitimate political organizers. If platforms insist on controlling the primary infrastructure of modern American political discourse, they must bear the responsibility of protecting those communications.
Until Meta provides the transparency and remedies organizers demanded by Wednesday night, suspicion will rightfully remain that the systems built to protect our information ecosystem are instead silencing the voices of democracy. “No Kings” means you too Mr. Zuckerberg.
Frank Figliuzzi, right, hosts The Frank Figliuzzi Show on Lincoln Square. He is an FBI Assistant Director (retired); 25-year veteran Special Agent; and author of the national bestseller, The FBI Way, and Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.
Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting
New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal, Tyler Pager, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.
Julio Herrera Velutini really wanted a pardon.
A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Mr. Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record.
So Mr. Herrera deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.
Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.
Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.ImageAlina Habba in the Oval Office last March. A former personal lawyer for President Trump, she went on to work in his Justice Department.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.
Ms. Habba denied any role in the pardon.
“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a statement.
Ms. Habba was a special government employee at the time, which allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.
She declined to discuss her work for Concord.
Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.
A White House official said that Ms. Habba had nothing to do with the pardon and that the administration follows a pardon review process that includes the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.
Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.
For Ms. Habba, the job from the Herrera family came at a pivotal point in her life and career.
She resigned in December 2025 as U.S. attorney in New Jersey after a panel of federal judges ruled that her appointment by Mr. Trump had been carried out unlawfully. Her second marriage was also falling apart.
The arrangement with the Herreras provided her with a new level of financial security. She also found new love. Shortly after the pardon was issued, Ms. Habba started dating Turhan Mildon, a Turkish investor.
They were married last month in a lavish ceremony in New York. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel.
The couple is now engaged in high-profile feud with Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump ally. Ms. Habba has accused Mr. Grenell of misallocating a donation from her husband to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Grenell was running at the time. Mr. Grenell has denied her accusations, calling them absurd.
Ms. Habba brought those accusations directly to Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Scharf to investigate them. The Times has previously reported that the investigation centers on a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company.
Mr. Herrera, who also has Italian citizenship, is a member of the Herrera family, a banking, real estate and fashion dynasty that dates back to the 14th century. The family owns estates and castles in Caracas, Venezuela; the Canary Islands; Spain; and Germany.
Mr. Herrera founded a bank based in Puerto Rico in 2008.
In August 2022, he was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera all pleaded not guilty to felony charges.
Mr. Kise, Mr. Herrera’s lawyer, helped negotiate a deal with the Justice Department under which Mr. Herrera pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Ms. Vázquez and the former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for harsher sentences.
All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.
In July, Banvelca, the Herreras’ family office since 1781, announced that Ms. Herrera, a member of the eighth generation and the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, was assuming leadership of the company. Neither the news release nor her bio on the company’s website makes any mention of Concord Partners, the vehicle employing Ms. Habba, who now goes by Mrs. Mildon.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
New York Times, Ahead of Midterms, Justice Kagan Says Rulings Have Intensified Polarization, Ann E. Marimow, Oct. 21, 2026 (print ed.). The justice said during a discussion that recent Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, gerrymandering and campaign finance have deepened America’s divides.
Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for a series of election-related decisions in recent years that she said have led to more polarization and a dysfunctional democracy.
Justice Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, delivered the sharp critique two weeks before hotly contested midterm elections and in front of an ideologically mixed crowd of law students and professors. In a wide-ranging discussion, she pointed to the court’s rulings that have loosened restrictions on campaign funding, cleared the way for partisan voting maps and undermined landmark voting rights protections.
“In all these areas, the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works” and has created “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”
The justice’s remarks came during a conversation at Catholic University’s law school with Prof. J. Joel Alicea, who was a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a conservative.
While Justice Kagan has issued strongly worded dissents in individual election-related cases, her remarks on Tuesday amounted to a global critique of how a series of choices by the court’s majority have affected democracy in the United States. Taken together, she said, the rulings have deepened political divisions and made the country’s electoral system work less well.
Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, for instance, when the court in 2019 closed the door on federal litigation challenging voting maps aimed at achieving political ends. As a result, she said, “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom” to draw voting maps that advantage either Democrats or Republicans in a way that “is very destructive of our democracy.”
Similarly, she said the court’s decisions to ease campaign finance rules have left loopholes that have allowed a massive infusion of political contributions into elections.
“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”
Justice Kagan spoke as the court’s new term has begun and ahead of midterm contests that will determine control of Congress, and could require the Supreme Court to intervene in post-election challenges. Election-related litigation has already been filed across the country, with both political parties anticipating the possibility of voter intimidation and the seizure of ballots.
In the coming months, the justices will also hear arguments in high-profile cases involving the legality of bans on semiautomatic rifles, religious rights and President Trump’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.
Even as the court has moved to the right with the addition of three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, Justice Kagan, a nominee of President Barack Obama, has at times found compromise with her colleagues selected by Republican presidents.
Before joining the bench in 2010, she was the dean of Harvard Law School, where she was known for building coalitions and recruiting conservative faculty members.
On Tuesday, Justice Kagan was the first justice who was nominated by a Democratic president and is a non-Catholic to take part in the annual event sponsored by the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. She is the fifth justice to participate.
She went over the allotted hour for the event and seemed eager to offer a polite takedown of originalism, the theory embraced by conservative justices that the Constitution should be interpreted based on its public meaning at the time it was adopted.
“They were writing the Constitution for the ages. They were writing the Constitution, knowing that there would be change in the world,” she said.
“The whole project” of originalism, she added, “is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”
More On Trump Family Scandals, Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.
This publication has delved into the espionage activities of a number of members of the Trump family, ranging from Donald Trump, Sr.’s longtime questionable links to Soviet and Russian intelligence during the Cold War and post-Cold War; Fred Trump. Sr.’s ties to Nazi German and Fascist Italian intelligence before and during World War II; and the paternal grandfather, Fred (Friedrich) Trump’s espionage at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel — location of the I.S. Navy’s transceiver radio unit — on behalf of the German Kaiser during World War I.
One Trump who has evaded suspicion is Donald Trump’s professorial uncle, Dr. John G. Trump. The president has often praised his uncle, a longtime professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using him as a benchmark of high intelligence and genetic superiority.
Trump often cites his uncle to claim "good genes" or "much better blood," a common feature of Nazi theories of racial superiority, stating during campaigns and public speeches that his uncle's academic pedigree proves his own natural intelligence. Trump has highlighted John Trump’s scientific background—including his work with high-voltage X-ray cancer treatments and radar development during World War II.
This month, Trump was presented with his uncle’s original 1983 National Medal of Science award. The occasion was the so-called Golden Age of American Innovation Summit held at the Trump-commandeered and renamed “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”
Trump has often inflated the curriculum vitae of his uncle. In July 2025, Trump told a story claiming that his uncle taught the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) at MIT. This was chronologically impossible, as John Trump died in 1985—a decade before Kaczynski was identified—and MIT records confirmed Kaczynski never attended the university. Trump has often misstated his uncle's academic credentials — claiming degrees in nuclear, chemical, and mathematics, when, in fact, his degrees were in electrical engineering and physics.
Trump has also briefly mentioned that his uncle was among the first to see Nikola Tesla’s highly-valued papers after the scientist’s death in 1943. On January 7, 1943: Tesla died at age 86 in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. At the time, Tesla’s innovative notebooks and papers were highly sought after by not only the U.S. government but by Nazi intelligence units operating in and around New York City. Fred Trump, Sr., who had been affiliated with both the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Queens and, later, the Nazi-led German American Bund, served as an important conduit between the Bund and German spies.
It is well known that Fred Trump was so ardently pro-German, he spoke only German in his house and with his German friends. Whether this camaraderie extended to his brother at MIT is sketchy but they did share one thing: their father, Fred Trump, also known as Friedrich, had been doing everything possible to regain the trust of Kaiser Wilhelm’s government after having been banished from Germany by a Bavarian royal decree issued in February 1905. The banishment was due to Friedrich’s failure to register his emigration to North America as a teenager in 1885 and his evasion of mandatory military service. Friedrich left Germany to strike it rich in the United States, which he did by starting hotels, restaurants, and whorehouses during the California and Yukon gold rushes. Friedrich and his wife, Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents, were never happy being Americans but longed for their German homeland. Friedrich’s dream of returning to Germany was never realized as he died from the Spanish flu on May 30, 1918, at the age of 49.
Although the focus on the Trump family has been on Fred, Sr, and his son Donald, relatively little attention has been paid to Friedrich’s other son, Dr. John Trump.
Upon Tesla’s death, federal authorities, acting through the Office of Alien Property Custodian, took control of Tesla's belongings, including technical papers, drawings, and equipment. This occurred despite Tesla having been a naturalized American citizen since 1891. It remains perplexing that the federal government asked Dr. Trump, the son of a pro-German hotel manager and bartender at the McAlpin Hotel, where war plans were devised among U.S. and visiting Allied officers, to examine Tesla's technical documents and determine whether they contained inventions or scientific information valuable to the American war effort.
Although Tesla’s papers were sought after by the intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, Dr. Trump concluded that the papers contained no immediately usable scientific or military breakthroughs. In particular, he found no practical evidence supporting Tesla's claims about a revolutionary particle-beam weapon, popularly called a death ray. But was this a feint by the MIT professor? Did he claim the papers were of no value, while passing on copies of them to his family’s valued German homeland either directly or via his brother, Fred? Considering the Trump family’s four generations of treasonous behavior, Dr. Trump should be considered as suspect as everyone else in the family.
In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a message from someone in Weehawken, NJ referring to a New York Times article about Tesla’s work on a “teleforce” death ray perfected by Tesla. The letter’s author urged Hoover to provide protection for Tesla lest he and his invention falling into the hands of “alien enemies.” The letter and article are found below.
There is also a problem with the chain-of-custody for Tesla’s papers. Dr. Trump's signed report, dated January 30, 1943, confirms that he examined the material on January 26–27 at the Manhattan Warehouse in New York, not in Tesla's hotel room. It also confirms that selected documents were retained by the Office of Alien Property Custodian. But how many may have been retained by Dr. Trump? Some papers were retained by government authorities, and subsequent FBI correspondence acknowledged uncertainty about the whereabouts of portions of Tesla's materials. A January 12, 1943 FBI memo reported that there was fear that “enemy agents” had confiscated some of Tesla’s trunks of documents after his death on January 7th and that the “War Department was interested in this matter.”
In a later letter, Hoover wrote that the FBI had never been in possession of any copies of Tesla’s papers (letter below). What? Missing Tesla papers that were briefly in the possession of Dr. Trump (whose brother was a suspected Nazi agent)?
Shades of the bathroom of Mar-a-Lago!
Dr. Trump’s suspiciously short examination of Tesla’s papers resulted in a dubiously short summation in his report on the veracity of Tesla’s work:
“His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”
Copies of Tesla's papers on the “death ray” were not “speculative,” as cited by Dr. Trump, nor was the U.S, Navy’s interest in Tesla’s work on a “revolutionary torpedo.” Tesla was investigating particle beam weaponry, something that over three decades later would serve as the basis for Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic missile defense program.
Some of Tesla’s papers were sent by the U.S. government to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. A project code-named "Project Nick" received massive funding and was placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published nor was the involvement of Dr. Trump.
One thing is known for certain. The copies of Tesla’s papers held in Dayton disappeared and their whereabouts remain unknown to this day.
Did the Trump family profit from Tesla’s purloined research? Or was it their friends, the Nazis, Soviets, or Elon Musk?
It is also odd that in1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions held by the U.S. government were released to Sava Kosanovic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United States from 1946 to 1950 and Tesla’s nephew, and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where the Tesla Museum was created in honor of the naturalized American scientist.
Under Marshal Tito’s Communist government, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and researchers to access to the Tesla archive in Belgrade. Things were much different for Soviet scientists who sent delegation after delegation to the museum during the 1950s. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced before the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage." Based on the fact that in 1958, the U.S. began work on charged-particle beam weaponry at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. The top secret research, code-named Project Seesaw, was eventually discontinued with the principals of the research claiming that it had nothing to do with Tesla’s papers. That’s exactly the same sort of wave-off of Tesla’s research that was offered up by Dr. Trump.
The FBI stated for years that it had not been the first to enter Tesla’s hotel room after his death but it was the Office of Alien Property, the latter for which Dr. Trump was taking his marching orders. One of many FBI denial letters below:
Successive FBI directors and acting directors from Hoover and L. Patrick Gray III to William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, all denied that the FBI was ever in possession of Tesla’s papers. Yet, questions remain about the ultimate recipients of the valuable research. Was it Nazi nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg or rocket scientist Werner Von Braun via Dr. Trump and/or his brother Fred? The Soviets? Or the Japanese, who remain very interested in Tesla’s work to this very day.
In addition, did Elon Musk’s Tesla Corporation capitalize on any of Tesla’s research, especially considering the fact that Musk has never “invented” anything but has made his fortune on the research conducted by others.
During the 1930s, Tesla claimed to have developed the theoretical basis for a defensive weapon capable of projecting concentrated streams of electrically charged particles.
He suggested that such a weapon could destroy approaching bomber formations, defend national borders against aerial attack, deliver destructive energy over considerable distances, and potentially make conventional aerial warfare obsolete. During the 1930s, this research would have been relevant to Nazi Germany's military improvements, particularly as Germany developed advanced antiaircraft defenses and experimental weapons.
A nagging question remains. Why did Dr. Trump substantially diminish the government's immediate interest in Tesla’s proposed death ray when the record suggests that this research was pursued by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, the Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, a period when Donald Trump was sidling up to the Soviet Union and communist Czechoslovakia while also denouncing NATO. The Trump family has not been known to value the national security of the United States since the Woodrow Wilson administration and, now, with Donald Trump in charge of everything, how much of Tesla’s research and that of others has flown out of U.S. security vaults into the hands of Moscow, Beijing, or Elon Musk?
Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.
The Daily Beast noted the other day that Truth Social’s daily traffic has cratered, losing over 30% of daily traffic since last June.
Donald Trump’s Truth Social is hemorrhaging users, with daily traffic plunging more than 30 percent in a year despite the president’s relentless stream of posts.
The social media platform averaged roughly 260,000 daily users last month, a steep drop from its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.
It’s an astonishingly small number. Heather Cox Richardson has upwards of 2.8 million subscribers on Substack, plus a bunch on other platforms. Meidas Touch has 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. On the other side of the spectrum, Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners. Benny Johnson has 6.1 million YouTube subscribers.
Just 260,000 users use Truth Social as if it were a social media website.
Of course, Trump’s own posts don’t, primarily, circulate on Truth Social. They are disseminated by Trump loyalists, self-described journalists, and haters far and wide, achieving a total dissemination that no doubt rivals those other outlets for viewers. But that dissemination happens only via a largely unexamined faith about what Trump Truth Social posts are. For MAGAts, sharing them announces tribal loyalty to the performed power in them. For journalists, it’s a lazy relationship with newsworthiness. For haters, it is often, equally, a tribal statement, triggering the same kind of emotional — and therefore irrational — response.
And while the MAGAts need only the performance of power, for the latter two, there is a conceit that the Truth Social posts in some way provide a transparent view on Trump’s “true” views … even though they are routinely riddled with lies.The Diesel Tweet promising diesel that doesn’t exist
That’s how it happened that Trump’s Diesel Tweet came to be read not just as a statement of his reason for betraying Ukraine — he needed diesel to bring prices down before the election — but also of a momentous call with Vladimir Putin on October 9.
Even Chris Wright couldn’t paper over how absurd that interpretation is (I had been wondering whether Wright was lying to Trump to allow him to sustain this claim). He confessed that Russia didn’t have diesel to export, amid word salad attempting to explain how Trump stating that Russia might export diesel if they chose to stop invading Ukraine would induce them to make peace.
WRIGHT: They’re very different. Russia wants to and can export oil, as a — as was true when I said that, and as is true today. We have not removed the sanctions on Russian oil. We are removing sanctions on a product that Russia currently does not and cannot export.
The way forward for Russia to be able to export diesel is to reduce their war effort, make progress towards peace.
[Martha] RADDATZ: President Trump said that there was a deal, a ceasefire, an energy ceasefire a week ago. Russia and Ukraine said there was no such thing. Were you involved in that? Was there anything?
WRIGHT: This is President Trump encouraging Russia if they want to export diesel, if they want to get the benefits you believe that are about to be showered upon them, the only way they can do that is with an energy ceasefire or reduction of war effort. [my emphasis]
Because there is so much faith among data mules who treat these posts as some form of truth, there was little consideration of other possibilities, such as that the last person in the room — the FSB officer whom JD Vance lauded for being “soft-spoken,” the guy who has always played Trumps narcissism like a maestro — suggested he write the tweet like that, either told him to or leveraged his grievance to get him to scapegoat Ukraine for Trump’s own failures.Both Putin and Trump acknowledged the Diesel Tweet was (also) about Iran
And in fact, both Putin and Trump acknowledged that their October 9 conversations were about — were also about — Iran.
In his post scapegoating Ukraine for the diesel shortage Trump’s own invasion of Iran caused, he included the non sequitur, “it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”
Wright’s word salad with Martha Raddatz also included that rhetorical dodge. When Raddatz pointed out what everyone should about the Diesel Tweet — that Trump, not Ukraine, caused the diesel shortages, Wright suggested she was dismissing attempts to deprive Iran of nukes.
RADDATZ: I just — the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran War, you would admit, caused a lot of these problems.
WRIGHT: Absolutely. To prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons, absolutely comes at a cost. The Iranian regime killed 30,000 to 40,000 of their own citizens in January. Since then, they’ve bombed every neighbor they have. Are you comfortable —
RADDATZ: I understand that.
WRIGHT: Are you comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iranian regime?
RADDATZ: I understand the point of stopping a nuclear weapon. That has not happened yet, and there’s no end in sight at this point.
In Putin’s readout of the October 9 conversation, he listed Ukraine, Iran, and various aspects of a strictly bilateral relationship with the US “were touched upon.”
During the October 9 telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump, considerable focus was on prospects for settling the Ukraine crisis, while the situation surrounding Iran and various aspects of bilateral relations were touched upon as well.
I’ve been arguing since March we need to understand that this is a world war and one possible outcome — made more likely so long as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were Trump’s “negotiators” on both Ukraine and Iran — would be that Russia uses it to get Trump to flip sides, as he has now apparently done.
Trump lies, again, about Iran
And here’s where Trump betrayed his weakness and here’s where his betrayal remains vulnerable to a concerted response.
His and Wright’s pathetic explanation about the Diesel Tweet are bad enough.
But his subsequent tweet explaining why he refuses to sanction Russia is even more pathetic.
Amid the repeated scapegoating of Ukraine and more spin about Russia giving the US something that would recognizably benefit the country (hostage negotiations) rather than Trump personally, Trump claimed that Russia was not doing “what they could be doing” to help Iran, a claim Trump has attempted to repeat in his babbling public statements.
As numerous people point out, though, US intelligence knows (and Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reminding) Russia is helping Iran kill Americans.
What Trump said in this tweet and has babbled publicly, of course, is that Russia could be doing more.
And that’s why, Trump says, he refuses to sanction Russia: For fear his best friend Putin will help Iran do worse to America and its partners than they’re already doing in Iran. For fear Russia will help Iran deal Trump an even more humiliating loss.
If that’s not already proof that Putin threatened Trump even as he offered him carrots in the form of oil contracts, Sergei Lavrov met with Abbas Araghchi and made it clear they are, in fact, doing quite a bit to support Iran, including feeding them so they can outlast the US in this current standoff.
Trump said Moscow and Beijing had the capacity to provide Tehran with far greater assistance but had so far refrained from doing so.
“Russia could have done a lot more to help Iran. Russia’s done very little for Iran,” Trump told reporters on Monday. He said China could also have provided much more assistance and described the limited help from both countries as “a very positive thing.”
Trump’s remarks came as Lavrov held talks with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, where Moscow reaffirmed its commitment to its strategic partnership with Iran while calling for a diplomatic solution to the regional conflict.
At a joint press conference with Araghchi, Lavrov said Russia had no intention of abandoning economic and investment agreements with Iran despite the war.
He said Russian specialists were gradually returning to work at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant and pointed to continued cooperation on energy and transport projects, including the planned Rasht-Astara railway.
Lavrov also said Moscow had provided humanitarian assistance during the war and would continue supplying food to Iran.
And even though Putin is flaunting his support for Iran (and has, at similar moments in the past) Trump is nevertheless allowing Putin to convince him that his own failures in Iran are all due to betrayal from America’s allies and not his own failures and the incompetent blowhard he put in charge of DOD.
Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. As a narcissist, he needs scapegoats to blame for his own historic failure, and Russia’s dictator has scripted convenient scapegoats for him: Ukraine for attacking Russia’s diesel refineries, Europe, for failing to join Trump’s rudderless attack.
And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia.
New York Times, Vance Defends Ramaswamy’s Ad as Backlash Threatens Ohio Campaign, Campbell Robertson and Bayliss Wagner, Oct. 21, 2026. The vice president backed an advertisement featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother, who has been estranged from Dr. Acton since her stepfather was charged with child rape.
Vice President JD Vance, right, on Wednesday defended an ad featuring the estranged mother of the Democrat 
running for Ohio governor, Amy Acton, dismissing condemnation of it from even fellow Republicans as “whining.”
In the ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, Dr. Acton’s Republican opponent, the mother said her daughter had lied and exaggerated about her childhood struggles. The ad was met with outrage, given that the mother’s longtime husband, Dr. Acton’s stepfather, was charged with raping the candidate when she was 12, according to records produced by the Acton campaign.
Mr. Ramaswamy is putting $4 million behind the spot. Mr. Vance lauded it, saying it “calls it out like it is, and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
Child sexual abuse has been a surprisingly prevalent issue in the 2026 midterms. It has surfaced in Texas, where Democrats accused Attorney General Ken Paxton of treating a convicted abuser leniently; in Kansas, where Republicans said the Democratic candidate for Senate, Adam Hamilton, failed to respond to abuse accusations by a volunteer at his church; and in multiple races where Republican votes against releasing the Epstein files have become political fodder.
Even though Mr. Ramaswamy’s ad does not directly mention sexual abuse, it has brought it to the forefront of the Ohio governor’s race and whipped up national attention. In the ad, Donna Arthur, Dr. Acton’s mother, accused her daughter of lying about details she has relayed about a troubled childhood in which she was homeless for a time. During that period, Dr. Acton has said, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. She has said she and her mother have not spoken since she was 12, when Ms. Arthur lost custody of both her daughter and her son.
Documents provided by the Acton campaign this week show that a grand jury had indicted the candidate’s stepfather on charges of raping Dr. Acton in 1978, the year Ms. Arthur lost custody. The stepfather, Cledith Arthur, pleaded not guilty, and then fled the state before trial. He died in Pennsylvania in 2004.
This week, Dr. Acton’s campaign decried the ad and quickly responded with one of its own, in which her brother, Philip Stearns, says that she had for years been the victim of their stepfather’s physical and sexual abuse.
Asked Wednesday evening about the ad, President Trump tried three approaches. He first claimed not to know anything about it. Then he cited its contents at length, saying, “It’s a very unusual situation to have a mother hate a daughter that much.” Finally, he absolved Mr. Ramaswamy of responsibility for it, concluding, “I don’t think that has anything to do with Vivek.”
Mr. Vance, at a Wednesday morning campaign rally in the state, lauded Mr. Ramaswamy for the spot even as the backlash threatened to engulf the candidate’s campaign.
“I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America,” Mr. Vance told reporters. “So I would say to Ohio Republicans, do you actually think that Amy Acton is unfit to serve as governor of the state of Ohio? I do.”
The downplaying of the ad’s significance by the president and vice president did little to stem the criticism.
MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, announced on Wednesday that she would put half a million dollars behind Dr. Acton’s campaign, accusing Mr. Ramaswamy of exploiting “a highly qualified woman’s pain for political gain.”
The editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch announced its backing for Dr. Acton for governor on Wednesday morning, describing the ad in its endorsement as “revolting and unsettling.”
Multiple well-known figures in the Ohio Republican establishment either criticized the ad or distanced themselves from it. They include Frank LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state; Lydia Mihalik, director of the Ohio Department of Development; Ryan Smith, the Republican former speaker of the Ohio House; and Senator Jon Husted. In a statement, Mr. Husted, who is in the middle of a tight battle for his Senate seat, said, “I would not have run that ad.”
But denunciations also came from people far outside of establishment circles. Casey Putsch, a car designer who ran against Mr. Ramaswamy from the hard right in the Republican primary, slammed the ad on social media and said that he would vote for Dr. Acton. Mr. Ramaswamy and his campaign, he wrote, are “attacking Amy Acton over the abuse she endured as a child.”
With Election Day less than two weeks away, erosion of support from the Republicans’ Ohio establishment and its far right could spell trouble for Mr. Ramaswamy.
Kathy Barnette, a conservative radio host who advised Mr. Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, said that the stakes of the election could not be higher and that she could vouch “100 percent” for Mr. Ramaswamy’s character and vision. At the same time, Ms. Barnette, who said her mother was raped at a young age, called the ad a “very personal thing” for her.
“It is a very fine line that the Ramaswamy campaign are walking in sharing this information,” she said. “They’re taking a huge bet.”
Did she think it was a bet worth taking? “No comment,” she said.
AdImpact, a political ad-watching firm, said Wednesday that the Ramaswamy campaign added $2.8 million in advertising reservations to the nearly $15 million already in place.
Some Republicans said the angry reaction to the ad was more political than genuine, much of it coming from people who did not support Mr. Ramaswamy in the first place.
“This was a bold and raw move, but many of the critics of this ad have strong political motivations to launch their criticism,” said Mark R. Weaver, a Republican political consultant in Ohio.
At a rally at a convention center near Cincinnati that was headlined by Mr. Vance, at which Mr. Ramaswamy briefly spoke, attendees brushed off the criticism. Some said that Dr. Acton’s mother was entitled to give her side of the story, while others downplayed the whole controversy.
“We are not voting for ads, we are voting for people,” said Greg Garland, who was attending with a group of people supporting the Republican ticket.
On Tuesday night, after being heckled about the ad, Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters, “I would love for this race, this election, to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.”
Lance's Substack, Opinion: J.D. Vance Rams His Salami In Ramaswamy, Lance F Rosen, right, Oct. 21, 2026. So, now J.D. Vance is officially on the record as:
Vance is the "unhuman" in this equation, not the woke left.
He is many things, and has perpetrated great evils in the form of policies on behalf of his tech billionaire controllers and Project 2025.
But above all, he is a Nazi, who is right at home with politicians and candidates who are also rapists in addition to being Nazis. That is why he was groomed for VP by Thiel and company.
Also remember some of the GOP's history in whitewashing their history of rape and pedophilia aside from the Epstein case. The engine of Vance's Senate campaign was the Nazi Church belt of Christian nationalists in the corruptly gerrymandered Ohio Congressional district of Congressman Gym Jordan, people in various cults who return him to office every two years despite his personal involvement in covering up the Ohio State gymnastic teams sexual assaults. (In addition to Jordan's direct role in launching the January 6th insurrection plot to assasinate Vice-President Pence and overturn the election of Biden-Harris)
I know from personal experience of having lived in Columbus off and on and run political campaigns in Ohio with my wife Martha for more than 30 years that Jordan's district is the epicenter of the most extreme white supremacist churches in Ohio tied to the "Christian Identity" movement of which Timothy McVeigh was a member. I have published the SPLC flow charts in the past tracking these Nazi networks run under cover of churches, and I can tell you that this is what runs the Ohio GOP.
When we were organizing in that area we went head to head with them, something I'll write about if I ever publish a book.
That is Vance's base, and that is the extremist cristo-fascist layer to whom Ramaswamy (whom I will refer to in the future as "Ramshismommy") is playing to with his malignant, destructive, violence-inciting nihilistic ad campaign.
Vance's attempts to downplay it are his way of endorsing them. Because that is who he is.
Vance is a lifelong chameleon who adapts to whatever new circumstances in which he is operating in order to advance himself. So in order to become the heir apparent to Trump's presidency, he has to absorb the worst pathological features of Trump's personality disorders to win over the most virulent haters in the GOP base, from Nazis, to QAnon, to the billionaire eugenics crowd that wants a new Confederacy, to the ultra-far right Catholics and evangelicals, to the testosterone junkies of the misogynist Alpha-Male rape camp set. They are the engine of fascist Trump core activists and megadonors which is running these ops.
I have friends in Ohio who are fighting this in different ways through local campaigns. Many of them still have difficulty facing what these people are, because they have known them for so long. They are neighbors, friends, family, co-workers, and fellow church congregants who always seemed Iike "nice people." But they never got to know them as they are beneath the surface, and naively think they can convert some of the hard core. I don't rule everyone out, some might break ranks, (and if anyone can, my friends are dynamite organizers) but the worst are the churchey types and the greedy business leaders, just as they were in the Sinclair Lewis book, "It Can't Happen Here."
When you scratch off the veneer of a MAGA Christian or GOP businessperson that donates to Trump, you'll find underneath a small time Hitler. Not someone who is "confused," or "low information," which are just Newspeak euphemisms for those who decide to become fascist assholes.
So, the bottom line is that when we think about it, Ramaswamy's ads make perfect sense, because they are intended to mobilize Trump's and Vance's movevent of fascist assholes.
Ramaswamy doesn't give a you-know-what about Ohioans. He wants to be Vance's Vice-President, and his campaign is his audition or job interview. Every issue on which they take a position, from immigration to data centers, is motivated by both of their personal ambitions and desire to curry favor with the gamemasters running them. That's the real story here.
Remember two years ago when Kristi Noem was trying out for Trump's VP? What did she do to get Trump's attention? She wrote her garbage biography bragging about executing her dog for no reason. Why did she do that? Maybe it was that she was putting her own cruelty and sadism on display in order to convince Trump she was his soulmate. And because she knows that Trump personally hates dogs.
So these ads by Ramaswamy are the same thing. They are performative cosplay for Vance's handlers, his version of the school kid trying to impress his teachers by keeping his hand raised to answer every question. ""Me, me, me." He consciously picked the most hateful, provocative, and despicable line of attack, in order to appeal to the very worst people, because his identity is rooted in advancing himself in any way he sees as necessary, regardless of truth, ethics, morality, or accountability.
It is the mentality of Hitler's newspaper publishers like Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosenberg, who published anti-semitic cartoons about Jewish men preying upon, raping, murdering, and cannibalizing young blonde German girls, in order to incite attacks against Jews. This was the modern incarnation of the infamous "blood libel."
Vance and Ramaswamy are doing something on similar lines, running a propaganda/brainwashing campaign to sell the idea that every rape victim that names their accusers is likely lying, in order to either run a grift, or hurt the careers of "Christian conservatives" whom they falsely accuse for political or personal reasons.
Both Ramaswamy and Vance are running that game. Now, who are they actually performing for, who are they trying to impress? It sounds like they both have an intended audience of one. Could it be anyone else other than the Mad King, the one who has the power to anoint them as his successors, the "Rapist-In-Chief" himself?
The media is playing this as just an awful election campaign "dirty trick," a new low in misogyny which has divided the Republicans and makes them look bad. That particular line of spin is just low-level brain dead reality TV horsepoop. It is way bigger than all of that.
This is what I'm saying it is. It is a part of a raging succession fight within the GOP in which one group of Nazis is trying to out-Nazi the others in order to win Trump's favor. And also to set the stage for trying to overturn candidate Amy Acton's victory if she wins, by demonizing her as a liar and a cheat first.
Because this is such an ugly and shocking headliner, everyone will have their own take on it, their own spin, and it will be tempting for some of our readers to want to add on, or call us out for what we left out, or even to change the subject to avoid discussing what is presented here. That is expected, and also an example of the damage done by prolonged exposure to social media and internet news.
It is a Truman Show bubble. You have to step outside of it to see what is really going on. Maybe my headline for this article will help give it a bit of perspective.
Special Reports: Venezuelan Earthquake Tragedy Reexamined
New York Times, How Venezuela’s Public Housing Towers Were Built to Fail, Julie Turkewitz, Helmuth Rosales, James Glanz, Malika Khurana and Isayen Herrera, Oct. 20, 2026. These 10 public housing towers collapsed within seconds of back-to-back earthquakes in June. The Venezuelan government suggested the intensity of the quakes was to blame.
But a New York Times investigation found that the design and construction were fundamentally flawed for towers perched so close to a major fault line.
New York Times, Death Toll From Venezuela Quakes Likely Far Exceeds Official Count, James Glanz, Julie Turkewitz and Helmuth Rosales, Oct. 21, 2026. A Times analysis and U.S. Geological Survey data indicate that the official 6,509 death toll is probably a severe undercount.
Venezuela’s government says 6,509 people died in the back-to-back earthquakes in June. But calculations from multiple sources, including a New York Times analysis of residential buildings and the U.S. Geological Survey, indicate that this is likely a severe undercount.
For years the U.S.G.S. has used shaking severity, historical data and population distribution to try to estimate deaths after an earthquake. The information is typically more accurate in higher casualty incidents, like this one, said David Wald, a seismologist at the U.S.G.S.
For the Venezuela quakes, the U.S.G.S.’s median estimate is that 53,000 people died — meaning there is a 50 percent chance the actual number is higher than that, and a 50 percent chance it is lower.
The U.S.G.S. also says there is approximately an 81 percent chance that the real number of deaths is higher than 10,000.
One obstacle to calculating a reliable death count in Venezuela is the absence of an up-to-date official government census.
To address that problem, the U.S.G.S. uses a model called LandScan to “age” the most recent census forward in time. The model, developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also uses independent United Nations figures to refine the estimates. LandScan uses dozens of other variables, including land use, roads and proximity to urban areas to estimate where people are likely to be when the ground shakes.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to messages detailing our findings and asking for comment.
A Times analysis of satellite imagery, ground-level footage and building type also casts doubt on the government’s official death toll.
Our examination of public housing in the hardest-hit state, La Guaira, shows that 16 public housing towers collapsed there after the quakes. Each concrete tower had 12 residential floors with eight apartments per floor, according to floor plans obtained by The Times and site observations.
To arrive at an estimated number of residents per apartment, we used a census of one of the complexes taken by its community council, which indicated that an average of 3.4 people lived in each unit. We corroborated this information with former residents and an official government statement, which indicated that around four people lived in each public housing apartment.
This means that roughly 5,200 people lived in the 16 collapsed public housing towers in La Guaira alone.
Of course, all those residents might not have been home at the time of the quakes. But witness accounts and surveillance footage indicate that at least some of the buildings, including several tall towers, collapsed immediately — leaving those who were inside little or no time to escape.
Times reporters on the ground after the quakes witnessed how these towers, called OPPPEs for the government office that built them, became some of the densest pockets of death. Bodies were pulled out of some of the buildings every day for weeks.
More Global News
New York Times, A Battle for Control of India’s Biggest Business Empire, Alex Travelli, Oct. 21, 2026. A boardroom fight, an attempted veto and government intervention have plunged the Tata Group, one of India’s most revered institutions, into a fight over its future.
Who actually controls India’s biggest company?
A bitter power struggle over the Tata Group, a 158-year-old conglomerate with more than a million employees worldwide and $180 billion in annual revenue, has become a test of who calls the shots in Indian capitalism: owners, professional managers or the government.
The fight pits the family-led charitable trusts that own two-thirds of Tata Sons, the group’s holding company, against the powerful chairman who runs its businesses. India’s government has emerged as a wild card, pressing Tata Sons to list on the stock market — a move that could permanently reshape its ownership and weaken the founding family’s control.
The conflict simmered for at least a year before bursting into the open. In August, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, one of India’s most celebrated chief executives, stunned the business world by announcing he would not seek another five-year term as chairman. He cited opposition from one board member to his staying beyond February.
That “absence of unanimous support” would hurt the company when “many strategic projects” are under “critical stages of execution,” he wrote in a letter at the time. “Clarity on leadership is important for employees, investors, partners and other stakeholders.”
A month later, he reversed course. At a Sept. 17 meeting, a majority of the board voted to reappoint him. Noel Tata, a board member and head of the Tata Trusts, a group of public charities that owns 66 percent of Tata Sons, had cast the sole dissenting vote.
Oct. 20
Top Headlines
Russian missile attack kills one, wounds 112 in Ukraine's Kharkiv, officials say.
via Substack, Opinion: The Traitor in Chief, Paul Krugman, right,Oct. 20, 2026. Trump and his allies hate America and what it stands for. What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started. Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
desire to normalize the relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine.More On Trump's Sellout Of Ukraine, Europe, American National Security
President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: More Terrible Polling For Trump Today. If Anything The Election Is Moving Further Away From Him And The Rs, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Fourteen days to go. Yesterday Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas started early in-person voting. Today Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin join them.There are two weeks left until election day 2026. It seems like it could be a big moment, even perhaps an historic one.right, National security expert, ex-DHS Trump administration chief of staff, NYT best-selling author. Was “Anonymous” — now urging folks to take their masks off, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is getting desperate, but we’re more prepared than ever to protect our democracy.Her fundamental dilemma is simple: After years of feigning to follow in the tradition of Maine “independence,” her record reveals she has been a rubber stamp for the Trump regime’s worst nominees and policies.News Roundup
Oct. 20, 2026. For weeks, Elon Musk insisted he had nothing to do with throttling the satellite internet Ukraine’s soldiers depend on. He said it was the U.S. military’s call, “and ultimately POTUS.”Special Report: Another Trump Threat To White House Press Corps
Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting
Special Report: Trump's Family's Big Lie -- About Spies
Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran
Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.More News Roundups
Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is furious. He was heckled six times at his own rally in Kansas last night, a state he won three times, and he lashed out, calling protesters “idiots” and telling his crowd, “It never ends.” He’s rattled for a reason: early voting is shattering records in Texas, and in North Carolina, Democrats have cast 70% of the major-party ballots so far. Meanwhile, Democrats are making it clear that if they win the House, Elon Musk, the GOP’s $276 million megadonor, will be at the top of their list. More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Taunting Trump Over Gas Prices, Iran Braces for Aftermath of U.S. Vote, Michael Crowley, Oct. 20, 2026. The midterm elections appear to be a factor for both sides in the war as President Trump weighs his next steps. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Iranian state media is gleefully chronicling high prices at American gas pumps — and their impact on President Trump’s political standing.More Global News
New York Times, Voters in Oil-Rich Alberta Reject Leaving Canada, Ian Austen, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. Residents of the province were asked if they wish to remain in Canada or to hold another vote on breaking away, in a referendum that left both sides unhappy.More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, above, died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune.
Oct. 20, 2026. The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. A lawful permanent resident who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody.U.S. High Tech, Media, Culture
President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).
More On Trump Corruption, Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement
Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump not only refused to endorse JD Vance for 2028, but he also fell asleep on his vice president while Vance was talking. JD Vance doesn’t get it. Trump is using his vice president as a human shield who is often sent to the worst spots on the campaign trail and sent out in front of the media to take the hit when there is bad news.
Oct. 20, 2026. It’s all so eternally exhausting. Yesterday’s event featured Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife, making one of her contractually-obligated appearances with the husband for whom she has such open, burning contempt. Shouldn’t Donny have figured out by now that any attempt at affection is going to result with him being on the wrong end of a public humiliation?Top Stories
Russian missile attack kills one, wounds 112 in Ukraine's Kharkiv, officials say.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: The Traitor in Chief, Paul Krugman, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Trump and his allies hate America and what it stands for.
Writing in the New York Times, David Sanger highlights the extent to which Donald Trump is going all out to support Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine:
President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.
“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.
In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.”
As Sanger notes, Trump’s support for Putin is unique in American history. Previous administrations have made deals with erstwhile adversaries, as Nixon did with China, and given up on support for failing allies, as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But never before have we outright switched sides, let alone supported an aggressor while vilifying that aggressor’s victim.
What makes Trump’s support for Putin even more remarkable is that Russia has, by many accounts, been actively aiding Iran against America in the war Trump started.
Who says so? Well, among others, Dan Caine, 
right, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the aid goes beyond intelligence sharing that has helped Iran target U.S. forces. Russia has also reportedly been sending Iran explosives and weapons components.
What would Republicans be saying if a Democratic president were supporting a foreign dictator even as that dictator was helping another nation kill American troops? They would be crying “treason.” But this is all apparently “fine” with Trump.
What’s going on here? It’s important to understand that — as Phillips O’Brien documents — Trump hasn’t “pivoted” away from Ukraine toward Russia. He has been a Putin supporter all along.
Thus when Trump says that “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine,” who, exactly, does he mean by “we”? He cut off all economic and military aid to Ukraine as soon as he took office. Here’s total support for Ukraine, by country, since January 2025:
True, the U.S. continued to share military intelligence with Ukraine while allowing Ukraine to use Elon Musk’s Starshield and permitting European nations to transfer some U.S. weapons to Ukraine. But these actions cost America nothing. The most you can say is that until recently Trump shied away from actively sabotaging Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
And now even that restraint is gone. According to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, U.S. intelligence sharing was blocked “for some period of time,” although it appears to have resumed for now. Ukraine’s access to Starshield has been limited. And the Washington Post reports that the U.S. has been holding up European transfers of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.
There are two questions here. First, why does Trump love Putin and hate Zelenskyy? Second, why has he ripped off the mask and gone full pro-Russia in the past few weeks?
On the first question, Zelenskyy gave a blunt answer in a recent interview with the Financial Times: Trump, he asserted, has an instinctive affinity for autocrats and the super wealthy: “He speaks about it openly that he loves such people and he respects such people.” That’s clearly right.
I would add three points. First, Trump and his inner circle don’t just love autocrats. They hate democracy and rule of law — which means that they hate America and American values.
Second, Putin-worship was widespread on the authoritarian right even before Trump entered the picture, with many celebrating Russia’s anti-wokeness and perceived masculinity. Remarkably, the valorization of Russia’s supposed toughness has survived despite Russia’s repeated military humiliations. So Trump has been following a well-trodden path.
Finally, whatever else you may say about Zelenskyy, he’s a genuine hero, who showed great personal courage by staying in Kyiv when Russia invaded. And Trump surely resents the fact that Zelenskyy is everything he is not.
The second question is, why now? Why has Trump chosen this moment to switch from covert, deniable support for Putin to overtly, explicitly taking Russia’s side?
As I suggested yesterday, the answer lies precisely in Trump’s collapsing support at home. Nothing he does now is likely to avert Republican catastrophe in the midterms. Republican politicians have been going out of their way to avoid being seen with him on the campaign trail. Trump officials are already lawyering up in preparation for the probes a Democratic Congress will launch.
At this point, then, Trump effectively has nothing left to lose on the political front — and his political bankruptcy has freed him to become his worst self, indulging himself by doing what he always wanted to do — which includes supporting corrupt, murderous dictators.
And there will be much more of this to come. Trump can’t and won’t make America great again. But he can betray everything America stands for, and he’s doing it as we speak.
New York Times, Trump’s Push for Deals With Russia Powers His Frustration With Ukraine, David E. Sanger, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. The series of recent steps by the president that seem to favor Vladimir Putin reflect his intensifying desire to normalize the relationship with Moscow even if it means further undercutting Ukraine.
He shunted aside a bipartisan law, signed just weeks ago, imposing new tariffs on Russia. He cut a deal to purchase diesel from Moscow. His negotiators agreed on the vague outlines of a deal for much of Lukoil, a battered Russian energy firm. And he called for the replacement of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, whose success in taking the fight inside Russia deeply frustrates him.
President Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.
“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a campaign rally. “They haven’t been doing much,” he said, making no mention of the Russian missiles and jet-powered drones that have been targeting apartment buildings in Kyiv and Ukraine’s surviving electricity grid.
In contrast, he said, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.” He repeated the statement for emphasis. The night before, he wrote on social media that Mr. Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” because it brought him a flow of cash and arms from Europe, making no mention that Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty and even survival in a war that it did not start.
Mr. Trump’s disdain for Mr. Zelensky is hardly new. Nor is his willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Putin, for whom he has often expressed respect and even admiration.
But what is different now is Mr. Trump’s increased determination to force a deal on Mr. Zelensky, telling him that holding out to retain occupied portions of the country’s eastern provinces is not worth it — and that there is money to be made for Ukraine, as well, if it would only drop its objections to an accord, even one written largely on Russia’s terms.
President Trump's Russian and Iranian war negotiators Jared Kushner, left, and Steve Witkoff have business ties to two of the Middle Eastern investors involved in the deal (Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin).
That will be the American message to Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday in Oslo, where Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff is expected to meet the Ukrainian president. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, will participate in the meeting remotely, the Norwegian government said in a statement.
Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, and Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, will also take part in the discussion, the statement said. (Finland has become an enthusiastic member of the NATO alliance. In World War II, it ceded about 12 percent of its territory to Russia, and has never gotten it back.)
The next day Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner will fly to St. Petersburg, Russia, to meet Mr. Putin in his hometown. There, Mr. Trump’s representatives are expected to take the next step in their efforts to show the benefits of deal-making with Mr. Putin by securing the release of a long-held American.
Mr. Trump discussed the prospect of a hostage release again on Monday, but did not say who was involved. The only American the State Department categorizes as “wrongfully detained” in Russia is Stephen Hubbard, who Russia accused of fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine when he was seized in 2022. Mr. Hubbard, who is in his mid-70s, was sentenced to more than six years in a penal colony.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
The timing of the release, if it happens, says volumes about Mr. Putin’s strategy. Ridding Russia of an elderly American hostage costs Mr. Putin nothing, and does no good for Ukraine. But in the midst of midterm elections in the United States it allows Mr. Trump to make the case that he is pursuing an America First foreign policy, complete with the heartwarming images of a prisoner being reunited with his family.
But the larger goal here, for Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, is to normalize a relationship that began to go off the rails more than a decade ago, when Mr. Putin took Crimea, a territory that was integrated with Ukraine during the Soviet era, and when he began to send Russian fighters into eastern Ukraine.
Europe and the United States responded with sanctions. But a year later, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany signed a deal with Mr. Putin to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, calling the Russian leader a “reliable supplier.”
The idea was to reintegrate Russia with the West, in hopes of curbing Mr. Putin’s territorial appetites. The effort failed; seven years later Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine.
Today, that history, and the rationale behind it, is replaying itself. But it is Mr. Trump who is taking the role that Ms. Merkel once played.
Mr. Trump’s ambitions are clearly bigger. There is already talk of a three-way meeting in China between Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping of China on the sidelines of a larger summit of Pacific Rim countries scheduled for next month. Mr. Trump said on Monday the goal would be to discuss the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and “denuclearization.” (He likely meant arms control, since none of the three powers seems remotely interested in eliminating their nuclear stockpiles.)
That is exactly what Mr. Putin has in mind: Expanding the discussion with the United States to other topics, apart from Ukraine, that make the long-running conflict look like just one of many issues to be managed. And should the three-way meeting happen, the image of the leaders of the three largest nuclear powers talking would likely carry the suggestion that they are carving the globe into zones of influence, much as Stalin, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt did at Yalta.
News Roundup
The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary:Musk Ordered Slowdown of Ukraine’s Starlink Himself as Trump Snaps at Reporters and GOP Turns on Trump’s Russia Policy, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. For weeks, Elon Musk insisted he had nothing to do with throttling the satellite internet Ukraine’s soldiers depend on. He said it was the U.S. military’s call, “and ultimately POTUS.”
Tonight, The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk ordered the slowdown himself, and that he may have discussed it with Trump before he flipped the switch. Ukrainian officials say those restrictions left drones useless and helped Russian missiles get through their defenses.
Some of you will remember that when I spoke out about Musk’s role in this, his allies demanded that he sue me.
And the walls are starting to close in politically, too. Republicans like Don Bacon and Brian Fitzpatrick are openly breaking with Trump over his Russia policy, with Bacon saying flatly, “What I see him doing here is surrendering.” Meanwhile, Trump spent today saying it’s “time for Ukraine to end this war,” snapping at reporters in the Oval Office, and telling one, “You better be careful.”
For me, this is personal. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs. That’s why I’ve decided to do a deep dive outlining all of Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials, going back decades. It’ll be out soon, and it’s one you won’t want to miss.
Journalism like this takes time and resources, and there’s no billionaire, corporation, or politician behind it. Just you.
Let’s get into it.
Elon Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine, as Republicans Revolt Over Trump’s Russia Policy
Elon Musk personally ordered the slowdown of the military-grade Starlink service Ukraine relies on, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the network beginning October 14, leaving some attack and interceptor drones virtually useless. Ukrainian officials said the restrictions allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses. The move came four days after Musk responded to Trump’s attacks on Zelenskyy by posting, “Zelensky has gone too far.” Musk had publicly claimed that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” and Trump told reporters Monday he didn’t know who was responsible but “would like to find out.” The Journal reports that Musk and Trump discussed the slowdown on a call after it became public, and one person said they discussed it before Musk imposed it.
The revelation contradicts weeks of denials and finger-pointing from Musk and the administration. Some U.S. officials told the Journal that Musk acted on his own and that Trump never ordered retribution against Ukraine, but a person familiar with the situation said Musk spoke with multiple senior administration officials, including Trump, before imposing the speed cap. During the uproar, SpaceX representatives reportedly called White House officials seeking a unified message suggesting the company and the administration had coordinated in advance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “we haven’t pulled anything back,” adding that “Starlink has the option to make decisions concerning its terms of service.” Analyst Michael Kofman said Ukrainian drones are still being throttled below the speeds they need, hampering both strikes and air defense. Ukraine’s top diplomat in Washington said Kyiv is still waiting for answers from the Pentagon and SpaceX.
Zelenskyy said U.S. intelligence warnings on Russian strikes “work now” after meeting Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in Oslo, even as Trump escalated his attacks. Speaking alongside the leaders of Norway and Finland, Zelenskyy said he was “thankful” the early warning system had been restored and that he expects “good results” on Patriot missiles and Starlink, though he said the Starlink restrictions are ongoing. He said Ukraine is “ready for negotiations” and wants trilateral talks with the U.S. and Russia, adding, “We are not losing this war, but we are losing people because Russia attacks.” Witkoff will travel to St. Petersburg on Wednesday to present updated proposals to Putin. At almost the same time, Trump said from the Oval Office that “it’s now time for Ukraine to end this war,” complaining that the U.S. has gotten “absolutely nothing back except grief, death, tremendous monetary loss.” Earlier this month, Trump said it was time for Ukraine to get “a new president.”
Republicans are breaking with Trump over Russia, with some threatening to withhold support for his agenda. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska called Trump’s diesel deal and sanctions waiver “absolutely disgraceful,” accused him of cozying up to “a war criminal” in Putin, and said, “I think the president’s leverage in this Congress is shot.” Bacon said he won’t back Trump’s priorities like a triumphal arch or White House ballroom, adding, “What I see him doing here is surrendering.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania called the situation “wildly unacceptable” and warned of “punitive budgetary action” to force answers. Sen. Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, said she would choose to pressure Russia because “I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia.” Outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy wrote that Ronald Reagan and Lindsey Graham “would be ashamed of this.”
A CNN analysis says Trump’s recent moves on Ukraine read like policy Putin could have written himself. The analysis lists what it calls an extensive set of “Trump gifts to Moscow”: a diesel deal likely to pour billions into Putin’s war chest, a short-lived energy ceasefire that paused Ukraine’s refinery strikes, Starlink restrictions, gaps in intelligence sharing that left Ukraine without missile warnings for several nights, and repeated calls for Zelenskyy to step down. “If Putin could write US policy, it might look much like this,” the analysis concludes. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that the remaining Ukrainian-held part of the Donetsk region is “the last defensible line” before “a straight shot into Kyiv,” undercutting pressure on Ukraine to give it up. The analysis argues Trump’s moves are damaging Republicans ahead of the midterms and may reflect what it calls his “last unbridled moment” to act on his sympathy for Putin.
Video Featuring Amy Acton’s Estranged Mother Turns Ohio Governor’s Race Even Uglier as Ramaswamy Campaign Stands By It
A video featuring the estranged mother of Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a liar has sparked a fierce backlash two weeks before the election. In the minute-long, ad-style video, Donna Arthur claims Acton lied about growing up homeless and tells voters, “Don’t let her become your governor.” Acton has said she hasn’t seen her mother since she was 12, when her stepfather was charged with raping her and Arthur stood by him. Court records provided by Acton’s campaign show her stepfather was indicted and fled the state before trial, and he died in 2004 without ever appearing before a judge. The video was shared widely on social media, including by Donald Trump Jr. It carries no legally required disclaimer showing who paid for it, and it has not appeared as a paid ad on Ohio television.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign won’t say whether it was behind the video, but it appeared to endorse its message. A campaign spokesperson said, “We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother,” but called Acton “a serial fabulist” and said Ohioans “deserve to know” what her mother says. The campaign argued that everyone who knows Acton best, “and now her own mother,” is warning voters not to support her. The campaign didn’t answer whether Arthur was paid to appear. The main super PAC backing Ramaswamy said it didn’t make the video. A blogger who first posted it said he got it from a voter who saw it as part of a poll. Acton said this in response:
Acton’s brother and allies blasted the video as a “despicable low.” Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, said he and his sister were removed from their mother’s custody after the arrest, and that “our birth mother stayed married to Amy’s rapist until he died.” He called Ramaswamy “a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants,” and appears in a new Acton campaign ad saying, “Shame on Vivek.” Acton said it was “awful” to see her mother this way and accused Ramaswamy of taking advantage of “someone who’s clearly not well.” Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, called it “a dastardly ad” that “never should have been created.” Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown called it “disgusting” and urged his opponent, Sen. Jon Husted, to condemn it.
The video is the latest in a series of deeply personal attacks in one of the nation’s ugliest races. Republicans have repeatedly attacked Acton over a 2019 police call to her home in which no charges were filed, portraying her as having a substance problem. Another Ramaswamy ad featured a woman blaming Acton for her mother’s COVID death, though fact-checkers found the woman was a political operative and her mother died in Kentucky, not Ohio. The Bulwark also reported that a separate Ramaswamy ad featured a man convicted of sexually abusing a child under 13. Ramaswamy’s campaign said it removed the clips, but ad tracking shows the spot is still running unchanged. Acton has refused to debate Ramaswamy, saying, “I won’t normalize somebody who has said that my childhood is something I’m just complaining about.”
The race remains a toss-up, with Acton holding a narrow lead in most public polls. Acton, the former head of the Ohio Department of Health during the early COVID pandemic, and Ramaswamy, a billionaire former presidential candidate, are competing to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate the race a toss-up. Acton’s campaign has painted Ramaswamy as a “con man” and an out-of-touch billionaire, while his campaign accuses her of lying about her record and hiding from debates. A Democrat hasn’t won the Ohio governor’s race since 2006. One political scientist said that this late in the race, many voters have already made up their minds and tune out the flood of attack ads.
Trump Snaps at Reporters, Says Ilhan Omar Could “Go to Jail,” and Promises Tipsters Will “Become Rich” in Chaotic Oval Office Event
Trump lashed out at a string of reporters during an Oval Office event Tuesday, telling one, “I don’t know who the hell you are, but you better be careful.” The outbursts began when Trump shouted down a female reporter, saying, “Wait! Shh! No, no no!” before calling on someone else. He then repeatedly targeted Andrew Feinberg of The Independent, who had asked why Trump’s new anti-fraud program pays tipsters only 1%, far less than the 10% to 25% whistleblowers can receive under existing federal law. Minutes later, Trump appeared not to recognize Feinberg and threatened him, then snapped again: “Quiet. Quiet! What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?” When Feinberg replied, “Not that I know of, sir,” Trump said, “I actually think there’s something wrong with you.” JD Vance later shared the exchange online, calling Feinberg an “imbecile journalist,” to which Feinberg replied that if Vance was going to insult him, he should “at least have the guts to tag my account.”
Trump launched a $25 million anti-fraud program promising tipsters a 1% commission, saying people who report fraud are “gonna become rich.” The Justice Department program, run through Fraud.gov, offers rewards to anyone who reports government fraud. “If anybody turns anybody in [for fraud of] a billion dollars, $5 billion, $100 billion, you get a 1 percent commission,” Trump said, calling it “the largest commission ever paid, probably for anything anywhere.” He claimed, without evidence, that “trillions” have been stolen by “crooked politicians.” During the event, Trump handed a $10,000 check to Nick Shirley, a 24-year-old right-wing YouTuber whose widely criticized videos about Somali daycare centers in Minnesota were followed by a rise in attacks on that community. The announcement comes as Trump faces his own growing list of corruption allegations, including the recent resignation of Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle amid pay-to-play accusations.
Trump said Rep. Ilhan Omar could be deported or “go to jail” and called Somalia “a real shithouse.” In a lengthy rant, Trump called Omar a “sick” and “very dishonest person who hates our country,” referring to the federal investigation into whether her father misstated her age on a citizenship application nearly three decades ago. “She comes from a country that is essentially not even a country,” Trump said. “It’s a real shithouse.… Then she comes over here and she wants to tell us how to run America.” He also claimed, without evidence, that 98% of Somalis in the U.S. “don’t work” and that “most of them shouldn’t be here.” In a bizarre aside, Trump suggested Minnesota once had more lakes before Somali immigrants arrived, saying, “They’ve ruined a great state.” He used the remarks to boost Republican Lisa Demuth, who is running for Minnesota governor against Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
New reporting shows the mysterious mailers targeting transgender students in Texas came from an organization that doesn’t exist. The flyers, sent to homes across Texas, claim to come from the “Texas Transgender Student Union” and offer guidance on emancipation and out-of-state medical care. The Concho Observer, a local outlet in San Angelo, found that the group’s listed address is a UPS Store in Flower Mound, Texas. The outlet estimates the mailing would cost between $3 million and $4.4 million, suggesting a well-funded, deliberate operation. The real Transgender Education Network of Texas, whose branding the flyers appear to mimic, says it had nothing to do with them or an earlier text message campaign. The mailers have sparked outrage among conservative voters as early voting began, and it remains unknown who is behind them.
Other news:
The Trump administration is telling states to prepare to handle most disasters without federal help, according to remarks by FEMA’s administrator obtained by Politico. Speaking to state officials at a conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton said “every state must have the appropriate financial reserves” and capabilities so recovery can begin without waiting on federal disaster declarations. According to Politico, the administration plans to begin cutting disaster aid in as few as six months and shift that responsibility to the states. Hamilton said he hopes for a future in which the federal government “wouldn’t require as many disasters” to be declared because states’ capabilities are “so high and so substantial.” His remarks offered the most detailed look yet at the administration’s long-planned effort to scale back FEMA’s role. The shift would leave states, many of which have limited budgets, to shoulder far more of the cost of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other disasters on their own.
Los Angeles election officials say the Justice Department’s list of suspected non-citizen voters includes a “high percentage” of people born in the United States. The DOJ sent California a list of 20,000 names last week and gave officials 48 hours to set aside ballots from anyone on it unless they could verify citizenship, then sued when the state refused. In a court filing, Los Angeles County said only about 7,000 of the names even had an address in the county. In a sample of 200 records, nearly 39% of those with meaningful birthplace information listed the United States, 43% had cancelled registrations, and 71% had never voted. Homeland Security, which compiled the list, has refused to share how it matched voter rolls to its records, and a similar list it sent Nevada turned out to include 185 people who were all citizens. A top DOJ official acknowledged there “may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.”
The man who tried to ambush Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over the Muslim Brotherhood is the son of a Republican operative recently paid $250,000 to oppose him, The Guardian reports. Thomas “Tommy” Teepell, a former aide to Sen. Josh Hawley, asked El-Sayed to “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood, sparking a five-minute exchange about religious freedom that has drawn more than 50 million views and become a highlight of El-Sayed’s campaign. His father, longtime Hawley strategist Timmy Teepell, runs a firm that was paid $250,000 last month by the dark-money group America Next for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed. America Next has reportedly tried to stir up “organic” opposition, including allegedly offering students $200 to boo El-Sayed at a Flint town hall. Nothing in the filings shows the younger Teepell himself was paid. There is no evidence El-Sayed has any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, despite Trump claiming without evidence that he is “100%” connected.
Italy and France are deploying troops ahead of more cost-of-living protests planned for Saturday. Italy is sending 500 soldiers to Milan after weekend unrest in which hooded youths set fires and looted stores near the city’s cathedral, leading to 271 detentions. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is moving to approve tougher security measures, including extending preventive detention for minors and banning gatherings by people deemed a public threat. In France, the interior minister said military forces would be deployed to free up police, while the prime minister promised a “massive” police presence after riots that led to nearly 2,400 arrests. Curfews remain in place in parts of Paris and other cities. A new Italian movement has vowed to protest every Saturday “until this government of thieves collapses.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is facing a conservative backlash after calling for a national wealth tax and near-100% inheritance taxes. In an interview with The New York Times, Kirby called wealth inequality “a danger to society” and said, “We should have a national wealth tax – it won’t work by state because people will just move.” He added that inheritance taxes should “get close to 100% at some level,” saying, “I would pay them.” Conservatives pointed out that Kirby made $32 million last year, and commentator Glenn Beck called for a boycott of United. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called the comments “audacious” and suggested Kirby give his salary to his lowest-paid employees. The remarks come two weeks before Californians vote on a proposed 5% tax on the state’s billionaires.
Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of vaccine researchers praised by RFK Jr. and seized doses of hepatitis B vaccine. The researchers, whom Kennedy once called “the deities of vaccine research,” are at the center of a controversial study backed by $1.6 million from the CDC that would deny hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 newborns for their first six weeks of life. Hepatitis B infects about one in five adults in Guinea-Bissau and can cause liver cancer and failure, while vaccination at birth is safe and highly effective. The World Health Organization called any study that withholds the vaccine “unethical,” warning it exposes newborns to “serious and potentially irreversible harm.” Guinea-Bissau’s health minister has denied that the trial will move forward. Kennedy has repeatedly cited the group’s research, including when he cut U.S. funding to the global vaccine alliance Gavi.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey spared the life of a death row inmate, citing doubts about the evidence against him. Ivey commuted Toforest Johnson’s death sentence to life in prison without parole, saying there was “not enough direct evidence to carry out the most serious punishment.” Johnson was convicted of the 1995 murder of a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy and has long maintained he was on the other side of town at the time. The current district attorney, along with a former Alabama attorney general and former chief justices, has supported his bid for a new trial. The key prosecution witness, who claimed to overhear Johnson confess on a phone call, was paid $5,000, and his lawyers say the state hid that motive. Ivey, who has overseen 27 executions, said her decision “is not a determination of innocence,” and Johnson’s attorneys vowed to keep fighting to clear his name.
Kyle Kennedy, a granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy and an advocate for education and disability rights, has died at 42. According to her obituary, she died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts on September 21, though her cause of death was not announced. Kennedy suffered a severe spinal cord injury in 2020 that left her with long-term paralysis and other medical challenges. She built a career in early childhood education, starting with Teach for America in New York City public schools, and earned master’s degrees from Pace and Harvard. After her injury, she advocated for people with disabilities, including testifying at the Massachusetts statehouse on discrimination in health care. She is survived by her two sons, her mother, and her siblings.
Spotify says it has removed more than 50 million AI-generated “slop” and spam tracks from its recommendations this year. The company said it identified the tracks by analyzing songs listeners frequently skipped or ignored, which consistently overlapped with AI-generated audio. Spotify combined that data with metadata and outside AI-detection tools to keep such content out of users’ recommendations. The flood of AI music threatens human artists’ earnings, since royalties are based partly on their share of total streams. Spotify has also begun labeling suspected AI artists with an “AI Persona” badge and excluding them from recommendations by default. “As AI makes music more abundant, we believe listeners will value human artistry even more,” the company said.
A Connecticut woman accused of holding her stepson captive for more than 20 years is set to go to trial in February. Kimberly Sullivan is charged with kidnapping, assault, unlawful restraint, and cruelty after her stepson told police he had been abused, starved, and held captive since he was 11. Police said he weighed just 68 pounds at 5-foot-9 when he was found, after setting a fire in his room to escape. Photos released by police showed squalid rooms and doors locked from the outside. Sullivan has pleaded not guilty and rejected two plea deals that would have sent her to prison for 10 to 20 years. If convicted, she faces more than 45 years in prison.
British police have rearrested two men on suspicion of helping Iranian intelligence in a suspected plot against a U.S.-run air base in England. The men, a 24-year-old British national and a 25-year-old dual British-Iranian national, were arrested under the National Security Act. The incident occurred in late September at RAF Fairford, a base used to launch bombing missions against Iran during this year’s war. Police found gasoline in three vans at the site but no explosives, and the U.S. later pulled its bombers from the base. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the plot was “almost certainly” directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, though Iran denies involvement. Britain’s MI5 chief said more than 50 people have been arrested over Iran-linked plots in the past year.
Prince Harry says he wants to reconcile with his brother Prince William and his father, King Charles. In an interview with GQ about grief and family, Harry said, “Some people don’t want it to work out – I want it to work out.” He added that “with everything else that’s going on in the world, the most important thing is to reconcile.” Harry, Meghan, and their children moved back to the U.K. in August, six years after stepping away from royal duties. Asked whether the rift could be repaired, he said, “Scars stick around forever,” but encouraged everyone to let go of the past. A spokesperson later said his “some people” comment was not a swipe at his brother or any other family member.
The woman who accused Cornell fraternity members of gang-raping her says the university’s president appeared to question her account. In a letter to the faculty senate, the woman, known as Jane Doe, said her sorority’s former president told her that Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff asked, “Why did she wait so long to report it?” She wrote that she “felt unsupported and disbelieved.” Cornell disputed the account, saying Kotlikoff’s question was directed at bystanders who didn’t use the school’s anonymous tip line despite social media chatter about the incident. Doe’s civil lawsuit accuses seven members of the now-shuttered Chi Phi fraternity of drugging and assaulting her in 2024, allegations several of the men deny. The faculty senate is weighing a possible no-confidence vote, and Cornell has hired former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to lead an independent review.
An elderly California couple pleaded not guilty to murdering their son-in-law, a New York Times engineer, at a park. Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, are accused of shooting Jonathan McKinsey in a crowded Dublin, California, parking lot in September as he was leaving a supervised visit with his children. Prosecutors say the couple waited for him, while their attorney says they did not premeditate the shooting and acted out of fear after McKinsey allegedly threatened Chen’s life three times. McKinsey was in a bitter divorce and custody fight with their daughter and was facing misdemeanor child abuse charges that limited him to supervised visits. Police say Zhang admitted to the shooting. If convicted, both could face life in prison without parole.
Pennsylvania health officials are warning of a rise in measles among pregnant women and in rare cases of congenital measles in newborns. The state says 66 pregnant women have been infected since its outbreak began in April, raising the risk of miscarriage, early labor, and low birth weight. Doctors say at least six babies have been born with measles, two of whom ended up in intensive care with pneumonia, and at least one baby has died. Congenital measles was rare even before vaccines, because most women had been infected as children, and is now re-emerging as vaccination rates fall. The U.S. has recorded more than 4,400 measles cases this year, including nearly 1,300 in Pennsylvania. Officials urge women to get vaccinated before becoming pregnant, since the vaccine can’t be given during pregnancy.
A drone strike on a market in the disputed Abyei region killed more than 150 people, South Sudanese officials say. Officials blamed Sudan’s military for the attack, which they say hit a market north of Abyei town on Monday, displacing about 8,000 people. Diplomatic sources told Reuters the strike hit a fuel depot that had previously been used to supply Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The death toll more than doubled overnight as fires continued to burn and rescuers struggled to recover bodies. Doctors Without Borders said it was treating more than 20 wounded, many with burns. Sudan’s civil war, which began in April 2023, has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and increasingly spilled across its borders.
Israeli fire killed at least four Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, including a married couple and a 17-year-old, despite an ongoing ceasefire. Medics said an Israeli airstrike killed Akram Yassin and his wife in their Gaza City apartment, and Israel said Yassin was a senior official in Hamas’s security apparatus. A 17-year-old boy was killed by Israeli gunfire in Khan Younis, and another person was killed east of Gaza City. “We’re supposed to be in a ceasefire period, but honestly, we are not seeing a ceasefire or anything,” said the brother of one of the victims. Israel accuses Hamas of rearming and launching attacks, which Hamas denies. Gaza health officials say at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire began a year ago, while Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed.
More On Trump's Sellout Of Ukraine, Europe, American National Security
President Trump warmly greeted Russian President Vladimir Putin last summer in Alaska with red carpet treatment rolled out by the U.S. military in honor of a longtime adversary of the United States highly active in disrupting elections, media and other institutions to help his allies operating in the United States (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
Public Notice, News and Opinion: The plot against Ukraine (and Europe), David R. Lurie, Oct. 20, 2026. We are now part of the axis of evil.
Donald Trump has never hidden his infatuation with Vladimir Putin and his brutal dictatorial regime, or his disdain for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s resilient democracy.
Before entering the White House for the second time in 2025, Trump agreed with Putin’s fictional grievances over the expansion of NATO — which provided the pretense for Putin’s assault on his neighbor, saying “I could understand their feeling.” Nonetheless, the Trump regime still purported to be supporting Ukraine’s defense.
But last week, Trump gave up any pretense of being a “mediator” in Russia’s War on Ukraine, and openly threw in his lot with Putin.Putin needs Trump's help more than everPutin needs Trump's help more than everDavid R. Lurie·January 14, 2025Read full story
The dire significance of Trump’s actions can’t be minimized. Trump has declared his desire to make the United States an ally in Russia’s ever more brutal effort to annihilate Ukraine, including by bolstering Russia’s flagging economy with US funds, and using Ukraine’s dependence on US defense systems against it by hobbling the country’s successful offensive and defensive actions.
But there may be a silver lining in a very dark cloud: Ukraine’s true supporters are being forced to face facts many have long avoided.
Over the past two years, many have clung to the false proposition that pandering and supplication could induce Trump to change his mind and support Ukraine. That baseless theory allowed some Europeans to avoid the reality that they must take on the full burden — including the costs and risks — of supporting Ukraine, or face the inevitability that Russia will come after them next.
The false notion that Trump was not fully committed to Putin also allowed many Republican supporters of Ukraine to justify looking the other way while Trump uttered his endearments to the Russian dictator.
Now that the Trump/Putin alliance has been indelibly formalized, denial is no longer a remotely reasonable option.The fake peace plan
Trump’s announcement of his full-blown alliance with Putin was preceded by an attempt by his incompetent and absurdly corrupt team of “envoys,” real estate investor Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to advance a predictably bogus Ukraine “peace plan.”
On October 9, Witkoff and Kushner made a show of inviting representatives of Ukraine, as well and European and NATO representatives whom they had previously frozen out of their “mediation” efforts, to a meeting at Witkoff’s Florida golf club.
The purpose, as columnist (and Kushner mouthpiece) David Ignatius explained in a recent column, was to announce a “peace” initiative.
As Ignatius touted, instead of going along with Putin’s demand for all of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, the Trumper plan offered Ukraine the “carrot” of a ceasefire based on the current lines — “guaranteed” by the US (whatever that is worth).
The only problem with the “plan” was that Putin has resolutely refused such terms in the past, and there’s no indication he’s changed his mind.
Ingnatius asserted that the Trumper “envoys” had extended a generous offer of funding the rebuilding of Ukraine once Russia’s campaign of devastation ends. What Ignatius failed to mention, but later emerged from press reports, is that Kushner and Witkoff also demanded (as they have in the past) that Europe hand over to Trump as yet undisclosed portions of the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets currently held in Belgium.
In sum, their “peace plan” was to use those monies — which rightfully belong to Ukraine — to fund the “rebuilding” effort, presumably after skimming a large amount off the top for Trump cronies.The one-sided “ceasefire”
To cap off this great proposal, Witkoff and Kushner reportedly announced that the “peace plan” would involve an immediate halt on some of the most devastating attacks in the war … but solely by Ukraine.
For months, Ukraine has been striking key elements of Russia’s war economy, particularly its oil and gas industry, by attacking hydrocarbon industry plants and other infrastructure, including refineries and tankers. As a result, Russia’s ability to generate oil revenues on the black market is becoming impaired, as is Russia’s ability to produce the refined fuel that is crucial to the operation of its economy and prosecution of its war of conquest against Ukraine.
One would expect that Kushner and Witkoff, as supposed “mediators,” would want Ukraine to continue its strikes. After all — as demonstrated during Zelenskyy’s notorious February 2025 Oval Office encounter with Trump and JD Vance — Ukraine needs to have such “cards” of its own both to defend itself and obtain leverage over Russia in any actual negotiations.
But the very opposite was true. Over at least the past several months, it has come to light that US representatives from Vance on down have been demanding that Ukraine cease attacking Russian refineries. And during the Florida golf course meeting, Kushner and Witkoff formalized that demand for what Trump later called an “energy ceasefire.”
The problem, of course, is that such a one-sided “deal” would leave Russia free to continue hitting Ukraine’s heating and electrical infrastructure in advance of the winter, as Putin’s regime has been doing with ever greater ferocity — including immediately after Trump announced the “ceasefire.”
The peace “proposal,” therefore, was actually a proposal for Ukraine to hobble its own military and defense activities, while Russia assaults Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure.
Trump’s “diesel deal”
But Trump himself all but put the kibosh on his purported mediators’ “peace plan” by announcing his intention for the US to join Iran, North Korea, and China in becoming an open ally in — and profiteer from — Russia’s “Special Military Operation” against Ukraine.
The vehicle for that announcement was Trump’s declaration that he had reached a “diesel deal” with Russia, pursuant to which the US would purchase diesel fuel from Russia and facilitate the sale of the fuel by Russia to other countries.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States has cut off purchases of Russian oil and gas and has strongly pressured allies, particularly Europeans, to do the same. Some countries, particularly Germany, have substantially reconfigured their economies to end dependence on Russian hydrocarbons.
Furthermore, just weeks ago, Trump signed into law the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which was to impose massive secondary tariffs on countries that continued to purchase Russian oil and gas, including China and India. Trump’s announcement was, therefore, a complete about-face, rendering the US into a buyer and marketer of the very same Russian oil products the US has pressured others to shun.
It was hard to make sense of Trump’s actions in light of actual energy market realities.
Because of Ukraine’s successful refinery strikes, as Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged during two Sunday interviews, Russia has been experiencing a serious shortage of diesel.
Indeed, Putin has had to turn to other countries, including South Korea, for supplies of the fuel. Furthermore, the US produces more diesel that it consumes, so it’s unlikely that Russian diesel would be imported to the US even if it was available.
But Trump’s actual purpose was plainly not to increase US diesel supplies, or otherwise lower consumer prices, but rather to make clear his intention to definitively change sides and become Russia’s wartime ally — and to undermine the international sanctions regime against Russia that the US worked so hard to implement over the past nearly five years.
This became all the more clear when reports began leaking out that Trump’s “peace” envoys, Witkoff and Kushner, have been working on a plan with their close associate, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to pressure Germany to start buying Russian gas again — but this time in a commercial arrangement that will give Trump-associated American firms a cut. This jibes completely with another Kushner/Witkoff scheme that was recently leaked to sell the assets of a large Russian oil company, Lukoil, to an American investor named Todd Boehly who has donated millions to Trump.
If Russia is going to be an ally, why shouldn’t Trumpers get a piece of the resulting gusher of oil profits?Trump loves Xi because he wants to be himTrump loves Xi because he wants to be himNoah Berlatsky·Sep 28Read full story
Trump capped off the week by announcing last Friday that he was “implementing” the Graham Act by suspending its provisions and preventing the sanctioning of purchasers of Russian goods, including the diesel fuel Trump has effectively been marketing for his ally Putin’s part.
The Graham Act requires the president to provide certification that any such waiver “is in the national interests of the United States” and to report to Congress on why that’s the case. But Trump made a mockery of these requirements by simply declaring that his about-face in US policy is in the national interest without any substantial explanation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in typically disingenuous fashion, later said that Trump “wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” despite the fact that the president signed a law calling for those sanctions and tariffs just days ago.
But, of course, by that time, everyone knew Trump’s actual purpose was to help Putin vanquish Ukraine and endanger the rest of Europe.
The scheme to hobble Ukrainian defenses
Trump’s decision to ally the US with Russia became clear last week, when the Defense Department — which uses its sophisticated aerial intelligence to warn Ukraine of incoming Russian ballistic missile attacks — repeatedly failed to provide such warnings in advance of massive Russian assaults on Kyiv. That came on the heels of reports that Kushner and Witkoff had threatened a complete cutoff of US intelligence sharing with Ukraine during the “peace” talks in Florida.
Then, on October 12 — entirely without warning — the Ukrainian armed forces began to incur sudden speed and connection interruptions in the SpaceX-owned Starlink systems used for navigation of many Ukrainian drones. As a result, Ukraine’s ability to both intercept incoming Russian drone attacks and conduct the midrange attacks the country has been pursuing with great success on Russian military logistics hubs were drastically impaired.
The unexplained cutoff was met with such anger and dismay by Ukraine and its allies that even Putin-friendly oligarch Elon Musk distanced himself from it, stating it was ordered by the US military. Defense Department sources then pointed the finger at, you guessed it, the White House.
Rubio later acknowledged that the US government has wholly cut off Ukraine from the “military” elements of Starlink. Rubio went on to say that it is “under discussion right now how [Ukraine] would want to use” the services Trump has cut off, more than implying that Trumpers are continuing to try to blackmail Ukraine into a one way “energy ceasefire.”
Just yesterday, reports emerged the United States has been holding off on giving necessary approvals to Ukraine of the transfer of Patriot missile interceptors — which provide virtually the only effective defense to increasing Russian ballistic missile attacks. This comes as the US itself has largely refused to provide these interceptors to Ukraine from its own stockpiles.
Also on Monday, Trump opined that Russia "hasn't been doing much" to Ukraine and that its brutal war of annihilation is “fine.”
Facing facts
During a Sunday morning interview Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked if Ukraine is an ally of the United States. He refused to give a straight answer, but effectively responded in the negative by berating Zelenskyy.
Trump himself is far less cagey than Bessent on the topic of who his allies are. He recently announced that he was going to invite Putin to attend the G20 meeting, to be held in December at his own Doral golf club. It is now clear that if Putin attends, it will be in his newly anointed role as US, or rather Trump, ally.
Trump’s open effort to join nations like Iran, North Korea, and China in aiding Putin’s murderous assault on Ukraine is nothing short of disastrous, and it will leave a lasting moral stain on the United States. But there may be something of a silver lining to this dark cloud.
Since Trump returned to the presidency, many of Ukraine’s supporters — including some allies in Europe and Republicans in the US — have clung to the theory that, despite Trump’s fondness for Putin, he was not ineluctably committed to a pro-Russian position. All that was needed, these “optimists” argued, was continued sweet-talking and submission from Ukraine’s leaders — including a lot of plaintive “thank yous” — and Trump would come around.
This never made much sense, particularly given the ample evidence that Russia helped Trump get elected, and continues to cultivate him through elaborate disinformation campaigns and by offering lucrative financial “deals” to the likes of Kushner, Witkoff and other Trump cronies.
But it was also, in certain respects, a reassuring fiction.Diesel Don is tanking the GOPDiesel Don is tanking the GOPTom Schaller·Oct 3Read full story
Many European countries have been notably hesitant to take all of the steps necessary to assist Ukraine in defending itself against Russia. Those include sharing weapons systems and stocks of anti-missile defense weapons (if the US allows it), and by providing Ukraine with access to frozen Russian assets, which are needed both to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat and fully fund the country’s defense.
That European hesitation has continued despite, and possibly in some respects because, Russia has been increasing its so-called hybrid war on other European countries, consisting of everything from cyber attacks to kinetic terror attacks on airports and infrastructure. The use of the term “hybrid warfare” itself reflects a form of self-denial by Europeans, many of whom are hesitant to acknowledge that they are now effectively at war with Russia.
Trump’s now open alliance with Russia may increase the impetus for European leaders to take more steps necessary to provide Ukraine — which after all is the frontline defender of the entire continent against Russian aggression — the resources it requires to prevail. But even if such full-throated resolve is forthcoming, it could also be too late given that (with the help of Russia) pro-Russian politicians may soon come to power in France and potentially Germany.
There also remains a chance, albeit a small one, that some of the vast majority of Republicans who have long claimed to support Ukraine against Russia’s murderous assault will finally stand up to Trump, even feebly. Lindsey Graham’s sister, who Trump plucked out of obscurity to become her late brother’s successor, took a first step in that direction last week by opposing Trump’s “diesel deal” with Putin. A drubbing in the midterms and Trump’s descent into the political basement could encourage that process.
Recent history makes it hard to say that optimism is warranted. But continued, and ever greater, efforts by Ukraine’s supporters are nonetheless essential. The stakes not only for Ukraine, but also the world, could not be higher.
Proof, Investigative Commentary: Second Treason Scandal Hits Donald Trump and the White House, Seth 
Abramson, left, Oct. 16-17, 2026. A Trump-Israel Treason scandal that’s already embroiled Trump, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee deputy David Milstein has deepened—even as a new Treason scandal involving Russia blows up.
More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: More Terrible Polling For Trump Today. If Anything The Election Is Moving Further Away From Him And The Rs, Simon Rosenberg, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Fourteen days to go. Yesterday Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas started early in-person voting. Today Hawaii, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah, and Wisconsin join them.
Millions and millions will be voting now as we hurdle deeper into the general election. Let’s now spend a little time looking at where we are with two weeks of voting left.
If anything -- despite the billions in ads, his intense campaigning, the escalating voter bribes, his corrupt control over legacy and social media -- Trump just keeps dropping as we get closer to the election. It is a bit stunning. On Sunday we reviewed the NBC and ABC/WaPo polls which had him at 34% and 33%, the worst showing for Trump in these polls this cycle.
Today we see decline in two more polls. The first is Reuters/Ipsos, and just look the trend lines in this data:
The second is the daily Civiqs track where Trump also hit a new low today:
Reuters/Ipsos also found the generic blowing open for us:
This graph looks a lot like the Gallup Party ID graph we’ve been gawking at this past week.
We got a very encouraging poll of Ohio from Marist, a highly regarded independent pollster:A respected Alaska poll has our gubernatorial candidate up 10 points, 55%-45%, when ranked choice voting is played all the way through (no data on the Senate race, assume we will get that tomorrow):
We are starting to get enough early in-person voting to start diving into the early vote in some states. For our early vote analysis our baseline will always be 2022, we use TargetEarly “modeled party” data, and we should assume with independents breaking 2:1 Dem right now that in each state we pick up between 1 and 3 points net in share from the unaffiliated vote. Let’s look at two high performing states now.
Georgia. Aggregate vote higher than 2022, Dem share up 6 points over 2022:
North Carolina. Aggregate vote way up over 2022, Dems running 19 points over 2022. Anderson Clayton is bringing it!
Another encouraging bit of data is the strong performance of Hispanic voters across the country who we know are trending very Democratic this time. Traditionally a late voting electorate the Hispanic share of the 2026 vote is 22% higher today than at this point in 2022:
I know there are encouraging signs from the first day of voting in Texas but I want to let a little more vote come in before diving in there. I am struggling to figure out how to convey all this to you each day for there is so much data, and more is coming in every day!Subscribed
With 14 days to go here’s the bottom line my friends - if anything the election is moving further away from Trump and the Rs right now, despite their enormous cash advantage, Trump’s ferocious campaigning, their escalating bribes of the electorate, and their control over legacy and social media. It’s stunning. And righteous, for we are on the cusp of having the election we all wanted to have, and the Trump and the Rs certainly deserve.
Which is why we just need to put our heads down now, my friends, drive the early vote, support our candidates and state parties, and go win this thing, together!
Yes, It’s Time To Go Kick These Corrupt Traitors’ Asses, Win The Midterms, And Fight The Fuckery That Is Already Here
Defiance.org, Opinion: Trump may try to hijack the vote. And we’re going to stop the steal, Miles Taylor, right, National security expert, ex-DHS chief of staff, NYT best-selling author. Was “Anonymous” — now urging folks to take their masks off, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is getting desperate, but we’re more prepared than ever to protect our democracy.
In 2020, Donald Trump’s mob chanted “stop the steal” while he tried to steal an election he lost. Two weeks out from the midterms, that phrase is about to be turned against him.
I want you to zoom out for a moment on what Trump has said and done this election cycle. It’s the best preview you can get of what he might try to do in two weeks. It’s scary. But it’s also been met with an unprecedented response.
In January, he told the New York Times he regretted not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020. Weeks later, armed FBI agents raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and carted off more than 600 boxes of ballots and voter rolls, proof that he’s willing to lay hands on the actual votes. In February, he said Republicans should “take over the voting” and “nationalize” elections, and then he signed an executive order to gut mail-in voting. In the meantime, his allies pushed the SAVE Act to bolt new ID requirements onto registration and purge the rolls.
And then his Justice Department demanded every state’s voter file and sued roughly 30 states that refused. Last week, it gave California officials 48 hours to act on a list of 20,000 supposed “noncitizen” voters or face prosecution. ICE has also bought voter data, ingested more than 50 million voter records, opened “voter fraud” investigations in nine states and run voter rolls through USCIS citizenship databases known to be faulty and flag actual citizens. Meanwhile, the administration has sidelined CISA (the agency that guards elections from foreign interference) and has threatened election workers with prosecution, including refusing to rule out sending armed agents to the polls, which Steve Bannon says is the plan.
That’s just an off-the-cuff summary. And much of it rests on the phantom menace of the “noncitizen voter,” a threat that doesn’t exist and has never been shown to have affected the results of an American election. Ever. Yet the Trump administration appears to be planning to use that non-existent danger to take dramatic action if they don’t like the results of the midterms.
Already, this is the most sweeping campaign of election interference by a sitting president in American history. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s colliding with the most sweeping mobilization ever assembled to stop one. He’s been getting crushed in the courts, as groups have sued him top to bottom over his attempts at voter suppression.
Just look at DEFIANCE.org alone and what we’re up to. I want you to do that because it’s a powerful reminder of how much more prepared the pro-democracy side is this time around than in 2020. In the past few months alone, our members have:
And that’s just what one small organization has helped make happen.
Multiply it across the whole pro-democracy movement, and you’ll begin to see what Trump is up against. He’s facing hyper-prepared election officials… prosecutors and sheriffs… armies of lawyers with briefs already drafted… millions of Americans ready to fill the streets… and an independent media operation big enough to shoot down the president’s lies in real time. This isn’t a repeat of 2020, when people scrambled to respond to Trump’s bogus election claims.
This year, a corrupt president is walking into a pro-democracy buzzsaw. And he’s desperate because he knows he’s losing.
So as we go into the final two weeks before the midterms, let me just say this: if Donald Trump tries to steal this election, WE will come together to turn his old catch phrase against him. WE will “stop the steal.” And if he lays a hand on our ballots, WE will lay down the law.Inb
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: These Midterms Could Matter *A Lot*, William Kristol, right, Oct. 20, 2026. There are two weeks left until election day 2026. It seems like it could be a big moment, even perhaps an historic one.
Or are we too swept up in the moment? It’s only a midterm election, after all. And midterms come and go, oscillating back and forth, absorbing for a moment and then pretty quickly forgotten. History with a capital ‘H’ is surely made by presidential elections, not midterms. We think of our political eras as beginning in 1876, or 1932, or 1980. Who today remembers 1874, or 1930, or 1978?
Take 1930. It was important in its own right, and a harbinger of things to come. That midterm saw Democratic gains of 8 Senate seats, 52 House seats, and seven governorships. It effectively ended a decade of Republican political dominance. The new Congress—though not under full Democratic control—began passing some progressive legislation. In New York, Franklin Roosevelt, who two years earlier had been elected with a margin of less than one percent of the vote, won re-election with a margin of 23 percent, laying the groundwork for his winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, and thus for the New Deal, and ultimately for the history of the next several decades.
Or consider 2010. The Republican party rebounded from disastrous defeats in 2006 and 2008 to win 63 House seats and control of that body, along with six Senate seats and six governorships. That off-year election turned out to forecast a decade and a half of Republican political dominance. Barack Obama’s re-election was the exception to the rule: Over the subsequent sixteen years, Republicans controlled the House for twelve and the Senate for ten. And ideologically and temperamentally, the Tea Party movement was something of a harbinger of the Trumpist takeover of the GOP. When the history of the Trumpist decade 2016–2026 is written, 2010 will be the first chapter. Or perhaps the second, after the midterm elections of 1994.
We can’t know what’s going to happen on Election Day in two weeks, let alone over the next two years. Democrats did well in 2018, but that didn’t amount to the decisive repudiation of Trump many of us then hoped. History doesn’t move in straight or smooth lines. Nor does it repeat itself. I’m not even sure it rhymes. The future is undetermined.
But while midterms may not be the moment recognized by history, they can matter historically. They can signal the waning of an old era. And they can be a preamble, a prelude, to a new one. This year may be no exception.
Assuming the electoral repudiation of Trump’s Republican party is as decisive as now looks likely, Trump’s standing in the nation and his party will be weakened. He’ll still be president and can do a lot of damage to the country and the world in his last two years. And he’ll still mostly control the Republican party. But it’s hard to see him having the kind of dominance going forward he’s had for the past decade. This doesn’t mean we’ll see a responsible or even defensible Republican party any time soon. But it means turmoil ahead in the GOP.
And unless Trump’s public approval recovers, Democrats will have a good shot at winning the presidency in 2028. Parties tend not to retain the presidency when they have to face the voters with very unpopular incumbent presidents—whether the incumbents are on the ballot (1932, 1980, 1992) or not (1952, 1968, 2008). And if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, he’s very likely to have majorities in both houses of Congress, and Democratic governors in a substantial majority of the largest states.
No less important than a possible electoral inflection point is a likely ideological one. It’s obvious that in many important areas of national life we’re going in the coming years to have fundamental debates and face new choices: regarding America’s role in the world, the problems of excessive oligarchic wealth and power, radically new challenges like artificial intelligence, and the very meaning of the American experiment.
It also seems likely that 2028 will mark the end of the long period of Baby Boomer dominance of our politics and society, the demographic end of the Clinton-George W. Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump era. January 2029 will surely see a younger president than any of these men—perhaps much younger, formed in a different era. And one sees harbingers of this generational transfer of power in races across the nation this year.
So 2026 probably won’t be a red-letter date in the history books. But 2028 could be one. If it is, it will be due in part to groundwork that was laid this year. So if future historians write of a No Kings era beginning in 2028, those of us who are still around can quietly interject to say: Don’t forget 2026.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes… Trump’s decline is accelerating, and RICK WILSON joins GEORGE CONWAY on Psycho Politics to explain why he sees a GOP catastrophe ahead.QUICK HITS
WORSE THAN EVER: As Russia’s war on Ukraine grinds on, Russian strikes on population centers continue to kill civilians by the hundreds. At least 328 were killed and 2,105 injured in September alone, per UN human-rights monitors, who added that the first two weeks of October were even worse: “among the deadliest for civilians in recent years.”
Donald Trump isn’t concerned. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” he told reporters yesterday. He’d be happy, he said, to take the trilateral meeting between the United States, Russia, and China that Vladimir Putin recently suggested, but he doesn’t know why the subject of Ukraine would even come up much: “I would do it, not so much for Ukraine. . . . We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization.” (Trump didn’t elaborate on which of the three powers he sees as likely to consider giving up its nuclear weapons, or why he thinks there is the remotest possibility of that happening.)
It’s not like Trump had nothing to say on Ukraine, of course. He got in a few extra punches against the embattled supposed U.S. ally: “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us. Remember that.” We’ll certainly remember the disgrace of a president who says things like this for a long, long time.
NETANYA-WHO?: Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t split openly on much. But after Trump made a glowing endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection Sunday—calling him “a Great Warrior Prime Minister, and an even greater Partner for Peace”—Vance quietly declined to share in his boss’s enthusiasm. Asked about the endorsement by pool reporters yesterday, Vance “declined to endorse Netanyahu and replied that he endorses American candidates and is not getting involved in Israeli elections.”
Vance is not always so circumspect. Since becoming vice president, he has frequently thrown his support behind hard-right candidates and parties abroad, campaigning this year for Viktor Orbán in Hungary and speaking last year on behalf of Germany’s growing Alternative für Deutschland party. But Vance—who is far more attuned to the currents of the online right than Trump is, and who unlike Trump has to worry about winning Republicans’ votes going forward—seems far more cautious about tying himself to Israel’s controversial leader.
THE SCAPEGOAT OLYMPICS: With a likely blue wave looming just over the horizon, everyone is already scrambling for positioning to shape the narrative of who gets to take credit—and who will have to take blame. Last week, our Lauren Egan had a great newsletter on the credit side of things, focusing on the proxy fight over Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. (Short version: If he wins, progressives will see it as a signal that their brand of politics can win even in tough, purple races; if he loses, centrists will be quick to brand him a cautionary tale.)
Over on Team Red, Politico reports, there’s a grumpier, more vicious fight brewing: Who will be the fall guy?
Much of the GOP’s ire is focused on a couple Senate candidates who, strategists grumble, shouldn’t have let their races get close in the first place: Ken Paxton in Texas and Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas. Much of the cash being trucked in to try to drag that pair over the finish line could have been extremely helpful elsewhere: “All of this money that was expected to go to the House, for the most part, is now being wasted on the Senate because they fucked up so bad,” one operative working on House races complained.
Trump has his own scapegoats in mind. In a Truth Social post last week, he berated Sen. John Cornyn—whom Paxton humiliated in the Texas primary after securing a late Trump endorsement—for failing to throw his enthusiastic support behind the guy who beat him. “If Ken Paxton loses,” Trump fumed, “it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”
If you’ve paid any attention to the last decade of Cornyn’s career as a loyal footsoldier for Trump, this is a particularly funny line of attack. Read the whole thing.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases: ‘Independent’? Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 20, 2026. 🚨 14 Days to the Midterms 🚨 No incumbent Republican Senate candidate has fared worse than Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in debates. Her fundamental dilemma is simple: After years of feigning to follow in the tradition of Maine “independence,” her record reveals she has been a rubber stamp for the Trump regime’s worst nominees and policies.
In the first Trump term, she voted to confirm both Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, two obviously anti-choice justices selected in large part because they could be relied upon to reverse Roe v. Wade. She regrets nothing, as the New York Times reported in June:
“I do not regret that vote,” Ms. Collins, widely seen as the most vulnerable Republican senator up for re-election this year, said when asked about the episode by The Portland Press Herald. “I do disagree with Justice Kavanaugh’s vote.” . . .
“When I look at a justice, I look at their qualifications, their integrity, their background, their experience in reaching a decision,” she said. “Obviously, I’m disappointed in that decision.”
“Disappointed” does not begin to describe the reaction of millions of women and their loved ones. Thanks to Collins’s votes, women denied access to abortions have died, suffered serious health complications, and otherwise had their constitutional rights stripped from them. “Disappointed” does not capture the reaction of Maine pro-choice voters who believed her gibberish over the years about defending a woman’s right to choose.
Moreover, Collins now paints herself as a willing dupe, insisting Kavanaugh did not lie to her in saying Roe was settled law. “I do not feel that he lied, but I think that he should not have said it was settled law because, to me, that meant that it would not be overturned,” she lamely offered in a debate. “But to be fair, you cannot ask a nominee how he might vote on some hypothetical future case.” But she did ask him, hypothetically; he misled her, and she doesn’t regret her vote. Independent-minded Mainer or Trump rubber stamp?Subscribed
Collins also voted to confirm Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has become an infamous anti-vaccine crank. In her most recent debate, she stated she does not regret voting for him, either. “I agree with him on some issues; I don’t with others,” Collins declared. “He was very helpful in expediting the release of the low-income eating assistance program.” Well, in that case, the deaths from measles, the thousands of contracted illnesses, the decimation of our national health research infrastructure, and the loss of hundreds of seasoned medical professionals are just the price of…expediting the release of a low-income eating assistance program?!? Maybe this is what she thinks it means to be an independent Mainer. But many voters now see this as a pathetic excuse for rubber-stamping yet another plainly unfit Trump nominee.
Speaking of food, the Big, Ugly bill cut roughly $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over 10 years, making it the biggest cut in the program’s history. The Center for Budget and Public Policy Priorities found, “We estimate that SNAP participation nationwide fell by over 5 million people (nearly 13 percent) between the law’s July 2025 enactment and June 2026, based on the latest month of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)… It’s very likely that nationwide, the number of children receiving SNAP has dropped by about 2 million since July 2025.” In Maine alone, well over 14,000 people lost SNAP benefits.
Collins has perfected the art of keeping her fingerprints off the worst, most egregious right-wing legislation, but not even she has been able to disguise her role in this one. As Maine Democrats pointed out at the time, when the bill could have been stopped in its tracks, Collins provided a key vote to move the bill from committee to the floor. “Collins ended up voting against the overall bill, but only after it was clear her vote was no longer needed to pass it,” academic and social services community leader Shawn Yardley pointed out.
Collins’s refusal to stop the Big, Ugly bill also has had tragic consequences for healthcare in Maine. “President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (HR 1), passed in July 2025, made massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy,” Mark Shaffer wrote in the Maine Morning Star. “Around 31,000 Mainers are expected to lose Medicaid due to new administrative burdens from the bill. Many people who lose Medicaid will have to rely on charity care at hospitals or take on debt, harming Mainers and hospitals alike.” Multiple Maine hospitals are at risk of closing due to Medicaid cuts scheduled to hit next year. (Some 9,100 Mainers have already lost coverage.) Collins only feigned “independence” when it came to the Big, Ugly bill. When it mattered, once again, she was a reliable rubber stamp for Trump’s radical MAGA agenda.
Pick a topic — the Iran war, ICE funding, Kash Patel’s nomination, etc. — and Collins was never “independent” enough to thwart Trump’s agenda. Faced with the devastating results of her votes supporting his policies, she has looked clueless and frankly deceptive in debates. Voters now have a chance to render their own verdict. If they’ve gotten sick of the phony pretense of “independent Mainer” they now have the opportunity to reject the rubber stamper and vote for someone who clearly opposes Trump’s extreme right-wing agenda.
The Counteroffensive, Ukraine aid opponents risk losing House seats, Daria Shtonda, Oct. 20, 2026. The US administration withholds Patriot missiles for Ukraine… Witkoff and Zelenskyy head to Norway, for a new round of talks… Russians can’t access money after Ukraine hits datacenters.
As Republicans face a challenging midterm election, several lawmakers who have opposed assistance to Ukraine are defending seats in highly competitive districts.Congress has the power to approve military assistance, allocate funding, impose sanctions on Russia, and scrutinize the president’s foreign policy.
These powers matter all the more as President Trump pressures Kyiv to make concessions while moving to ease sanctions on Moscow.
The upcoming U.S. midterm elections will help determine whether Kyiv receives renewed American military and financial aid. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Congress has not authorized any major assistance packages for Ukraine.
On November 3, American voters will elect all 435 members of the House of Representatives and roughly one-third of the Senate.
As of today, Democrats are leading Republicans by 9 percent on the generic congressional ballot. For Ukraine, the decisive factor is not just which party prevails, but the fate of a specific group: vulnerable Republican incumbents in tight swing districts who have consistently opposed aid, amplified skepticism of Kyiv, or pushed to halt military provisions.
Their re-election would not automatically determine U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Yet if these seats are flipped, the balance of power may shift — and with it the future of American support for Ukraine.
The Counteroffensive identified the most vulnerable lawmakers whose Ukraine records could make their electoral losses particularly consequential.
For Ukraine, the stakes of the midterms will not be decided by a single vote or a single politician. But in a closely divided Congress, a handful of races could determine how much room there is for lawmakers willing to sustain U.S. support for Kyiv — and how much influence those seeking to restrict it will have.
The Bulwark, Focus Groups: Darline Graham’s Seat Isn’t Safe. These Voters Explain Why, Sarah Longwell, Oct. 20, 2026. Some former Trump supporters are still waiting for a reason to like her.
South Carolina Democrats have had their hearts broken before. In 2020, future Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison spent a gajillion dollars (okay, $132 million) and lost to Lindsey Graham by 10 points.
Now, after Lindsey’s passing, his sister, Sen. Darline Graham, is running for a full term against Dr. Annie Andrews, a physician who previously ran for Congress in 2022.
South Carolina is a tougher state for Democrats to compete in than some of the others we’ve covered, like Iowa, Texas, or even Kansas. Donald Trump won here by 18 points in 2024, and racial polarization can also make it even less elastic than other states that are competitive this year.
But there are glimmers of hope. Darline Graham hasn’t had her patients arrested like Roger Marshall or been comically corrupt like Ken Paxton, but South Carolina Republicans didn’t send their best when they sent Darline.
Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews is running a good race. I got to see her up close last week, and she’s incredibly charismatic.
But still, the voters who will decide this race are reverting to their tribal instincts. Last week, we conducted two groups of disaffected 2024 Trump voters, many of whom were from South Carolina and had some choice words for the GOP Senate nominee there.
Those groups tell you why Andrews could get close. And even getting close could mean helping Democrats net a House seat along the way, like the same Charleston-based 1st district that Andrews lost to Nancy Mace in 2022.
PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Humiliates JD Vance By Refusing To Endorse And Falling Asleep On Him, Jason Easley, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump not only refused to endorse JD Vance for 2028, but he also fell asleep on his vice president while Vance was talking.
JD Vance doesn’t get it. Trump is using his vice president as a human shield who is often sent to the worst spots on the campaign trail and sent out in front of the media to take the hit when there is bad news.
Vance’s ambition and arrogance do not allow him to see that he is being used, and Donald Trump has no intention of turning the Republican Party over to him. Trump considers the Republican Party to be his property.
Republican strategists have been saying for months that they don’t expect Trump to step aside and hand the limelight to Vance. The vice president is going to have to battle Trump and a Democratic opponent to get attention during the 2028 campaign.
Vance seems to be heckled or protested nearly everywhere he goes, and polling shows he is the second-most unpopular politician in America, behind his current boss.
JD Vance is not charismatic or personable. He isn’t the new face that Americans seem to be yearning for.
Trump has never shown enthusiasm for JD Vance’s 2028 campaign, but his actions at an Oval Office event with Vance present were an act of sabotage.Trump Refuses To Endorse Vance And Fell Asleep While Vance Spoke
Trump finished his remarks in the Oval Office, and this is what he did as Vance spoke:
Trump was asked, “ I wanted to ask Mr. President, since we have the vice president here, the vice president said in an interview yesterday that he thought that you would endorse him if he does decide to run in twenty twenty-eight. Since we're here could you tell us- “
Trump cut off the question and said, “I tell you this, he's a very talented person, and he's a very good person, but we've literally... I don't think we've ever talked about it.”
Vance said, “No, sir.”
Trump continued:
I said that, too. I don't think we've... who would believe that? I don't talk about it with him. He doesn't talk... It's early. We are very early right now. We have to get through the midterms. We'll see how it goes.
I'm going to a rally in North Carolina. We had an amazing rally last night, Kansas, for a tremendous person, a number of great people, but in particular a senator who's done a fantastic job, as Roger. And I think Roger Marshall was helped a lot last night when we had that... I think it was... It really took him to a very high level, which-- where he's-- where he should be.
Trump gave Vance one sentence, then turned the subject back to himself and his rallies.
Donald Trump isn’t going to endorse Vance until he absolutely has to.
JD Vance is never going to be president, and Trump seems to be determined to make sure that his vice president never outshines him.
Special Report: Trump's Family's Big Lie -- About Spies
Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: In the Trump family of spies, one has particularly evaded scrutiny, Wayne Madsen, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump often praises the intellect of his uncle, Sr. John G. Trump of MIT. It’s not the uncle’s intellect that his nephew claims rubbed off on him but possibly the high treason.
This publication has delved into the espionage activities of a number of members of the Trump family, ranging from Donald Trump, Sr.’s longtime questionable links to Soviet and Russian intelligence during the Cold War and post-Cold War; Fred Trump. Sr.’s ties to Nazi German and Fascist Italian intelligence before and during World War II; and the paternal grandfather, Fred (Friedrich) Trump’s espionage at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel — location of the I.S. Navy’s transceiver radio unit — on behalf of the German Kaiser during World War I.
One Trump who has evaded suspicion is Donald Trump’s professorial uncle, Dr. John G. Trump. The president has often praised his uncle, a longtime professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using him as a benchmark of high intelligence and genetic superiority.
Trump often cites his uncle to claim "good genes" or "much better blood," a common feature of Nazi theories of racial superiority, stating during campaigns and public speeches that his uncle's academic pedigree proves his own natural intelligence. Trump has highlighted John Trump’s scientific background—including his work with high-voltage X-ray cancer treatments and radar development during World War II.
This month, Trump was presented with his uncle’s original 1983 National Medal of Science award. The occasion was the so-called Golden Age of American Innovation Summit held at the Trump-commandeered and renamed “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”
Trump has often inflated the curriculum vitae of his uncle. In July 2025, Trump told a story claiming that his uncle taught the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) at MIT. This was chronologically impossible, as John Trump died in 1985—a decade before Kaczynski was identified—and MIT records confirmed Kaczynski never attended the university. Trump has often misstated his uncle's academic credentials — claiming degrees in nuclear, chemical, and mathematics, when, in fact, his degrees were in electrical engineering and physics.
Trump has also briefly mentioned that his uncle was among the first to see Nikola Tesla’s highly-valued papers after the scientist’s death in 1943. On January 7, 1943: Tesla died at age 86 in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. At the time, Tesla’s innovative notebooks and papers were highly sought after by not only the U.S. government but by Nazi intelligence units operating in and around New York City. Fred Trump, Sr., who had been affiliated with both the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Queens and, later, the Nazi-led German American Bund, served as an important conduit between the Bund and German spies.
It is well known that Fred Trump was so ardently pro-German, he spoke only German in his house and with his German friends. Whether this camaraderie extended to his brother at MIT is sketchy but they did share one thing: their father, Fred Trump, also known as Friedrich, had been doing everything possible to regain the trust of Kaiser Wilhelm’s government after having been banished from Germany by a Bavarian royal decree issued in February 1905. The banishment was due to Friedrich’s failure to register his emigration to North America as a teenager in 1885 and his evasion of mandatory military service. Friedrich left Germany to strike it rich in the United States, which he did by starting hotels, restaurants, and whorehouses during the California and Yukon gold rushes. Friedrich and his wife, Donald Trump’s paternal grandparents, were never happy being Americans but longed for their German homeland. Friedrich’s dream of returning to Germany was never realized as he died from the Spanish flu on May 30, 1918, at the age of 49.
Although the focus on the Trump family has been on Fred, Sr, and his son Donald, relatively little attention has been paid to Friedrich’s other son, Dr. John Trump.
Upon Tesla’s death, federal authorities, acting through the Office of Alien Property Custodian, took control of Tesla's belongings, including technical papers, drawings, and equipment. This occurred despite Tesla having been a naturalized American citizen since 1891. It remains perplexing that the federal government asked Dr. Trump, the son of a pro-German hotel manager and bartender at the McAlpin Hotel, where war plans were devised among U.S. and visiting Allied officers, to examine Tesla's technical documents and determine whether they contained inventions or scientific information valuable to the American war effort.
Although Tesla’s papers were sought after by the intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, Dr. Trump concluded that the papers contained no immediately usable scientific or military breakthroughs. In particular, he found no practical evidence supporting Tesla's claims about a revolutionary particle-beam weapon, popularly called a death ray. But was this a feint by the MIT professor? Did he claim the papers were of no value, while passing on copies of them to his family’s valued German homeland either directly or via his brother, Fred? Considering the Trump family’s four generations of treasonous behavior, Dr. Trump should be considered as suspect as everyone else in the family.
In 1940, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover received a message from someone in Weehawken, NJ referring to a New York Times article about Tesla’s work on a “teleforce” death ray perfected by Tesla. The letter’s author urged Hoover to provide protection for Tesla lest he and his invention falling into the hands of “alien enemies.” The letter and article are found below:
There is also a problem with the chain-of-custody for Tesla’s papers. Dr. Trump's signed report, dated January 30, 1943, confirms that he examined the material on January 26–27 at the Manhattan Warehouse in New York, not in Tesla's hotel room. It also confirms that selected documents were retained by the Office of Alien Property Custodian. But how many may have been retained by Dr. Trump? Some papers were retained by government authorities, and subsequent FBI correspondence acknowledged uncertainty about the whereabouts of portions of Tesla's materials. A January 12, 1943 FBI memo reported that there was fear that “enemy agents” had confiscated some of Tesla’s trunks of documents after his death on January 7th and that the “War Department was interested in this matter.” In a later letter, Hoover wrote that the FBI had never been in possession of any copies of Tesla’s papers (letter below). What? Missing Tesla papers that were briefly in the possession of Dr. Trump (whose brother was a suspected Nazi agent)? Shades of the bathroom of Mar-a-Lago!
Dr. Trump’s suspiciously short examination of Tesla’s papers resulted in a dubiously short summation in his report on the veracity of Tesla’s work:
“His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”
Copies of Tesla's papers on the “death ray” were not “speculative,” as cited by Dr. Trump, nor was the U.S, Navy’s interest in Tesla’s work on a “revolutionary torpedo.” Tesla was investigating particle beam weaponry, something that over three decades later would serve as the basis for Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” strategic missile defense program. Some of Tesla’s papers were sent by the U.S. government to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. A project code-named "Project Nick" received massive funding and was placed under the command of Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's concept. Details of the experiments were never published nor was the involvement of Dr. Trump. One thing is known for certain. The copies of Tesla’s papers held in Dayton disappeared and their whereabouts remain unknown to this day.Did the Trump family profit from Tesla’s purloined research? Or was it their friends, the Nazis, Soviets, or Elon Musk?
It is also odd that in1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions held by the U.S. government were released to Sava Kosanovic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United States from 1946 to 1950 and Tesla’s nephew, and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where the Tesla Museum was created in honor of the naturalized American scientist. Under Marshal Tito’s Communist government, it was extremely difficult for Western journalists and researchers to access to the Tesla archive in Belgrade. Things were much different for Soviet scientists who sent delegation after delegation to the museum during the 1950s. In 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced before the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic weapon was in the hatching stage." Based on the fact that in 1958, the U.S. began work on charged-particle beam weaponry at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. The top secret research, code-named Project Seesaw, was eventually discontinued with the principals of the research claiming that it had nothing to do with Tesla’s papers. That’s exactly the same sort of wave-off of Tesla’s research that was offered up by Dr. Trump.
The FBI stated for years that it had not been the first to enter Tesla’s hotel room after his death but it was the Office of Alien Property, the latter for which Dr. Trump was taking his marching orders. One of many FBI denial letters below:
Successive FBI directors and acting directors from Hoover and L. Patrick Gray III to William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, all denied that the FBI was ever in possession of Tesla’s papers. Yet, questions remain about the ultimate recipients of the valuable research. Was it Nazi nuclear scientist Werner Heisenberg or rocket scientist Werner Von Braun via Dr. Trump and/or his brother Fred? The Soviets? Or the Japanese, who remain very interested in Tesla’s work to this very day. In addition, did Elon Musk’s Tesla Corporation capitalize on any of Tesla’s research, especially considering the fact that Musk has never “invented” anything but has made his fortune on the research conducted by others.
During the 1930s, Tesla claimed to have developed the theoretical basis for a defensive weapon capable of projecting concentrated streams of electrically charged particles.
He suggested that such a weapon could destroy approaching bomber formations, defend national borders against aerial attack, deliver destructive energy over considerable distances, and potentially make conventional aerial warfare obsolete. During the 1930s, this research would have been relevant to Nazi Germany's military improvements, particularly as Germany developed advanced antiaircraft defenses and experimental weapons.
A nagging question remains. Why did Dr. Trump substantially diminish the government's immediate interest in Tesla’s proposed death ray when the record suggests that this research was pursued by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, the Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s, a period when Donald Trump was sidling up to the Soviet Union and communist Czechoslovakia while also denouncing NATO. The Trump family has not been known to value the national security of the United States since the Woodrow Wilson administration and, now, with Donald Trump in charge of everything, how much of Tesla’s research and that of others has flown out of U.S. security vaults into the hands of Moscow, Beijing, or Elon Musk?
Special Report: Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine Is Also Betrayl of U.S On Iran
Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump’s Latest Russia Russia Russia Turn Is about Iran Iran Iran, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Oct. 20, 2026. The collective cognitive failure to be able to read Donald Trump has blinded us to the extent to which Donald Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is about Iran Iran Iran as much as it is Russia Russia Russia.
The Daily Beast noted the other day that Truth Social’s daily traffic has cratered, losing over 30% of daily traffic since last June.
Donald Trump’s Truth Social is hemorrhaging users, with daily traffic plunging more than 30 percent in a year despite the president’s relentless stream of posts.
The social media platform averaged roughly 260,000 daily users last month, a steep drop from its peak of 420,000 in June 2025, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb.
It’s an astonishingly small number. Heather Cox Richardson has upwards of 2.8 million subscribers on Substack, plus a bunch on other platforms. Meidas Touch has 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. On the other side of the spectrum, Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners. Benny Johnson has 6.1 million YouTube subscribers.
Just 260,000 users use Truth Social as if it were a social media website.
Of course, Trump’s own posts don’t, primarily, circulate on Truth Social. They are disseminated by Trump loyalists, self-described journalists, and haters far and wide, achieving a total dissemination that no doubt rivals those other outlets for viewers. But that dissemination happens only via a largely unexamined faith about what Trump Truth Social posts are. For MAGAts, sharing them announces tribal loyalty to the performed power in them. For journalists, it’s a lazy relationship with newsworthiness. For haters, it is often, equally, a tribal statement, triggering the same kind of emotional — and therefore irrational — response.
And while the MAGAts need only the performance of power, for the latter two, there is a conceit that the Truth Social posts in some way provide a transparent view on Trump’s “true” views … even though they are routinely riddled with lies.The Diesel Tweet promising diesel that doesn’t exist
That’s how it happened that Trump’s Diesel Tweet came to be read not just as a statement of his reason for betraying Ukraine — he needed diesel to bring prices down before the election — but also of a momentous call with Vladimir Putin on October 9.
Even Chris Wright couldn’t paper over how absurd that interpretation is (I had been wondering whether Wright was lying to Trump to allow him to sustain this claim). He confessed that Russia didn’t have diesel to export, amid word salad attempting to explain how Trump stating that Russia might export diesel if they chose to stop invading Ukraine would induce them to make peace.
WRIGHT: They’re very different. Russia wants to and can export oil, as a — as was true when I said that, and as is true today. We have not removed the sanctions on Russian oil. We are removing sanctions on a product that Russia currently does not and cannot export.
The way forward for Russia to be able to export diesel is to reduce their war effort, make progress towards peace.
[Martha] RADDATZ: President Trump said that there was a deal, a ceasefire, an energy ceasefire a week ago. Russia and Ukraine said there was no such thing. Were you involved in that? Was there anything?
WRIGHT: This is President Trump encouraging Russia if they want to export diesel, if they want to get the benefits you believe that are about to be showered upon them, the only way they can do that is with an energy ceasefire or reduction of war effort. [my emphasis]
Because there is so much faith among data mules who treat these posts as some form of truth, there was little consideration of other possibilities, such as that the last person in the room — the FSB officer whom JD Vance lauded for being “soft-spoken,” the guy who has always played Trumps narcissism like a maestro — suggested he write the tweet like that, either told him to or leveraged his grievance to get him to scapegoat Ukraine for Trump’s own failures.Both Putin and Trump acknowledged the Diesel Tweet was (also) about Iran
And in fact, both Putin and Trump acknowledged that their October 9 conversations were about — were also about — Iran.
In his post scapegoating Ukraine for the diesel shortage Trump’s own invasion of Iran caused, he included the non sequitur, “it must be understood, that Iran will not have a Nuclear Weapon!”
Wright’s word salad with Martha Raddatz also included that rhetorical dodge. When Raddatz pointed out what everyone should about the Diesel Tweet — that Trump, not Ukraine, caused the diesel shortages, Wright suggested she was dismissing attempts to deprive Iran of nukes.
RADDATZ: I just — the Strait of Hormuz and the Iran War, you would admit, caused a lot of these problems.
WRIGHT: Absolutely. To prevent the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons, absolutely comes at a cost. The Iranian regime killed 30,000 to 40,000 of their own citizens in January. Since then, they’ve bombed every neighbor they have. Are you comfortable —
RADDATZ: I understand that.
WRIGHT: Are you comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iranian regime?
RADDATZ: I understand the point of stopping a nuclear weapon. That has not happened yet, and there’s no end in sight at this point.
In Putin’s readout of the October 9 conversation, he listed Ukraine, Iran, and various aspects of a strictly bilateral relationship with the US “were touched upon.”
During the October 9 telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump, considerable focus was on prospects for settling the Ukraine crisis, while the situation surrounding Iran and various aspects of bilateral relations were touched upon as well.
I’ve been arguing since March we need to understand that this is a world war and one possible outcome — made more likely so long as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were Trump’s “negotiators” on both Ukraine and Iran — would be that Russia uses it to get Trump to flip sides, as he has now apparently done.
Trump lies, again, about Iran
And here’s where Trump betrayed his weakness and here’s where his betrayal remains vulnerable to a concerted response.
His and Wright’s pathetic explanation about the Diesel Tweet are bad enough.
But his subsequent tweet explaining why he refuses to sanction Russia is even more pathetic.
Amid the repeated scapegoating of Ukraine and more spin about Russia giving the US something that would recognizably benefit the country (hostage negotiations) rather than Trump personally, Trump claimed that Russia was not doing “what they could be doing” to help Iran, a claim Trump has attempted to repeat in his babbling public statements.
As numerous people point out, though, US intelligence knows (and Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reminding) Russia is helping Iran kill Americans.
What Trump said in this tweet and has babbled publicly, of course, is that Russia could be doing more.
And that’s why, Trump says, he refuses to sanction Russia: For fear his best friend Putin will help Iran do worse to America and its partners than they’re already doing in Iran. For fear Russia will help Iran deal Trump an even more humiliating loss.
If that’s not already proof that Putin threatened Trump even as he offered him carrots in the form of oil contracts, Sergei Lavrov met with Abbas Araghchi and made it clear they are, in fact, doing quite a bit to support Iran, including feeding them so they can outlast the US in this current standoff.
Trump said Moscow and Beijing had the capacity to provide Tehran with far greater assistance but had so far refrained from doing so.
“Russia could have done a lot more to help Iran. Russia’s done very little for Iran,” Trump told reporters on Monday. He said China could also have provided much more assistance and described the limited help from both countries as “a very positive thing.”
Trump’s remarks came as Lavrov held talks with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran, where Moscow reaffirmed its commitment to its strategic partnership with Iran while calling for a diplomatic solution to the regional conflict.
At a joint press conference with Araghchi, Lavrov said Russia had no intention of abandoning economic and investment agreements with Iran despite the war.
He said Russian specialists were gradually returning to work at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant and pointed to continued cooperation on energy and transport projects, including the planned Rasht-Astara railway.
Lavrov also said Moscow had provided humanitarian assistance during the war and would continue supplying food to Iran.
And even though Putin is flaunting his support for Iran (and has, at similar moments in the past) Trump is nevertheless allowing Putin to convince him that his own failures in Iran are all due to betrayal from America’s allies and not his own failures and the incompetent blowhard he put in charge of DOD.
Donald Trump lost the war in Iran. As a narcissist, he needs scapegoats to blame for his own historic failure, and Russia’s dictator has scripted convenient scapegoats for him: Ukraine for attacking Russia’s diesel refineries, Europe, for failing to join Trump’s rudderless attack.
And out of fear that Russia will make him lose the war worse, out of narcissistic imperative to deny his loss, Donald Trump has decided to align with Russia.
The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: NEWS: Trump Lashes Out as Early Voting Shatters Records, Says Russia “Has Been Fine” as Drone Kills Baby, Musk Becomes Top Target, Aaron Parnas, right, Oct. 20, 2026. Donald Trump is furious. He was heckled six times at his own rally in Kansas last night, a state he won three times, and he lashed out, calling protesters “idiots” and telling his crowd, “It never ends.”
He’s rattled for a reason: early voting is shattering records in Texas, and in North Carolina, Democrats have cast 70% of the major-party ballots so far. Meanwhile, Democrats are making it clear that if they win the House, Elon Musk, the GOP’s $276 million megadonor, will be at the top of their list.
But the story I can’t stop thinking about today is in Ukraine. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.” At almost the same moment, a Russian drone struck a park in the Kharkiv region and killed a 1-year-old girl named Anhelina in her stroller. Her mother died in the hospital. And while this is happening, the Trump administration is holding up the Patriot missiles Ukraine needs to defend itself.
For me, this isn’t abstract. My family in Ukraine is living under Russian bombs right now. That’s why I’ve decided to do a deep dive outlining all of Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian officials. It’ll be out soon, and it’s one you won’t want to miss.
Let’s get into it.
Furious Trump Lashes Out at Protesters as Early Voting Surges Against Republicans
Trump lashed out at protesters who interrupted his Kansas rally four times, as early voting numbers show Democrats surging across the country. Minutes into his speech in Park City, the president was heckled again and again, a now-common scene as he campaigns in red states that should be safe for Republicans. Trump called the protesters “idiots,” claimed they were paid $250 to disrupt him, and told the crowd to vote “so we can get rid of idiots like that,” adding, “It never ends.” He was in Kansas to rescue Sen. Roger Marshall, who trails Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton 48% to 45% in a recent YouGov poll in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. Trump also defended Marshall against a New York Times report that the former OB-GYN sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills, 81 of whom were arrested, claiming critics made him look like “some kind of a Shylock-type guy.” The outburst came as voters in Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia turned out in record numbers, with Democrats leading the early surge.
Texas’s two largest Democratic strongholds smashed first-day early voting records, a warning sign for Republicans in a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in 32 years. Dallas County recorded 76,069 voters on the first day, the most for any election in its history and a nearly 26% jump over the 2020 record. Harris County, home to Houston, processed more than 70,000 voters by mid-afternoon, beating its 2018 midterm record of 63,188 with hours still to go. That increase is partly driven by growth, since Harris County has about 15% more registered voters than it did in 2018. El Paso County, a Democratic stronghold that has often struggled with turnout, posted its second-highest midterm first day on record. Trump carried Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024, but Republican leaders have now poured more than $158 million in outside spending into the state.
Democrats are competitive at the top of the Texas ticket, with Talarico leading in most recent polls. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton by 2.2 points in the RealClearPolitics average, and Paxton has led in only one of the six most recent public polls. In the governor’s race, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott holds a 3.4-point edge over Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a far thinner margin than he’s used to. The Dallas Morning News, which backed Republican John Cornyn in every one of his Senate races, endorsed Talarico, calling Paxton unfit for office because of his long history of scandals. Talarico has also won endorsements from the Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, and San Antonio Express-News. Worried Republicans are pleading for turnout, with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick saying “it’s up to rural America to save the country” and warning that too many conservatives aren’t taking the threat seriously.
Democrats are dominating North Carolina’s early vote at a level not seen in at least two decades. Through Sunday, North Carolinians had cast about 526,000 early ballots, 37% more than at this point in 2022, according to analysis by G. Elliott Morris. Among ballots from the two major parties, 70% came from Democrats, even though they make up just 49% of registered Democrats and Republicans. Democratic ballots are up 53% compared with 2022, while Republican ballots are down 8%. Georgia is also running well above its normal Democratic lean. Morris cautions that early leads can be misleading, noting that in 2016 Democrats had a big early edge in North Carolina that evaporated before Trump carried the state, but if Republicans are truly staying home, Democrats could have a real turnout advantage.
Polling shows Trump deeply unpopular even in the red states that put him back in office. Navigator Research, a progressive polling group, found Trump with a net approval of negative 14 across Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas, four states he won by double digits and that now host competitive Senate races. In Iowa, 60% disapprove of his handling of the economy, including 50% who strongly disapprove. The group’s focus groups with mostly Republican Iowa farmers found deep frustration over tariffs and diesel prices that have climbed more than $3 a gallon in a year. Navigator also found that about one in five 2024 Trump voters now regret their vote, citing broken promises, the Iran war, and high prices, with regret highest among young voters, voters of color, and mothers. Even among Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, one in four say they regret supporting Trump.
Trump Says Russia “Has Been Fine on Ukraine” as His Administration Holds Up Patriot Missiles
The Trump administration is holding up the transfer of Patriot interceptor missiles that Ukraine desperately needs to defend against Russian attacks, The Washington Post reports. At least some of the missiles are coming from friendly countries that need Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sign-off to send U.S.-made weapons to Ukraine, according to a U.S. official and three others familiar with the situation. Officials said Hegseth hasn’t formally rejected the transfers, but he also hasn’t completed the steps needed to approve them. A Ukrainian official told the Post last week that “only a couple” of interceptors remain in Ukraine’s stockpile, and Poland’s foreign minister said his country has none left to give. Zelenskyy told U.S. senators the Pentagon is delaying missiles that European countries have already paid for, saying, “All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us.” A senior Pentagon official insisted there has been no change in policy and that the program for allies to provide U.S.-built weapons to Ukraine “continues unaltered.”
Trump claimed “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine” at almost the same moment a Russian drone killed a 1-year-old girl in her stroller. “They haven’t been doing much,” Trump told reporters Monday. Around the same time, a Russian drone struck a park in Nova Vodolaha in the Kharkiv region, killing six people, including a baby girl named Anhelina, who died instantly in her stroller, and her mother, who died later in the hospital. Images of the child’s body sparked outrage across Ukraine, and Zelenskyy called the attack an “absolute atrocity.” At least 16 people were killed and 69 injured across Ukraine over the past day, including three killed when a Russian drone hit rush-hour traffic in Kyiv. Russian strikes on the power grid have left 12 regions without electricity as winter approaches.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “scandalous” to suggest Ukrainians are dying because the U.S. is pulling support. Rubio said he told Zelenskyy during a 45-minute call that nothing had changed in U.S. support and that “there’s nothing being deliberately denied to Ukraine.” He called the accusations “outrageous” and “simply not true,” and has blamed missed missile warnings on a “software problem.” But Kyiv says it received no early warning before Russian ballistic missiles struck the capital on Sunday, the third time in recent days, and that restrictions on its military satellite network remain in place. Zelenskyy described his call with Rubio as “substantive” and “constructive,” saying Starshield “needs to be restored” and interceptors “are needed to protect lives.” Trump, meanwhile, insisted “we share a lot,” adding, “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given nothing to us.”
Zelenskyy is meeting with Trump envoys in Norway as fears grow that Ukraine is being sidelined. Special envoy Steve Witkoff is meeting Zelenskyy in Oslo on Tuesday, with Jared Kushner joining by video and Norway’s prime minister and Finland’s president also taking part. Axios reports Witkoff will then travel to Russia to meet Putin. Trump said Monday he is ready to meet Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in China next month, and that the talks could cover the war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s foreign minister warned that such a meeting would “only encourage Putin to continue this war.” Trump also repeated that it’s “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” saying Zelenskyy “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Pressure is mounting on Trump from Republicans and allies, while Zelenskyy’s support at home is surging. Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, a Republican, said after meeting Zelenskyy in Kyiv that Ukraine would stop hitting Russian refineries if Russia stopped attacking Ukrainian infrastructure, urging Trump in all caps: “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE TAKE THIS WIN!” Rep. Michael McCaul and 20 House colleagues also wrote to the White House warning that lifting sanctions on Russian oil “will only fuel the Kremlin’s violence and destruction.” Oil analysts say Trump’s diesel deal is unlikely to meaningfully lower U.S. prices, which are driven mainly by the Iran war, but it has given Trump a direct stake in stopping Ukraine’s refinery strikes. A new poll found Zelenskyy’s trust rating has surged amid Trump’s pressure campaign. Meanwhile, Hungary blocked the next step in Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union without offering any explanation.
Elon Musk Will Be a Top Target for Democrats in 2027 If They Win the House
House Democrats are preparing to make Elon Musk one of their top investigative targets if they win control of the chamber next month, according to Politico. The world’s richest man and the GOP’s single biggest known midterm donor, with $276 million and counting given to Republican committees and candidates, has drawn interest from several potential committee chairs and scores of rank-and-file lawmakers. Democrats are eyeing multiple fronts, including his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ multibillion-dollar federal contracts, and his possible role in throttling the Ukrainian military’s satellite internet access. Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, an Oversight Committee member, said Democrats should “absolutely” probe how Musk is “trying to buy his way into billions of dollars more in federal government money.” “It takes two to tango,” Casar added. Spokespeople for Musk did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.
Democrats say Musk’s DOGE tenure, which cut an estimated 250,000 federal jobs, is the “original sin” they plan to investigate. A spokesperson for Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the panel has “a lot of questions” about Musk’s role in DOGE and plans to investigate it. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the Science Committee, said Musk “helped orchestrate the systematic destruction of government programs and services” and that “the sheer number of conflicts of interest are astounding.” Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “a full accounting” of the damage, saying the dismantling of USAID “saved no taxpayer money, balanced no budget, and made America no safer.” Some Democrats aren’t waiting, with Homeland Security Committee members already demanding Musk testify under oath about a report finding DOGE overstated its savings. Lawmakers have also called for investigating alleged DOGE-related data theft from Social Security.
The Ukraine satellite controversy has added a new and urgent front to Democrats’ scrutiny of Musk. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington asked what happens “when one guy gets a giant contract from the government and then uses it to do something that shuts down communication in a war” that the U.S. has worked to support. Ukraine says restrictions on its military satellite network have hampered its defenses, and while Musk has suggested the decision came from the government, The Telegraph reported he proposed the limits himself. Democrats are also eyeing SpaceX’s billions in NASA contracts and the clean-energy subsidies Tesla has received. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has kept the party’s midterm message focused on affordability, but has vowed to crack down on the “wealthy, the well-off and the well-connected.” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California summed up the sentiment of many Democrats on hauling Musk before Congress: “Bring it all on.”
Judge in Trump Golf Course Case Says She’s Receiving Death Threats as Trump Calls Her a “Crazed Lunatic”
Federal Judge Ana Reyes revealed that she has been receiving threats over her handling of the East Potomac Park golf course case. At the close of a seven-hour hearing Monday, Reyes said family members had been texting her about reports that she was receiving death threats, and she described the emails and voicemails flooding in. “A federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course,” she said, adding, “I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned.” The threats come as the president has repeatedly attacked her by name on social media. Reyes has been overseeing a lawsuit brought by a preservation group and local golfers challenging the administration’s plan to transform the public course. She ended the hearing simply by saying, “We’re dismissed.”
Trump escalated his personal attacks on Reyes before and after the hearing. In an early-morning Truth Social post Monday, he called the judge “a crazed lunatic” who “may be insane,” insisted the Interior Department doesn’t need approval, and declared that work would begin “IMMEDIATELY.” Later, he dismissed the case as “frivolous litigation” before a judge who “seems not to want greatness for our capital or our nation.” Late Monday night, he posted nearly 30 photos of debris and damaged structures around the course, writing, “Here are pictures of Trash Island for the judge to study.” The administration has also asked Reyes to step aside, accusing her of bias, a request she denied. The barrage marks an extraordinary campaign by a sitting president against a judge actively presiding over a case involving his own administration.
Reyes pressed administration officials on why their story keeps contradicting Trump’s. Government lawyers and witnesses have insisted there is no final plan for the course and that the felling of more than 400 trees was routine cleanup tied to a 2019 maintenance plan. But Trump has now publicly announced a final design by architect Tom Fazio and a November 15 closure date. “I have, on the one hand, the president of the United States saying to the American public three times now... there is a final plan,” Reyes said. “Then I have you all telling me... that there’s no final plan. Which is it?” The acting director of the National Park Service testified she wasn’t even aware of the November 15 date, and Reyes said there is “no universe” in which the tree removal and Trump’s plans coincidentally happened at the same time.
Reyes did not order a halt to the project from the bench, but a temporary block on tree removal remains in place. The judge said she plans to make a factual finding, based on Monday’s testimony, that the trees were cut down as part of the plan to renovate the golf course. Her temporary order barring further tree removal remains in effect for another week, and a decision on whether to stop the project is expected by Monday. East Potomac Park was created by Congress in 1897 to be “forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people,” and its course is believed to be one of the first public courses in the country to be desegregated. Regulars fear an expensive championship course will replace one of the few affordable places to play in the capital. They also warn that the trees already lost could take decades to replace.
Other news:
New details have emerged about the Mississippi police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, which the state attorney general ruled “justified.” Officers in Senatobia were responding to a call alleging that Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, and her friend Latoya Ferrell had stolen a pack of diapers, but neither woman has been charged and officials have released no evidence of shoplifting. As the women tried to leave the Walmart parking lot, officers drew their weapons, and Wiley lifted her baby to show there was a child in the car. An officer identified in records as Sgt. Hunter Foster then fired into the vehicle, killing Kohen and wounding Ferrell. Foster is white, and both Wileys and Ferrell are Black. The town’s police force has a troubled history, including the firing last month of a police chief who reportedly used racial slurs and the 2023 arrest of a 10-year-old Black boy for urinating in public.
Mississippi attorney general rules fatal police shooting of one-year-old as 'justified' | Mississippi | The Guardian
Nearly half of active-duty military families struggled to afford enough food last year, forcing soldiers to rely on food pantries around bases like Fort Hood in Texas. Food insecurity among military families more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, hitting enlisted troops hardest, with nearly 57% reporting it compared with 14% of officers. The Armed Services YMCA pantry near Fort Hood served more than 19,000 families last year and often runs out of food by early afternoon, with its director calling it “the most heartbreaking thing” to turn away a soldier in uniform. Congress approved a historic 14.5% raise for junior enlisted troops, but soaring costs for rent, childcare, and gas, which is up about 40% since the Iran war began, have wiped out much of the gains. Republican Rep. Don Bacon also says Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon took $2.9 billion Congress set aside to fix troops’ housing allowances and instead used it to pay a one-time $1,776 “warrior dividend” bonus. Experts warn the strain threatens national security, as financial stress drives troops to leave the military and distracts those who stay from the mission.
Texas households are receiving unsolicited mailers addressed to students that offer guidance on unsupportive parents, legal emancipation, and seeking transgender-related medical care outside the state, and no one knows who sent them. The envelopes list the sender as the “Texas Transgender Student Union,” and the enclosed guide directs students to trusted adults and advocacy groups, including the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT. TENT says it did not author, authorize, or distribute the mailers, or a similar text message campaign that circulated earlier this month, and it has sent cease-and-desist demands to the messaging companies involved to identify who is behind it. The mailers surfaced just as early voting began in Texas, prompting Republican State Rep. Jeff Leach to call on Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is also the GOP Senate nominee, to investigate. The Dallas Express, which first reported the mailers, said no evidence it reviewed establishes that any campaign, party, or advocacy group orchestrated the effort. The timing and the anonymous sender have raised questions about whether the mailers are a genuine outreach effort or a political stunt designed to stir controversy ahead of the election.
A Guardian investigation found that Louisiana’s justice of the peace courts are churning out thousands of evictions while some judges earn more than the chief justice of the United States. The state’s 390 part-time justices of the peace need only a high school diploma, aren’t required to keep detailed records, and are paid directly from the fees their courts charge, including eviction filings. One justice in suburban New Orleans earned more than $400,000 last year, while a single landlord accounted for over 60% of his eviction docket and tenants won less than 1% of cases. Reporters watched him hear 86 cases in 36 minutes, with all but one ending in eviction. A former Justice Department official called the system “blatantly unconstitutional,” citing a century-old Supreme Court ruling barring judges from having a financial stake in their cases. The justice is retiring this year, and his son is running unopposed to replace him.
Voters in Alberta overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to begin the process of separating from Canada. With more than 1.5 million votes counted, 76% chose to remain in Canada while about 24% backed starting a path toward independence. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, said Albertans “chose unity” and “above all, Albertans chose Canada.” Carney had warned in the final days of the campaign that a vote for separation was a “dangerous bluff,” and previously accused outside forces of trying to break up Canada to gain control of the oil-rich province. Separatist leaders said the result still shows at least a quarter of Albertans want better treatment and vowed to keep pushing. The referendum exposed deep divisions within Premier Danielle Smith’s governing party, whose support has slipped in recent months.
Italy is sending 500 soldiers to Milan after cost-of-living protests turned into looting and clashes with police. Police detained 271 young people over the weekend after hooded groups set fires, smashed windows, and ransacked stores near the city’s famous cathedral. Luxury brands including Chanel, Tiffany, and Dior pulled merchandise from their windows, and many stores in the fashion district stayed closed. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government is moving to approve tough new security measures, including allowing police to hold minors for 12 hours even if they haven’t committed a crime. A new movement called “17 October” has vowed to protest every Saturday “until this government of thieves collapses.” Opposition leaders accuse the government of using security as a distraction from real problems like housing, education, and the soaring cost of living.
France says targeted curfews helped bring calm after last weekend’s riots, as the first rioters head to court. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said curfews in parts of Paris and other cities “contributed to calm overnight,” with a police helicopter sweeping a searchlight over Place de la République, a center of the unrest. Curfews in Bordeaux and Nice will stay in place for several days. Authorities arrested a 40-year-old man described as a far-left activist on suspicion of setting the fire that destroyed Limoges’s historic town hall, and 149 people have already been jailed or detained. The government is offering businesses interest-free loans of up to €50,000 to recover from the looting. Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron secured an extra 200,000 tons of diesel a month from Gulf nations in an effort to bring down fuel prices.
The FBI is investigating whether a Louisiana hospital counselor illegally shared the medical records of a preschooler who was allegedly sexually abused by a classmate. Court filings show that a counselor at Manning 
Family Children’s Hospital in New Orleans accessed the young girl’s records and shared information with the preschool’s principal, who was her sister-in-law. The counselor, who was not part of the girl’s treatment team, was fired after the hospital found an impermissible disclosure of information, and the principal left the school shortly afterward. The girl’s parents, who are suing the school, say they were contacted by FBI agents seeking documents related to potential violations of federal health privacy law. An attorney for the former principal said she has not been accused of wrongdoing and called the disclosure of the FBI’s involvement an attempt to sway public opinion days before trial. The case is set to go to trial the week of October 26.
A Serbian prosecutor who helped investigate an allegedly illegal scheme to help the Trump family build a tower in Belgrade was apparently targeted with spyware. Rade Bajić received a warning from Apple in August that his iPhone had been targeted in a “mercenary attack,” and researchers at Citizen Lab said it was likely sophisticated spyware such as Pegasus. Bajić said he believes his work on the case was “the sole reason” he was targeted. Prosecutors had indicted senior officials in the Serbian regime last year for allegedly stripping a historic Belgrade site of its legal protection so it could be handed over for a $500 million Trump hotel project led by Jared Kushner. The Guardian recently reported that then-President Aleksandar Vučić personally ordered the move, and Kushner called off the project after the charges became public. Representatives of the Trumps and Kushner deny any “pay to play” arrangement or involvement in the decision.
Critics say Myanmar’s release of rare photos of detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi is a stunt to help the military regime escape international isolation. Officials delivered two gardening books and a sealed letter from King Charles to the 81-year-old Nobel Peace laureate, who is serving multiple sentences under house arrest at an undisclosed location. Her son, Kim Aris, welcomed the gifts but warned the regime should not be allowed to use such moments “to create an illusion of normality or gain international legitimacy.” Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing became president in April after elections widely condemned as a sham, and has been rebuilding ties with Southeast Asian neighbors. He has also reached out to the Trump administration, and Reuters reported U.S. and Myanmar officials have held talks that could expand to Myanmar’s mineral resources. The civil war that followed the 2021 coup has killed more than 100,000 people.
Special Report: Another Trump Threat To White House Press Corps
New York Times, Trump Pushes to Evict the Press From the White House, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Oct. 20, 2026. President Trump has talked about replacing the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with an indoor swimming pool.
In late August, during one of Karoline Leavitt’s final meetings with President Trump in the Oval Office, he pitched her on an idea in front of several senior aides. He told her to move reporters out of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which would effectively remove news organizations from the White House. It would be, he told her, her “last legacy.”
But the proposal never moved forward while she was there. The president had put the request to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. Ms. Leavitt officially stepped down as White House press secretary on Aug. 27.
Mr. Trump has told aides he would prefer to bring back the indoor pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt added in 1933 as therapy for his polio-afflicted legs; President Richard Nixon later covered it over to make room for the news media. Journalists who are credentialed to cover the White House work out of a small office space connected to the press briefing room.
While moving the media out of the White House may be a relatively small debate considering Mr. Trump’s attacks on journalists more broadly, it would be highly symbolic. The proximity of the media to the seat of U.S. executive power has long been an acknowledgment of the importance of a free press in a constitutional democracy.
It would also be a decision that would be difficult to undo by future presidents.
Mr. Trump has brought up the press-eviction idea before, dating to his first term, and he has never quite dropped it. A growing number of people around him favor the idea. Several close to him believe that moving the news media, most likely to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street, may be the latest escalation in a remarkable series of moves against the news media that have already gone further than most of them expected.
As recently as Sept. 27, Mr. Trump shared a pair of images on Truth Social showing the briefing room as it is now, captioned “Fake News,” alongside another that shows the space reimagined as a gilded swimming pool, captioned “FDR Pool.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Mr. Trump had repeatedly discussed moving the press corps out of the White House, and that his advisers had so far either offered pushback or waited for him to move on.
What has changed since Mr. Trump’s first term or even earlier this term is the staff around him. The president’s core team has shrunk from the already-tight unit that he brought into the White House last year. During earlier discussions, most of Mr. Trump’s senior aides agreed it served him better to keep the media nearby. But Mr. Trump has grown more enraged about his press coverage, and other advisers of growing influence have encouraged him to take drastic measures to punish journalists.
“America is rightly distrustful of the fake news media because they fabricate stories based off lies and sources who are not even privy to any type of information,” said Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. “All options remain on the table, and we will make an announcement when appropriate.”
What you should know about anonymous sources. The Times makes a careful decision any time it shields the identity of a source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy, credible and give readers genuine insight.
During the 2016 Trump transition, Stephen K. Bannon, then the incoming chief strategist, suggested moving the press corps out of the West Wing, to a townhouse near Lafayette Square. Senior officials rejected the idea out of hand. Mr. Bannon proposed the Eisenhower building as a fallback option.
In January 2017, the incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, publicly confirmed that the team was weighing a move of press briefings to that location, framing it as a way to accommodate more reporters. But he and others dropped the idea, ultimately viewing it as too disruptive and impractical.
“From the moment I arrived in the White House I believed it was a national security threat to have the press literally surround the Oval Office — and devised a plan to either move them off campus next to the Blair House or at least to E.O.B.,” Mr. Bannon recalled in a statement to The New York Times this month. “But definitely physically remove them from the West Wing. That plan landed with a thud among all the other senior advisers to the president.”
The idea came up again during the summer of 2017, when the West Wing was undergoing renovations. A former administration official recalled that it was less a formal plan than an impulse tied to the renovations: With the space torn up anyway, why let the reporters back in? The official said that Sean Spicer, the departing press secretary, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his successor, questioned the logistical complexities. It soon died again.
The idea came up yet again during the presidential transition in late 2024. Most of Mr. Trump’s advisers thought it was better to leave the news media inside the White House. They knew Mr. Trump liked to call the cameras into the Oval Office at a moment’s notice. And several of his more seasoned advisers suspected that if they followed his direction to evict the press — and his coverage got worse — Mr. Trump would blame them for the inevitable results of his own idea.
But even without physically moving the news media to a building outside the White House main gates, the administration has for months been building up a buffer against the press. Last fall, Mr. Trump’s team barred reporters from entering “Upper Press,” the area near the press secretary’s office, without an appointment.
It has been more than 30 years since another president seriously considered removing the news media from the White House. President Bill Clinton’s first communications director, George Stephanopoulos, recounted in his memoir that in 1993 the first lady, Hillary Clinton, wanted to convert the press quarters back into a swimming pool. When word of her plan leaked, the blowback quickly ended it.
But Mr. Trump currently faces no comparable pressure to accommodate a news media that is despised by so many of his supporters. He has received relatively little backlash so far — even from Democrats — against his anti-media moves.Attacks on the News MediaImageKaroline Leavitt, the former press secretary, delivering a briefing last year. The president put the request to move out the news media to her several times over months, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Mr. Trump entered his second term emboldened by his victory, and he quickly went on offense against media companies that had covered him critically. He filed lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register. His aides made clear that the president intended these suits to have a chilling effect on negative coverage.
One of the instigators of the swimming pool discussion has been Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Pulte has no formal role in White House operations. But he created a foam board rendering of the briefing room restored as an in-ground pool, the people said.
Mr. Pulte often spends his weekends with Mr. Trump at his golf clubs. The president has only a tiny staff around him on the weekends, which means Mr. Pulte often enjoys freewheeling access to Mr. Trump, which he uses to pitch the president on his latest ideas. Senior White House officials say that Mr. Pulte brings along foam boards that highlight potential targets for revenge prosecutions.
Mr. Pulte did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.
Another top adviser feeding into Mr. Trump’s anti-media tendencies is Boris Epshteyn, the president’s longtime lawyer and outside adviser, who pushed several of the lawsuits the president has filed against news outlets or individual journalists. Mr. Epshteyn’s influence has grown in recent months, according to current officials and people close to the president. Mr. Epshteyn declined to comment.
In September, Mr. Trump startled some of his own advisers by declaring on social media that he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over coverage he called “fiction and lies.” The administration swiftly revoked the credentials of more than 70 journalists.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Natalie Harp, the aide who controls much of the media and messages from supporters that reach the president’s desk, and the majority of his social media feed, had played Mr. Trump clips of MS NOW anchors criticizing his administration shortly before he announced the ban on the three outlets.
Ms. Harp did not respond to a request for comment.
White House officials say the group that provides Mr. Trump updates about news coverage is wider than just Ms. Harp, and that she didn’t intend to prompt the media ban by showing him clips. He made a decision after months of his own anger over coverage, they said. Mr. Cheung singled out Ms. Harp for praise.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly, whom Mr. Trump appointed in his first term, had put a hold on the president’s media ban, saying officials there had violated standard process. But the White House continued for a short period to bar those outlets from the grounds. Judge Kelly last week ruled that the president had violated the outlets’ First Amendment rights and ordered their passes restored. The administration is appealing his ruling.
The campaign against the news media has not stopped there. On Oct. 9, the Justice Department sent letters demanding information from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News after the five networks temporarily halted their pooled White House TV coverage in solidarity with CNN. People with knowledge of the effort said it was an antitrust investigation.
That Justice Department effort came just a few months after F.B.I. agents showed up at the homes of Times reporters to serve them grand jury subpoenas. Earlier that week, they had reported on security concerns about Mr. Trump while he traveled to Turkey for the NATO summit, as well as the lack of some defensive equipment on the luxury jet, donated by Qatar, that Mr. Trump was using as his new Air Force One.
The president was livid about the reporting and demanded his aides find the leaks, multiple people familiar with the matter said.
The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas within a few weeks, after the judge in the case admonished federal lawyers for violations of process in appearing to use subpoenas as a first option instead of a last resort to obtain information.
With Mr. Trump’s encouragement, other government departments have taken draconian measures against the press as well. Earlier this year, the Defense Department required credentialed reporters to sign a pledge that included not soliciting unauthorized information. Nearly every major news organization, including Fox News, refused to do so, and instead chose to give up work space in the building.
Special Report: More Trump Team Massive Grifting
New York Times, Times Exclusive: A Billionaire Wanted a Trump Pardon. His Family Gave Alina Habba a $50 Million Deal,Tyler Pager, Oct. 20, 2026. Julio Herrera Velutini, a prominent Venezuelan, was seeking clemency. He got it not long after his daughter gave Ms. Habba, a lawyer close to President Trump, an extraordinarily lucrative job.
Julio Herrera Velutini really wanted a pardon.
A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Mr. Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record.
So Mr. Herrera deployed his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, the former Florida solicitor general who was on Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, to help with a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, who is an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Mr. Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon remained elusive.
Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department. They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.
Under the agreement, Ms. Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Ms. Herrera set up in late October 2025 in Florida. The company has no public profile and its business remains unclear even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire. Ms. Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, while she was still serving as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.ImageAlina Habba in the Oval Office last March. A former personal lawyer for President Trump, she went on to work in his Justice Department.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon.By then, Ms. Habba was a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi, overseeing U.S. attorneys. She had an office at the Justice Department and a protective detail from the U.S. Marshals, a holdover from her time serving as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.
Ms. Habba denied any role in the pardon.
“Any insinuation that my employment — all of which has been vetted and disclosed to the D.O.J. — had anything to do with securing a pardon is false,” she said in a statement.
Ms. Habba was a special government employee at the time, which allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.Editors’ Picks
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She declined to discuss her work for Concord.
Ms. Herrera and Mr. Herrera did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Neither did their companies. In a statement, the Justice Department said Ms. Habba did not speak to anyone about a pardon.
A White House official said that Ms. Habba had nothing to do with the pardon and that the administration follows a pardon review process that includes the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, a pardon industry has sprouted up, with wealthy criminals paying well-connected lawyers, fixers and lobbyists to appeal to the administration and its allies in an effort to secure pardons. Many pardon seekers have come to the conclusion that supporting Mr. Trump and his political agenda is the fastest way to secure clemency.
Some people looking for pardons have reported paying hundreds of thousands of dollars or even $1 million to hire people promising access to the president or influence over the pardon process.
For Ms. Habba, the job from the Herrera family came at a pivotal point in her life and career.
She resigned in December 2025 as U.S. attorney in New Jersey after a panel of federal judges ruled that her appointment by Mr. Trump had been carried out unlawfully. Her second marriage was also falling apart.
The arrangement with the Herreras provided her with a new level of financial security. She also found new love. Shortly after the pardon was issued, Ms. Habba started dating Turhan Mildon, a Turkish investor.
They were married last month in a lavish ceremony in New York. The guest list included Attorney General Todd Blanche; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Will Scharf, the White House counsel.
The couple is now engaged in high-profile feud with Richard Grenell, a longtime Trump ally. Ms. Habba has accused Mr. Grenell of misallocating a donation from her husband to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Grenell was running at the time. Mr. Grenell has denied her accusations, calling them absurd.
Ms. Habba brought those accusations directly to Mr. Trump, who directed Mr. Scharf to investigate them. The Times has previously reported that the investigation centers on a bank transfer from the Democratic Republic of Congo to a Texas defense company.
Mr. Herrera, who also has Italian citizenship, is a member of the Herrera family, a banking, real estate and fashion dynasty that dates back to the 14th century. The family owns estates and castles in Caracas, Venezuela; the Canary Islands; Spain; and Germany.
Mr. Herrera founded a bank based in Puerto Rico in 2008.
In August 2022, he was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera all pleaded not guilty to felony charges.
Mr. Kise, Mr. Herrera’s lawyer, helped negotiate a deal with the Justice Department under which Mr. Herrera pleaded guilty in August 2025 to a single misdemeanor campaign finance charge. Ms. Vázquez and the former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for harsher sentences.
All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.
In July, Banvelca, the Herreras’ family office since 1781, announced that Ms. Herrera, a member of the eighth generation and the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, was assuming leadership of the company. Neither the news release nor her bio on the company’s website makes any mention of Concord Partners, the vehicle employing Ms. Habba, who now goes by Mrs. Mildon.
More On Middle East Wars
New York Times, Taunting Trump Over Gas Prices, Iran Braces for Aftermath of U.S. Vote, Michael Crowley, Oct. 20, 2026. The midterm elections appear to be a factor for both sides in the war as President Trump weighs his next steps.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, Iranian state media is gleefully chronicling high prices at American gas pumps — and their impact on President Trump’s political standing.
Outlets like Tehran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency cite polls reflecting voter anger at Mr. Trump over his conflict with Iran.
Iranian officials are piling on. In an open letter to Americans last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps wrote that Mr. Trump “keeps on telling Americans that the economy is booming and the prices will soon start coming down,” adding: “This is, perhaps, his biggest lie.”
A few days earlier, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, mocked a spike in U.S. Treasury bond rates. “We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” he wrote.
Iran’s leaders clearly relish the political damage Mr. Trump has suffered from the conflict he launched in late February, even as their own economy suffers extreme stress from U.S. sanctions and an American naval blockade.
There are signs that political and economic pressure has pulled Mr. Trump back from the brink of military escalation, and the election result could determine what steps the United States takes next.
“They’re desperate to try and affect the election, so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there, and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon,” Mr. Trump told reporters last month.
It is not the first time Iran has been suspected of maximizing political pain against an American president. After Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage in November 1979, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran was drawing out the crisis “to bring about President Carter’s defeat” in the 1980 election, as a declassified C.I.A. analysis put it that year.
Mr. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan that November, an outcome he publicly attributed, in part, to the hostage ordeal.
For years, Iranian leaders have threatened to kill Mr. Trump, and in March a federal jury convicted a Pakistani national working as an Iranian intelligence agent of entering the United States in 2024 to arrange Mr. Trump’s assassination. Humiliating Mr. Trump in the elections is a way for Iran to get “satisfaction without doing something more drastic,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Iran’s ability to menace the Strait of Hormuz and attack the energy infrastructure of its neighbors has given Iran valuable insights into how it can exert pressure over the United States and the global economy.
That has also probably bought Iran at least some relief from further attacks in recent months by a president wary of military escalation that could drive oil prices even higher and anger voters who already mostly oppose the Iran conflict.
But any satisfaction in Tehran could evaporate quickly. Iranian leaders have grown more concerned lately about what might come after the U.S. elections, analysts said. With two years left in his last constitutionally allowed term as president, Mr. Trump may feel freer after Nov. 3 to take drastic action that could include a major new round of attacks on Iran.
“Once the elections are done, he may be free to do whatever he wants,” said Mr. Nasr, the author of the recent book “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.”
Iran hawks close to the Trump administration are hopeful that Mr. Trump will carry out new attacks, including on Iran’s already-battered nuclear facilities. The military has developed plans for heavy strikes and has concentrated more forces in the region, and will soon have three aircraft carrier groups positioned there.
“While Trump is unpredictable, there are certainly signs that he might hit Iran hard” after the midterm vote, said Michael Makovsky, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a hawkish think tank in Washington.
Mr. Trump may hold out “slim” hope for striking a deal before Election Day, Mr. Makovsky added. “But he doesn’t seem to think it’s likely.”
Mr. Trump has both accepted and rejected the idea that electoral politics influence his war plans. Speaking at the United Nations on Sept. 22, he claimed that Iran was the party focused on the U.S. vote, and that it was stalling peace talks.
More Global News
New York Times, News Analysis: It’s Not Just France. Europe’s Political Center Is Crumbling, Steven Erlanger, Oct. 20, 2026. Europe's centrist parties are losing ground among young people and workers, who are increasingly tempted by populist promises of radical change.
Centrist parties are in trouble in Europe’s largest and most important nations. Anger over low economic growth, high inflation, sizable government debt and poor prospects for the young are feeding protest and populist parties of the far right and far left.
The mass riots in France, which started as protests over underfunded schools, are a shocking example. But the phenomenon has been building for years, with the perceived failure of liberal democracy to make good on its promises of a better future, especially for the young and the salaried working class.
There is a growing perception among many Europeans that traditional parties of the center-left and center-right do not offer real alternatives and are led by an educated elite that has lost its connection to the poor, the workers and the young. Facing rising deficits, expenses and interest rates, governments feel constrained in what they can do to respond.
Instead, many people are supporting parties like the National Rally of Marine Le Pen, leading the polls for the French presidency on the far right, and France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the far-left, running second. In Germany, they are turning to the far-right Alternative for Germany and the far-left Die Linke party.
With major elections coming in the next year in four of Europe’s most populous states — Spain, France, Italy and Poland — there are significant challenges coming from more extremist parties. Even in Italy, where protests erupted over the weekend, the right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, faces a former general, Roberto Vannacci, who is running even further to the right.ImageAn elegant building being gutted by fire at night, with flames rising high through the roof.City Hall in Limoges was burned on Saturday.Credit...Pascal Lachenaud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hard-right parties also sit in the governments of the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and Croatia, while Slovenia’s government relies on outside support from one, Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Law at HEC Paris, recently noted. And competition from even farther to the right is already pushing some of them to harden their positions.
Satisfaction with how democracy is working has been declining dramatically, according to regular opinion polling from the Pew Research Center. In France, Pew found this year, 69 percent of the population is dissatisfied with democracy. In Spain, it is 68 percent. In Italy, 62 percent. In Poland, the newest democracy after years of Soviet occupation, it is 47 percent. In the United States, it is 69 percent.
There are many reasons put forward for the decline in optimism and faith in centrist politics. But Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics, puts it simply. “We started taking democracy for granted,” he said.
Liberal democracy has failed to keep faith with ordinary citizens, and especially with the larger working class. “If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” he said.Shared Prosperity
The rapid nationwide spread of the French protests to include workers and pensioners angry at inflation and high interest rates, especially given rising prices for energy and for borrowing costs, points to a larger failure of President Emmanuel Macron’s center-right government and of liberal democracy writ large.
The violence of what became riots in many cities is expected only to help Ms. Le Pen and her anti-liberal complaints about immigration and lawlessness.
Mr. Acemoglu, a professor at M.I.T., has tried to provide both an analysis and some prescriptions in a recent book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” In it, he outlines “two broad lines of failure” over the last half-century, which have led to widespread alienation and anti-establishment sentiment.
The first is what he calls the failure to deliver on shared prosperity, especially for a salaried working class hit by automation, globalization and sharply increased inequality, and which now feels deep anxiety about artificial intelligence.
Leaders have forgotten that a key part of their pact with voters is to “take care of the drains,” he said, to ensure the good functioning of the infrastructure of daily life, from roads to education to health care.ImageA red skull and crossbones painted on the drained floor of a public fountain with a statue of a team of horses. A worker in an orange vest aims a hose at the graffiti.A city hall employee removing graffiti from the Bartholdi Fountain in Place des Terreaux, Lyon, on Monday.Credit...Olivier Chassignole/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The second, Mr. Acemoglu said in an interview, is “the rise of top-down cultural politics,” whereby a college-educated elite now dominates even traditional Socialist and working-class parties throughout the Western world and in his view patronizes or dismisses the concerns of those who traditionally supported them.
As a result, working-class voters are moving toward populist parties on the far left and especially the far right, as in France and Germany, threatening traditional values, shrinking historically “large church” parties of the center and threatening the working of parliamentary democracy.
In Britain’s 2024 election, the two long-dominant parties, Labour and Conservative, won their lowest combined vote share in more than a century. The far-right Reform UK party surged in the polls last year, though it has since fallen somewhat.
Centrist parties need to regain the trust of voters that they not only hear them but empathize with them, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “A constant in all these countries are the people who feel left behind, who feel they are no part of the prosperity and security they see all around them,” he said.The Center Under Stress
Germany offers another example of the exhaustion and splintering of the center.
The Volksparteien, or “people’s parties” of the center-right and center-left — the Christian Democratic Union (and its partner, the Christian Social Union), and the Social Democratic Party — alternated running democratic Germany since World War II. But they are being hollowed out, said Mr. Sokol, with workers and the young moving to more extreme parties, like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Die Linke.
Given the difficulty of forming coherent coalitions now, the two Volksparteien are locked together in a squabbling coalition that is increasingly unpopular and perceived as failing to deliver economic growth and security.
Under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, the C.D.U. moved to the center, but it was cautious, “risking nothing, even in the face of obvious challenges,” said Norbert Röttgen, a prominent legislator in the party.
Those challenges included increased migration, a declining export market with China, sharpened tensions with Russia and slow economic growth. The move to the center and Ms. Merkel’s embrace of large-scale immigration, he said, alienated many of the party’s traditional conservative voters.
That gave space to the right, filled by the AfD, which is now attracting traditional C.D.U. voters among the working class, Mr. Röttgen said. “But to seriously deliver on our problems requires majorities, and this,” he said, “is our paradox.”ImageA crowd of people, some of them holding black, red and yellow German flags.Attendees at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany party last month in central Schwerin, Germany.Credit...Lisi Niesner/Reuters
As for the Social Democrats, they took the path Mr. Acemoglu described of many left-wing parties, where intellectual elites and left-wing academics “conquered the party and disconnected it from its traditional voters,” Mr. Röttgen said.
An average of current opinion polls in Germany shows how hard it is to construct a workable centrist coalition.
The AfD is the most popular party, with some 28 percent support, followed by the C.D.U./C.S.U., with 19.8 percent. The Greens have 15 percent, and the Social Democrats only 13.1 percent, barely ahead of Die Linke, with 11.3 percent.
Both mainstream parties are divided internally about how to proceed — for the Christian Democrats, to move closer to the AfD and not just copy some of its policies; for the Social Democrats, to move farther to the left to defend itself against both the Greens and Die Linke.A Splintered Europe
With these four important elections and the pull of the far right in each of them “we’re going to have a major transformation,” with fragmented governments, said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Bulgaria and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Right-wing coalitions will likely contain small far-right parties “which will keep the mainstream far-right parties hostage and may prevent them from moving to the center.”
If they do well, “then very quickly you’re trying to normalize them, because otherwise the European Union cannot function, and this is not making people feel more secure,” he said.
The French presidential election next spring will be key. A victory by Ms. Le Pen could have major implications for Brussels, for the euro, for NATO and for European support for Ukraine.ImageMarine Le Pen, seated and speaking in front of a microphone.Marine Le Pen, above, leader of the far-right National Rally, is leading the polls for the French presidency, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed, is running second.Credit...Nicolas Tucat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Acemoglu argues for “a big-tent populism,” that channels the anger of voters in the name of inclusivity.
“The centerpiece has to be creating jobs and wage growth and career paths for people without college degrees and diverse skills,” he said. “There must be an agenda for shared prosperity, which is why artificial intelligence and how it is used is critical.”
New York Times, Voters in Oil-Rich Alberta Reject Leaving Canada, Ian Austen, Updated Oct. 20, 2026. Residents of the province were asked if they wish to remain in Canada or to hold another vote on breaking away, in a referendum that left both sides unhappy.
Residents of Alberta voted on Monday to remain part of Canada, rejecting a campaign to try to separate the oil-rich western province from the rest of the country.
Voters in a referendum endorsed remaining in Canada over the option of holding a second vote on whether to secede, the public broadcaster CBC News projected late Monday evening local time.
With just over a third of votes counted, 76 percent of voters chose to remain part of Canada with 23 percent seeking another vote.
The referendum reflected the province’s long history of resentment toward the central government but also more recent discontents. Many of the separatist leaders became politically prominent by organizing large protests against restrictions during the Covid pandemic.
Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed the result. “Albertans chose Canada,” he said in a statement. “All Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose and high ambition.”
In a speech to supporters in Edmonton, the provincial capital, Thomas Lukaszuk, a former provincial lawmaker whose Forever Canadian organization led the campaign to oppose secession, addressed President Trump. The vote, he said, “will send a very strong message to the rest of the world: Don’t mess with Canada.”
Unlike in Quebec, a province that held two unsuccessful votes on leaving Canada, secessionist sentiments have always been a minority viewpoint in Alberta. Still, opponents of separatism worried before the vote that voters might support holding a second referendum to show their unhappiness with the province’s relationship with Canada, even if they did not want to secede.
The vote was the work of Danielle Smith, the conservative premier of Alberta, who managed to provoke the ire of people on both sides.
Ms. Smith assumed the leadership of the United Conservative Party largely through the support of separatists who were responsible for ousting the previous premier, Jason Kenney, from party leadership.
Supporters of a united Canada were angry at Ms. Smith for adding the secession vote to a previously planned referendum with nine other questions, mostly about provincial powers and immigration.
Her move came after a court blocked an attempt by separatists to force a vote to leave Canada through a petition. Many of those favoring unity said Ms. Smith’s decision was an effort to circumvent the courts and was unconstitutional.
Supporters of leaving Canada were dismayed for a different reason, questioning why Ms. Smith had asked residents to vote on whether to hold a second vote on secession — and not the more direct question of whether they wanted to stay in Canada or leave.
Ms. Smith said she would vote to remain in Canada. However, opponents of secession viewed her support as anemic, leading many to doubt her sincerity. Last month in an online forum, Ms. Smith, expressed support for keeping Alberta within Canada but also laid out what she described as Albertans’ grievances with the federal government.
Business groups, former premiers and local politicians were all firmly on the side of remaining in Canada. Economic studies, including one commissioned by the provincial government, forecast that leaving the country would come with enormous costs.
Looming over the vote was the trade war President Trump launched against Canada, as well as his musings about taking over the country as the 51st state. Some prominent separatists leaders traveled to Washington three times last year seeking support during meetings with low-level State Department officials.
Mr. Carney, who was raised in Edmonton, called the referendum a “dangerous bluff.” Mr. Carney was governor of the Bank of England when Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016.
More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice
On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, above, died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune, which asked the agency about his status.
The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: MAGA Death Cult Strikes Again as Lawful Resident Dies in ICE Custody, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Oct. 20, 2026. The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. A lawful permanent resident who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody.
A Mexican man who lived in Dallas for decades has died in ICE custody. He was a lawful permanent resident. He is the seventh person to die in ICE custody in Texas this year, while at least 29* people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year.
On Saturday, 56-year-old Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias died on October 17, 2026 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Texas. Contrary to the narratives being sold by Republicans, he was a lawful permanent resident in the country, according to the Texas Tribune, which asked the agency about his status.
Andrade-Covarrubias had been in detention since June. His cause of death is still unknown. ICE claims he received proper medical care, but his daughter says he was not given the medication he needed for diabetes, a heart condition and high blood pressure.
“He had medicine with him when he was detained, but she said staff at the center wouldn’t ‘give him his medications.’”
His daughter said he developed a cough and felt sick, but he was still ignored. His family were concerned because after he had COVID-19 in 2021, his health had declined.
The Daily is journalism that fights for democracy and freedom. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Subscribed
In 2021, a large swath of MAGA were pretending COVID-19 wasn’t real, was just the “flu”, as they actively fear-mongered about the vaccine.
In 2020, it was suggested that the MAGA Death Cult of Donald Trump took out at least 100,000 Americans due to mismanagement. The NIH concluded that failed leadership was at fault, attributing the high death toll to the Trump “Administration's failure to proactively address the threat and effectively manage the pandemic…”
Trump was busy copying China’s gaslighting about the pandemic, and surprise, it failed to such an extent that even the fascist-washing New York Times noted that “one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.”Lies, Lies, Lies
Inhumane Treatment: The Trump administration was trying to deport Andrade-Covarrubias, claiming he was detained “because officers believed he obtained his legal status in the U.S. fraudulently because he failed to disclose a 2004 arrest for theft during the review process.”
But his daughter told the Tribune that her father brought up his criminal record during the application process “and that immigration officials approved his green card application.”
In case the lies aren’t clear, the Trump administration got blocked by a judge when they tried to deport a witness to the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas.
Criminals: Republicans repeat the Trump administration’s claims that they are only deporting criminals, but the CATO Institute reported via data leaked from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that “73 percent of individuals booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities since October 1, 2025, had no criminal convictions of any kind—only 5 percent had violent criminal convictions.”
Only 5% had violent criminal convictions. Of booked detainees, 47% had not even been charged with a crime.
The Trump administration’s DHS accused CATO’s chart of being “made up” with “no legitimate data behind it.” CATO pushed back, explaining, “DHS inflates the number of “criminal” arrests by including people with pending criminal charges, because many criminal charges do not end in convictions, and an ICE arrest denies them due process and their day in court.”
They went back and forth unwinding the administration’s moved goal posts, but the bottom line is “ICE arrest data confirm that ICE is overwhelmingly arresting people without criminal convictions.”Death Cult
The first detainee to die in Texas ICE custody this year was Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso Medical Examiner’s office.
He “died after guards held him down and he stopped breathing, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday that ruled the death a homicide.”
*The Death Cult numbers for 2026 gathered by the National Immigration Project, as of October 19, 2026, include those who have been recently released from ICE, because ICE was accused of releasing the deathly ill as a way to avoid accountability for the death.
ICE stopped reporting those deaths in June, “rescinding a rule that existed to keep the agency from releasing someone who was dying and recording no death at all—a policy change we strongly opposed when it was announced.”
In the dead of night in June, every Republican - save Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AL) - voted to fund ICE through 2029 without oversight. Republicans gave ICE $70 billion through the reconciliation process, without adding accountability guardrails demanded by Democrats. Every single Democrat voted no.
Republicans gave ICE this unchecked power after the highly publicized ICE shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Republicans claim that ICE is only detaining people who are criminals, but of course focusing on deporting violent criminals was the immigration policy of :: checks notes:: Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The immigration policy of Donald Trump is to use ICE as a weapon of fear, intimidation, and even death. The point is to create a pathway of cutting off empathy and sympathy for other human beings to the point that their death is cheered.
Once the administration has achieved that, they can further divide the country and weaken freedoms. The problem for Trump is that some Americans care.
The New Republic, Trump Tries to Ban Jack Smith Testimony as BBC Lawsuit Implodes, Hafiz Rashid, Oct. 19, 2026. The BBC has subpoenaed Jack Smith as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the media company.
Former special counsel Jack Smith stands up with his right hand raised as if he is swearing.Former special counsel Jack Smith is sworn in to testify during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on September 29.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.
The BBC has subpoenaed Smith to defend itself from Trump’s accusations that the network defamed him with deceptive editing in a 2024 documentary about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. In a court filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers tried to fight the subpoena by claiming that “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.
“He was not present when President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech (the ‘Speech’) was made, nor did he participate in its preparation. Smith does not have any personal knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind at the time the Speech was given. Any evidence that Smith gathered during his investigation consists of secondhand knowledge based on materials that he and other third parties collected from various sources,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.
In response, the BBC’s attorneys wrote, “None of [Trump]’s arguments for blocking the deposition of Mr. Smith can withstand scrutiny,” pointing out that Smith himself doesn’t object to testifying in the deposition and that Trump still has to prove that “he did not foment or incite the January 6 Capitol riot,” as he claims the BBC’s documentary falsely implied.
“No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim, including Plaintiff’s burden to prove falsity,” the BBC’s lawyers wrote.
This is only Trump’s latest attempt to dodge actually having to prove that the BBC defamed him. His attorneys are also fighting attempts to have Trump himself testify, to subpoena his children to testify, and to dive into his finances. Trump can’t force the BBC to pay a hefty settlement or back off of the coverage, as it is funded by the British taxpayer. Now he either has to give in to the BBC’s lawyers and drop the case or actually try to prove his point and deal with the consequences.
U.S. High Tech, Media, Culture
President Trump and the world's first trillionairre, Elon Musk, right, have renewed and enhanced their alliance to install ultra-right governments in the United States and around the Western World (File photo).
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Beware of AI billionaires bearing gifts, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Oct. 20, 2026. On Monday morning, Elon Musk announced in a post on his social media platform X that he plans to give American children one share of SpaceX, his rocket, satellite, and AI company. “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” Musk wrote. “This will be the first of many.”
One share of SpaceX stock would be worth around $146 for each child, based on Friday’s closing price. According to 2025 census data, there are around 72 million children in the United States. If Musk donated one share to every child, the giveaway would be valued at around $10.5 billion today.
Musk did not provide any details on the giveaway, including whether shares would be given to every person under 18 or the exact timing of the giveaway. It is also not immediately clear how Musk would distribute the SpaceX shares to American children. On X, Musk responded “Yes” to a post about the shares potentially being distributed via Trump Accounts. A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Musk has “agreed in principle to distribute the stock through the Trump Accounts initiative.”
On Monday, President Trump celebrated Musk’s announcement, writing in a post on Truth Social that the shares would be going to Trump Accounts. “A BIG THANK YOU to our legendary friend, Elon Musk, for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX Stock to millions of American children through TRUMP ACCOUNTS!” Trump wrote.
Trump Accounts are savings accounts for children that were launched on July 4. This summer, Trump said in an interview that he believed that Musk would donate SpaceX stock to Trump Accounts. “Well, I think that he will do that,” Trump told CNBC. In July, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell separately announced that she and her husband would be donating a share of SpaceX to around two million children with Trump Accounts.
While, at first blush, it seems like an act of charity, there are reasons to be skeptical of Musk’s motivations.
A Quinnipiac poll conducted last month found that 74% of Americans have little to no trust in the leaders of AI companies. This is a major problem when AI companies are seeking approval from communities to build massive data centers, trying to convince millions of Americans to buy their products, and lobbying for legal protection from liability risks.
Is Musk motivated by a sincere desire to help American children? Or is this just a public relations gimmick? Influential figures in Musk’s orbit have suggested rehabilitating the image of the AI industry is at least part of the motivation.
David Sacks, Musk’s longtime friend and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has been advocating for AI companies to donate stock as a way to change the perceptions of the public. In a post on X, Sacks wrote, “I hope every AI company will follow the lead of [Shotwell] and give American kids a vested interest in their success. This would do much to improve the public’s image of AI.”
A memo from the Treasury Department on Trump Accounts says, “Donors are attracted by the hope that a stock contribution with a five-year holding period may lead recipients and their families to feel that they have a stake in the fate of the corporation to a greater extent than if the child’s holdings of the corporation were only through an index fund.” Any child who has a Trump Account will not be able to sell their donated SpaceX stock for at least five years.
There is considerable potential for Musk and other AI executives to use stock donations to sway the interests of an entire generation of children and their parents. While Musk announced donating one share to all children, future gifts could be targeted to specific geographic areas. For example, if a company wanted to construct a data center in a particular area but was facing pushback, it could donate stock to all of the children in the area.
For Musk, all of this comes at a small cost. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a current net worth of around $904 billion, according to Bloomberg. A donation of $10.5 billion is just over 1% of his net worth.
Musk also may have been seeking to keep up with one of his rivals in the AI industry. On Sunday, Anthropic committed 5% of its shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, which it described as “a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.” Overall, about 20% of Anthropic’s shares have been dedicated to the public good. The co-founders have personally pledged 80% of their equity to charity.
Under Anthropic’s announcement on X, Musk replied, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public.” The next morning, Musk declared his own donations.
Tax benefits
The donation of SpaceX stock would provide huge tax benefits to Musk personally.
As the founder, Musk paid essentially nothing for his SpaceX stock. Giving the shares away allows Musk to avoid about $2.5 billion in federal capital gains tax.
Because stock donations must be routed to Trump Accounts through a non-profit charity, the donations also count as a tax-deductible charitable donation and can generally be written off at their full market value for up to 20% of the donor’s adjusted gross income.
Musk has not said which private foundation he would make the donation through, but it seems likely that he would use his own Musk Foundation. Not only would this help Musk secure a tax deduction, it would also help the Musk Foundation meet its minimum annual giving requirements — which it has a history of violating.
Private foundations, including the Musk Foundation, are required to give away 5% of their assets each year. According to the New York Times, the Musk Foundation fell short of this 5% requirement in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The current value of the Musk Foundation is unknown, but its assets were worth over $14 billion in 2024.The uncertain future
The pledge to donate billions of dollars in stock is just one in a long line of grand promises made by Musk. In several previous cases, he has reneged or not fully fulfilled his promises.
For example, in 2021, Musk told the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) that if they could come up with a $6 billion plan to solve world hunger, he would sell Tesla stock to fund it. WFP quickly sent Musk a plan, but he did not donate the $6 billion.
Musk later donated $5.7 billion in Tesla stock — to his own foundation.
The New Republic, Meta Weakly Defends Blocking No Kings Instagram in the Middle of Event, Edith Olmsted, Oct. 19, 2026. Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.
During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hourslong suspension: There was a high volume of activity on the page.
“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote on X Sunday.
“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline.
“An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he continued. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”
The No Kings coalition claimed that Meta’s explanation still didn’t make sense.
“In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands. Meta’s ‘high frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up,” the group wrote on Bluesky Sunday.
“Beyond shutting down our Instagram, we’ve received reports that #NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms,” the group wrote in a separate post.
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded to Stone’s statement, calling on X for an investigation into the No Kings account’s sudden suspension. “Let’s assume this is true. It’s still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics,” he wrote.
“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he added.
By cozying up to the Trump administration, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts. Now it appears that the company may be doubling down on its allegiances by outright silencing the president’s critics.
More On Trump Corruption, Obsessions, Oppressions, Derangement
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Same rally, different day, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Oct. 20, 2026. It’s all so eternally exhausting.
Monday was no different. It checked every single box. Buckle in, and let us document the atrocities.
Yesterday’s event featured Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife, making one of her contractually-obligated appearances with the husband for whom she has such open, burning contempt.
Shouldn’t Donny have figured out by now that any attempt at affection is going to result with him being on the wrong end of a public humiliation?
Melania was there to introduce who --- even knows what she there to introduce. We keep hearing about how this woman speaks five languages, but English is apparently not one of them.
Fortunately, Donny was on hand to translate Melly’s word-adjacent mouth-sounds.
“…also establishes the The White House Women’s— Health Task Force, which will— mobilize the entire federal government to coordinate action focused on improving women’s health. And this task force will be led by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, that’s a big one. And, uh, he’s been fantastic.”
Fact check: has Bobby Brainworms indeed been ‘fantastic’?
I have no idea what this so-called ‘women’s health task’ force is supposed to achieve, but I do know that every time Cokesnort McToiletseat rears his head, some long-ago-conquered, easily-preventable malady makes a roaring comeback.
You’re welcome, women! Enjoy the who-knows-what-delights that are in store for you. Probably dying during childbirth.
After the dog-and-pony show: ,
New Mexico should immediately change its name to New America. We are not Mexico, we are the United States of America! The name would add great value and prestige to the State! Home Values and Incomes would rise, and you would be even prouder while saluting our beautiful American Flag! Maybe even the Crooked Elections, that New Mexico is known for, would become honest again!
President DONALD J. TRUMP
Does our Slumlord-in-Chief actually believe that property values in Albuquerque are suppressed because the word ‘Mexico’ is in the state’s name? Apparently he does. Racist much?
Every day, this idiot out-stupids himself -- and we’re all expected to pretend it never happened.
Trump: “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven't been doing much.”
Fact check: has Russia been ‘fine on Ukraine’?
Today, Russian drones and missiles hit the capital without warning, leaving walls slashed by shrapnel, blowing out residences, a shopping mall, and a school, part of Russia's attempt to make Kyiv unlivable.
No matter what atrocities Russia commits, Donny’s assignment is to insist that it’s all a no-biggie. As I speculated yesterday, the kompromat that Putin has on Donny must really and truly be horrific.
Did Donny then jet off to another hate-rally in who even cares where, they’re all exactly the same? Check!
These rallies really are interchangeable. Once again, Dear Leader bragged about having accomplished the superhuman task of pointing at a giraffe.
Trump: “The first one is they show you a lion, a bear, a snake, and a giraffe. And they say, ‘Which one is the giraffe?’ I got a perfect score.”
He also congratulated himself for almost winning the war that he’s already claimed to have won three hundred times since February.
Trump on Iran: “We’re knocking the shit out of them ... we could leave right now”
As usual, Donny tried to bribe the cultists into voting for Republicans — or else.
Trump: “With Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not going it. That’s it. I’m only doing it for him. That’s a big deal for Kansas.”
And he boasted about how he knows more about Christianity than all the Christians.
Trump on Christianity: “I know more than anybody…A certain pastor said…’He's going to lead us to a period of time in Christianity that nobody else can do — that nobody else can do.’ And he turned out to be right.”
Big, strong Christians with tears in their eyes, going ‘Sir! Sir! How do you do it? No one religions like you do! Sir!”
And, as always, there were random acts of incoherence.
Trump refers to President Xi as “China.”
Wut?
Okay, but did Donny do a racism? Check, check, and chec .
There was the obligatory smearing of Somalis in Michigan as low-IQ, expensive-car-buying fraudsters, and the ritual mocking of Abdul El-Sayed’s perfect normal name. But we also got this.
“Trump says the press smeared Roger Marshall as ‘a Shylock type guy’”
Shylock! Now there’s an antisemitic deep cut.
Shylock, of course, is the Jewish moneylender invented by William Shakespeare in 1596 — which we all know was an awesome time to be a Jew in Europe.
By the early 20th century in America, to call someone a ‘Shylock’ was to imply that they were as greedy and dishonest as one of them-there Jewish types. No doubt, it’s a slur that Donny learned from his tyrant Klansman father. Thing is, nobody’s hurled that term as in insult in probably forty or fifty years. It’s gone out of fashion — but Donny’s too decrepit to remember that we don’t say that any more, in polite company.
I’m still waiting for Donny to blurt the n-word into an open microphone. You know it’s only a matter of time.
Finally, at any point during the day, did Donny commit a dementia?
While Dear Leader was waddling across his beloved Epstein Helipad toward Helicopter Force One, he stopped to acknowledge and wave at—
well, we have no idea what was going on inside Donny’s collapsed cortex. At the 21-second mark, as the camera pulls back, we learn that he was waving at absolutely nothing.
Now, I want you to cast your mind back to June of 2024, when Joe Biden was in Italy for a G7 meeting.
Joe — who, you’ll remember, was alleged to be old and icky and smelled bad and was probably already dead but too demented to realize it — appeared to wander off aimlessly, right smack in the middle of an event. The right-wing noise machine had a f____ field day with it.
No doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that the wingnut screech-monkeys had deceptively cropped the video. The reality was that Joe had simply turned to acknowledge the skydivers who had just put on a show for the G7 leaders.
Fast forward two and a half years. We have actual, recorded, not-fake evidence of Dear Leader waving at an imaginary crowd that exists only inside his rat-infested head, and not worthless scribbler of the corporate-controlled press can be roused from their slumbers to mention it.
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Andrew Kreig
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The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) researches official misconduct
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